New Brunswick women bore jeers and insults to get the vote 100 years ago today

When Brenda Robertson became the first woman to sit as a member of the New Brunswick Legislature in 1967, there wasn't a women's bathroom in the building.

A commissionaire would stand guard outside the men's washroom when Robertson went in.

Eventually, women in the house got their own, but they still have to leave the chambers area and cross the rotunda, often where the news media are waiting to scrum politicians. 

The Creator designed woman ... for the duties of a higher and nobler sphere.- Andrew Blair, former premier

Those few extra steps pale, however, in comparison to the long, staggering, uphill march suffragists made 100 years ago to get the vote in New Brunswick.

They watched powerlessly for decades as bill after bill failed to pass through the legislature, but they never gave up. 

Until 1843, women technically were allowed to vote in New Brunswick, and some did. 

Officially excluded

Elspeth Tulloch writes in her book, "We, The Undersigned," that in 1830, a letter appeared in the Gleaner and Northumberland Schediasma "mentioning the disconcerting fact that in a recent provincial election four women had cast ballots."

The vote then was tied to property, and while it wasn't customary for women to vote, it wasn't specifically banned. 

That changed in 1843, when the Elections Act was amended to state that only men who owned property could vote. Women were officially excluded. 

Between 1885 and 1919 eight bills and four resolutions for women's suffrage were introduced in the legislature.

That first bill in 1885 — to give single women with property the vote — amazingly almost went through.

"The house passed it," said Gail Campbell, a retired political historian. "But then the council —  that would be the equivalent of the Senate — said, 'Oh, we don't think so.' So they turned it back, and at that stage they got nervous."

It happened at a time that the all-male assembly was looking at expanding voting rights for men who didn't own property. According to Campbell, there was no active women's lobby at the time.

"We don't know if women realized they were just one step away from getting access to the franchise," Campbell said.

The expanded voting rights for men were brought into law in 1889. And once that happened, the debate over women casting ballots became unavoidable.

Canary in a Cage

Opponents believed women might be corrupted if they engaged with the political process. They were considered the more moral sex, and politics was a dirty affair.

Women also weren't considered full citizens, since they didn't serve in the military or on police forces and couldn't hold public office.

"The people who opposed suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century usually did so because they considered it an inappropriate role for women," said Heidi MacDonald, the dean of arts at the University of New Brunswick Saint John who is writing a book on women's suffrage in Atlantic Canada.

There were also concerns about taking women away from cooking, cleaning and mothering. 

An 1889 debate in the legislature captures it all:

"The Creator designed woman ... for the duties of a higher and nobler sphere," argued Andrew Blair, the premier of the day. 

"Put her in a cage like a canary?" challenged opposition member and suffragist A.A. Stockton.

"I would sooner see her in a cage than in a polling booth — and a cage is the proper place for a canary," said Blair.

Johner women lead charge

Nowhere in the province was the suffrage movement as strong as in Saint John.

"It had a fair-sized middle class," said MacDonald. "And it's mainly middle class women who would be involved in that because of course they have domestic help and tend to be more formally educated."

The Women's Enfranchisement Association, or WEA, was formed in 1894 and was the only long-term women's advocacy group in Atlantic Canada whose main focus was women's suffrage.

Over the years, it was led by prominent members such as Ella and Frank Hatheway, Emma Fiske, Mabel Priscilla Penery French and Clara McGivern.

They circulated petitions and pamphlets. They held lectures and meetings and strategized next moves.

Emma Fiske, a widow and teacher at Saint John High School was the association's second president. She died in 1914, five years before women got the vote. Artist Clara McGivern taught art at Netherwood School in Rothesay and served for years as president of the WEA.

Ella and Frank Hatheway were a well-to-do couple. He was a progressive businessman and later became an MLA, she fought tirelessly for the cause.

"[Ella] was probably an even more amazing person because the criticism and the pressure that she would have been under to raise those issues during that time line and that culture would have been just horrendous for her, I'm sure," said Pat Riley, chair of the Ella and Frank Hatheway Labour Exhibit Centre in Saint John.

Then there was Mabel Priscilla Penery French.

Despite having a law degree, she was told in 1905 that under existing Canadian law a woman was not a person, and only a person could practise.

In turn, she refused to pay her bills, saying that since she wasn't a person, she couldn't be sued for debt. In 1907 she became the first female lawyer in the province.

Activists sent several petitions with thousands of signatures to the legislature. And every step of the way, they were accused of bringing down society.

"Letters to the editor could be quite very strongly worded against these women, and accusations of what these women were trying to do, that their motives were not pure," MacDonald said.

"There were a lot of suggestions that these women were displaying masculine characteristics by wanting to vote and that was a serious insult."

Single suffragist women were told they would never marry.

At the legislature, politicians hurled sarcasm and jeers at them.

One day, when Ella Hatheway was in the legislature, a crude sketch was circulated among MLAs. 

"One politician, apparently — we don't know who it is — drew a lurid picture of one of the women and then circulated it, and all of the several politicians were laughing about that," MacDonald said.

"And Ella Hatheway, who is apparently someone who had great dignity … a very strong quiet woman, only mentioned this outside her circle of friends three years later during another difficult suffrage petition and subsequent vote.

"She brought it up, saying, 'Well, this isn't a very impressive group of men.'"

Bills were introduced in 1908, 1909 and 1912, and all were defeated.

Then the First World War happened.

Many people argue it changed everything. From 1914, women were doing things they had never done before. Gender and class barriers started to break down. 

By 1917, anti-suffragists were looking a little behind the times. By that time, most women in every province west of Quebec had the vote. 

New Brunswick women had campaigned for decades and watched all those years as bill after bill was defeated in the legislature. But this, it seemed, was their time.

A new bill was brought before the legislature.

Delegations of suffragists travelled from all corners of the province to be in Fredericton for what they hoped would be the final decision.

And they weren't alone. Behind them, were the Trades and Labour Council, the press and the Protestant clergy, to name a few groups.

The latest bill was going to second reading. The event is recorded in the WEA's minute book. 

"That afternoon the bill passed second reading like a bolt from the blue, the attorney general [James] Byrne did it. But the next day they killed it." 

Another crushing defeat. Women in New Brunswick would wait two more years.

in January 1919, most Canadian women over 21 won the right to vote in federal elections.

In April of that year, New Brunswick's same attorney general, Byrne, introduced another bill.

It passed and was given royal assent on April 17. Women could now vote in provincial elections.

While it was a massive win, it still fell short — swaths of society were still left behind. Indigenous women living on reserve weren't given the right to vote until the 1960s, for example.

Women also weren't permitted to run for provincial office. That didn't change until 1934.

One hundred years on, women are still playing catch-up.

"To me one of the key missing pieces is that we don't have enough women part of the decision-making," said Norma Dubé, a founding members of Women for 50%, a group focused on getting gender parity in the legislature.

Only 42 women have sat in the New Brunswick Legislature since 1967.

Eleven women were elected in the 2018 provincial election — the most ever — and each of the four parties in the house has at least one woman in caucus. 

"Unfortunately, you don't change society overnight," Dubé said. "And we need women to stand up. But we also need the men to stand up and that's starting to happen."