Suffragette rally, Hyde Park 1910. International Contingent. Were there Canadians represented. Not sure, but I don't think so.In the preface to Pierre Berton's Marching as to War, about Canada's role in the Great War, he mentions the Canadian Suffrage Movement, but only in passing. It was temperance, he said, that pushed through woman suffrage. And he is right.
When I read that about 6 years ago, when I started researching the Tighsolas letters, I knew nothing about the suffrage movement, in Canada or elsewhere. I recall feeling disappointed about that statement.
"You mean, these early feminists were 'stuffy' old ladies?"
Boy, I didn't know the half of it.
I soon got a hold of the two books that exist on Canadian Suffrage, one of them an American's masters thesis written in 1940. However, these books did not enlighten me much.
There appears to be a real vacuum in this area of scholarship. Even the Canadian Social History Series doesn't have a book on suffrage.
I guess that's because it is commonly believed that there was no real suffrage movement in Canada except that Famous Four business - and that 'history' avoids the dark side of things.
That may explain why there is no bio of Carrie Derick, (except for another master's thesis that is next to impossible to track down. McGill has a copy).
Anyway, I have to decide what to do with all this women's rights info that I've uncovered, with respect to Flo in the City, a novel about a girl coming of age in 1910 Canada, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas/.
Edith Nicholson is the one interested in suffrage. (She's the one who likely clipped all the items in the Nicholson collection.) Flo mentions suffrage once in a joke in a letter from Macdonald. Marion never mentions it. And it is Marion Nicholson who would have made a terrific suffragette organizer, with her drive and determination. Indeed, if Marion had wanted to start a movement in Montreal, she would have done it, no question!
But she was kept too busy trying to find a place to live.
Edith was a bit of a dreamer, so her interest in suffrage wasn't much of a threat.
So I think I will have Edith promote the positive side of the movement, and I'll have Marion dismiss it, by pointing out the dark side, by pointing out that the suffagettes mightn't have approved of her living in her own apartment with three other girls.
Still, I wonder if the militant suffragettes believed all they said: I wonder if they were saying whatever needed to be said to get women the vote. Did they believe that men were all whoring, drinking, money-grubbing degenerates, and that women would change the world and make it better with the vote or were they tapping into repressed female anger? They were politically savvy, after all.
Politicians today will say or do anything to win and regularly 'pander to their base' as it is called. Did the suffragettes do this too? I suspect so.
The liquor trade, the sex trade and the textile trade have been described in my research as anti-woman suffrage, for financial reasons; they joined forces with moralists and traditionalists, who didn't want women to get the vote, as they believed women would turn their backs on family, contributing to what was called "race suicide." (Politics makes strange bed-fellows.)
Anyway, I'm lucky I have Herb Nicholson for my story: he clearly did some gambling, whoring and drinking...not to mention stealing. And then I have Henry Watters for the other side. (I wonder if Henry was gay. He was so successful but didn't marry.)
