Women’s Christian Temperance Union was very active in Creemore
January 28, 2016, marked the 100th anniversary of women being given the vote in Canada.
Manitoba was the first province to give women the right to vote. It wasn’t until April 12, 1917 that women in Ontario, after a long-fought battle, were afforded the same right.
True, some female property owners could vote in municipal elections. The 1914 voters’ list for Creemore listed 31 widows and spinsters who could mark their ballots for town council. But as for provincial and federal elections arguments were plenty against allowing women to vote. The big problem, of course, was that men held the power and until men chose to allow the vote the women were just out of luck.
Opinions presented by many males included the idea that looking after a home and the children was strenuous enough without asking a woman to try to understand an election.
Women’s vote would unsettle men. That meant broken homes, broken vows, and divorce. Women have a higher destiny than politics. Because they are pure and virtuous and beautiful they are up on a pedestal above the rabble and dirtiness of politics. Women’s brains are inferior to men’s and not able to understand the complexities of government. And, indeed, women were asking for something that would disrupt the whole course of civilization.
In spite of these arguments women kept on agitating for the vote. Nellie McClung in Manitoba spoke clearly and loudly that justice must be done for the females of the nation. The WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) promoted the cause everywhere. In Creemore, the WCTU was very active under the leadership of Mrs. Stacy. In a Creemore Star report the group declared that women voting “would be a good thing for the country both socially and morally.”
Women’s final argument was that they were holding the country together during the Great War, which had started in 1914. They did the heavy farm work while their sons and husbands were away fighting. They held manufacturing jobs, knit socks and raised thousands of dollars for the war effort. In Ontario they received the right to vote in 1917 and federally in 1918.
The following letter to the editor was written by Alice Webster, of the Bracebridge Gazette.
Alice Webster, as many of you know, was my grandmother. She moved from Bracebridge area to Creemore in 1902 when she married my grandfather. She always took her hometown paper to keep up with the news.
“Dear Editor:
“I read with much interest the report of Mrs. G.A. Steel’s excellent address on ‘The Dawn of a New Era,’ also the effusion it called forth from W.E. Massey. He tries to take it on himself to answer for busy mothers of small children that they don’t want to vote, haven’t time, in fact.
“Being in that class, permit me to speak for myself, and in doing so I assure you that I speak for the majority of women of my acquaintance, old and young, when I say most emphatically that we DO want to vote and we WILL vote in the near future and the granting of that right will be no favour but only justice long delayed.
“When that time comes I have no fear that men will be less chivalrous to us, because it is only the unchivalrous ones who are opposing it now. The Woman Franchise question causes no friction in my home for my husband regards the present status of women being listed as aliens, idiots and criminals as unfit to vote as a relic of barbarism and he will rejoice with us when Canada rises above it.
“ʻAre not all the up-to-date inventions the result of man’s brainpower?ʼ asks Mr. Massey. No, most decidedly not. For many years I have collected clippings for scrapbooks on topics including what has been accomplished by women and there is far too much of it to be included in this letter. He refers somewhat indirectly the time honoured gag about ‘who will care for the babies when the mothers go out to vote?’ It takes only one hand to mark a ballot and any woman can hold a baby with the other while she is doing it. We have learned to do far more difficult things than that and mind the baby at the same time.
“Mr. Massey most fittingly supports his contentions with quotations from writers who recorded their attitude to our sex two thousand year ago. That is where he belongs; there is no place for him in the 20th century among the men and women who are progressive enough to profit by the wisdom slowly gathered in the passing centuries.”
