Canadian Identity, Women’s Suffrage, and the Rights of Women: A Comparative Analysis of the Stories and Activism of Nellie McClung and Thérèse Casgrain

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the women’s suffrage movement and other aspects of the first-wave women’s movement through the lives and writing of two of the best-known Canadian suffragists: Nellie McClung (1873–1951) in Manitoba, Thérèse Casgrain (1896–1981) in Quebec. After a general introduction and some biography of each, we look more closely at stories McClung and Casgrain related about their activism in their autobiographies: McClung’s Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945), and Casgrain’s A Woman in a Man’s World (1972) (Une Femme Chez les Hommes (1971)). Despite significant regional and cultural differences between these two figures, we find a number of striking commonalities, particularly in the strategies both used to battle the prejudice and entrenched conservatism of their place and time. This comparative analysis of McClung and Casgrain offers a cross-cultural case study of women’s suffrage and related reform movements in English and French Canada in the early- to mid-twentieth century as well as a glimpse across Canada’s fabled two solitudes.