is due her. But both she and lawyer Sadie Lieff, another early member, have insisted that the idea for the movement originated with Cairine Wilson.
Mrs Wilson paid the rent for the association’s headquarters, a suite of two rooms on the seventh floor of Hope Chambers on Sparks Street. Here it shared space with the National Federation of Liberal Women of Canada, whose dedicated executive secretary, Helen Doherty, ran what has been described as “a national propaganda office.” Her assistant was Helen Campbell, who handled correspondence for the Twentieth Century Liberal Association and newsletters for the women’s federation. One of the most useful tools for this purpose was a Gestetner machine, which churned out thousands of newsletters for distribution across the country. “We became familiar with names in every hamlet across the country,” recalled Mrs Campbell. She also had vivid memories of Mrs Wilson’s organizing genius. “She was very persuasive. If she told you to stand on your head in the corner, you’d do it.”39 Another association member who could vouch for this was Ida Low. When Mrs Low was eight months pregnant, Cairine Wilson asked her to give a paper at the Chateau. The mother-to-be protested, whereupon Mrs Wilson replied, “Sure you can, just wear a cape.” Mrs Low wore a cape and gave the paper.
In Ottawa, members of the local Twentieth Century Liberal Club met four or five times a year wherever they could scrounge space, sometimes in a senator’s office. This meant that young men and women might find themselves sitting on the floor and leaning against a wall.40 Kathleen Ryan recalled that outside of national conventions, men and women in Toronto met separately. Unless there was an election, each group convened seven times a year to hear a speaker, discuss issues of the day and take care of business matters. During election campaigns the members addressed envelopes, answered phones and canvassed for candidates by phone. “Because of Cairine Wilson, the association had members with some standing in the community. In Toronto, for example, sixty percent of the women’s branch were Junior Leaguers,” reported Mrs Ryan. According to the one-time journalist, there was nobody to give young women leadership and direction before Cairine Wilson came to Toronto on Twentieth Century Liberal Association business. Mrs Wilson provided that inspiration. “We had such confidence in her. Here was a woman who didn’t need to do this, but she did. She took everything in her stride,” observed Mrs Ryan.41.
With the founding of the young Liberals’ association, Cairine Wilson could look back on a decade of outstanding achievement. Her eldest child, shy Olive, was now twenty and a leading light in that organization. The other children, with the exception of four-year-old Norma, were all enrolled in school, the girls at exclusive Elmwood School for girls, the boys at Ashbury College. Life had been, indeed, full. Little did she know, though, just how eventful it would become in the months ahead.
4
TO THE RED CHAMBER
Cairine Wilson’s entrance onto the centre stage of Canadian politics occurred on 15 February 1930 when her “dear chief” and friend, Mackenzie King, appointed her Canada’s first woman senator. In a sense, all the work that she had done in the political arena since 1921 had been preparation for this new and unsought appointment, an honour that followed some four months after the winning of the Persons case.
Today, it is difficult to imagine that learned counsels would be called upon to debate the meaning of the phrase “qualified Persons” as found in section 24 of the British North America Act. Yet this is what happened back in the 1920s when a band of determined Alberta feminists, led by Judge Emily Murphy of Edmonton, set out to prove that the Act’s reference to “qualified Persons” applied to both men and women and that, as a consequence, women could be summoned to the Senate, the upper house of Canada’s parliament. The disputed section reads:
The Governor General shall from Time to Time, in the Queen’s Name, by Instrument under the Great Seal of Canada, summon qualified Persons to the Senate; and, subject to the Provisions of this Act, every Person so summoned shall become and be a Member of the Senate and a Senator.
Since only the masculine pronoun is employed in section 23 to describe the qualifications of a senator, the question arose whether “qualified Persons,” as described in section 24, included both men and women.
The so-called Persons case came before the Supreme Court of Canada in 1928, but only after an indomitable struggle whose roots reached back to 1916. In June of that year the progressive Sifton government of Alberta decided to demonstrate its faith in women by appointing Emily Murphy magistrate of the newly established Women’s Court in Edmonton. Friends and feminists applauded the move, but not so some of the magistrate’s male colleagues. In fact, the new appointee soon discovered that the honour of becoming the British Empire’s first woman police magistrate was not without its drawbacks; on the first day that she presided over her court, an enraged counsel informed “Her Honour” that she was not a “person” under the BNA Act of 1867 and that therefore she had no right to be holding court.1
Similar objections were raised in the months that followed, but always the judge held her peace, thinking that the provincial government could prove, if necessary, that she was a “person.” The question finally came to a head after Mrs Alice Jamieson was appointed a Calgary police magistrate in December 1916 and one of her cases was appealed on the ground that a woman could not qualify for the position of magistrate. The case was taken to Alberta’s Supreme Court where Mr Justice Scott ruled: “...there is at common law no legal disqualification for holding public office in the Government of this country arising from any distinction of sex...” 2
And there the matter might have rested but for Emily Murphy. Not content with having the issue settled for Alberta, she began to ponder the whole question of the position of women under the BNA Act and the Act’s implications for their eligibility for appointment to the Senate.
In 1919, at the first conference of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada, Magistrate Murphy, by now the president of the FWIC, spearheaded a unanimous resolution requesting the Canadian government to appoint a woman to the Senate. The request was soon taken up by many other women’s organizations, including the powerful National Council of Women.
Two years later the Montreal Women’s Club, under the presidency of a resolute feminist, Mrs Isabella Scott, threw vagueness to the winds and asked Prime Minister Arthur Meighen point-blank to name Mrs Murphy to the Senate. Meighen turned down the request. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently impressed by the Club’s petition to promise during the 1921 election campaign to appoint a woman to the Senate if he was re-elected. The promise was unredeemed, however, when the Conservative Party went down to defeat.3
Despite such setbacks the issue did not die. Throughout the 1920s, Canadian women’s organizations continued to lobby the Government to appoint a woman to the Senate, but to no avail. Then, in 1927, an aroused Emily Murphy embarked on a new course of action. After consulting with her brother, Mr Justice Ferguson of the Supreme Court of Ontario, she decided to take advantage of Section 60 of the Supreme Court Act, which allows for any five interested persons to petition the Government for an order-in-council directing the Court to rule on a constitutional point in the BNA Act. Mrs Murphy applied to the Government for leave to present such a petition and was successful.4 Indeed, the Government considered the subject of the petition so important that it decided to defray all legal expenses associated with it.
Senator Wilson flanked by her two sponsors on the opening day of Parliament, 20 February 1930. Left to right: Hon. Raoul Dandurand, Cairine Wilson and the Right Hon. George Graham.
Then Emily Murphy found four “interested persons” to sign the petition with her. Her first choice was a friend and colleague, Nellie McClung, novelist, temperance worker and suffragist. The next person selected
