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Agnes Macphail and Feminism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2014
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- Type
- Notes critiques/Review Essays
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Printemps/spring 1992 , pp. 143 - 152
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1992
References
1. Crowley, Terry, Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality (Toronto: Lorimer, 1990) at 171–72Google Scholar; Stewart, Margaret and French, Doris, Ask No Quarter: A Biography of Agnes Macphail (Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1959) at 255–56Google Scholar.
2. Anderson, Alexandra, “The First Woman Lawyer in Canada: Clara Brett Martin” (1980) 2 Canadian Woman Studies 9 at 11Google Scholar.
3. Women Workers of Canada: Being a Report of the Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting and Conference of the National Council of Women of Canada (Montreal 1896) 361 at 370Google Scholar. For details of Carrie Derick's campaign against protective labour legislation for women, see Backhouse, Constance, Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada (Toronto: Women's Press, 1991), c. 9 and 11Google Scholar.
4. Crowley at 90, 205, 208. See also p. 155, where Crowley states that by the late 1930s, “she had become the pre-eminent voice for women's concerns in Canada.”
5. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 235, quote Macphail as saying: “They must be stopped reproducing their kind. There is no modesty about shutting our eyes to this situation. And nothing will be done until we start a row about it.”
6. I have added the designation “white” here to emphasize that matters of race, as well as gender and class, were relevant to the entrance of women into traditionally male-dominated positions.
7. But see Akenson, Don, At Face Value: The Life and Times of Eliza McCormack/John White (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, for the assertion that Eliza McCormack White, posing as a male John White, was actually the first woman to sit in the federal House of Parliament from 1871–1877.
8. Sanders, Byrne Hope, Emily Murphy—Crusader (Toronto: Macmillan, 1945)Google Scholar; Mander, Christine, Emily Murphy: Rebel (Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1985)Google Scholar.
9. MacGill, Elsie Gregory, My Mother, The Judge (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1955)Google Scholar.
10. Casgrain, Thérèse, A Woman in a Man's World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972) (autobiography)Google Scholar.
11. Knowles, Valerie, First Person: Canada's First Woman Senator (Toronto: Dundurn, 1988)Google Scholar.
12. Rooke, P.T. and Schnell, R.L., No Bleeding Heart: Charlotte Whitton, a Feminist on the Right (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
13. Bearden, Jim and Butler, Linda Jean, Shadd: The Life and Times of Mary Shadd Cary (Toronto: NC Press, 1977)Google Scholar.
14. Haig, Kennethe M., Brave Harvest: Life of E. Cora Hind (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1945)Google Scholar.
15. See, for example, the published diaries in Strong-Boag, Veronica, Elizabeth Smith: A Woman with a Purpose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980)Google Scholar, and Hacker, Carlotta, The Indomitable Lady Doctors (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1974)Google Scholar, which discusses Emily Stowe, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, Jennie Trout, and Maude Abbott among others.
16. Constance Backhouse: “To Open the Way for Others of my Sex: Clara Brett Martin's Career as Canada's First Woman Lawyer” (1985) 1 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 1Google Scholar; Petticoats and Prejudice, supra, note 3, c. 10; “Clara Brett Martin: Canadian Heroine or Not?” forthcoming in Canadian Journal of Women and the Law.
17. Savage, Candace, Our Nell: A Scrapbook Biography of Nellie L. McClung (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Hancock, Carol L., No Small Legacy: Canada's Nellie McClung (Winfield, B.C.: Wood Lake Books, 1986)Google Scholar.
18. MacDonald, Cheryl, Adelaide Hoodless: Domestic Crusader (Toronto: Dundurn, 1986)Google Scholar.
19. “What she did love was debate and that meant being among men”: at 18. As I read this I could not help but wonder whether farm women “debated” any less than their male partners, but presumably Crowley (and Macphail?) concluded that the subject-matter and process differed in important ways.
20. Crowley describes the NCWC's 1920 pre-election policies as an endorsement of “equal pay for work of equal value, no gender discrimination in employment, uniform marriage laws, equality in divorce and the removal of financial barriers, collective bargaining, the abolition of patronage, the publication of all political contributions, the naturalization of women independent of their husbands, and political equality for men and women,” at 40.
21. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 38.
22. Ibid. at 175. The authors add that many years later the two women became firm friends.
23. I have some difficulty with the characterization of the unequivocal, documented, systematic, male-orchestrated attempt to keep women from voting and serving for public office as “conspiracy theory.”
24. See, for example, Strange, Carolyn, “The Criminal and Fallen of their Set: The Establishment of Canada's First Women's Prison 1874–1901” (1985) Canadian Journal of Women and the Law at 79Google Scholar; Strange, Carolyn, The Velvet Glove: Materialistic Reform at the Andrew Mercer Ontario Reformatory for Females 1874–1927 (M.A. Thesis, University of Ottawa, 1983)Google Scholar; Strange, Carolyn, The Founding and Floundering of an Institution: Mercer 1874–1901 [unpublished]Google Scholar. By way of contrast, see also Peter Oliver, To Govern by Kindness: The First Two Decades of the Mercer Reformatory for Women [unpublished].
25. The term “equal pay for equal work” has traditionally been applied to males and females who do substantially the same work, thus leaving women whose jobs are ghettoized by sex out of its scope. The term “equal pay for work of equal value” has traditionally been used to permit cross-job comparisons, allowing women in all-female jobs to have their pay compared to men in all-male jobs where the work is of “equal value” to the employer. The very recently-coined term “pay equity” has received acceptance only in the late 1980s and eariy 1990s, as a phrase related to the newly-devised “employment equity” (a concept intended to replace the phrase “affirmative action” which was perceived to be offensive to Canadian ears). “Pay equity” is as yet relatively unclarified in meaning, but its early applications (e.g., in the Ontario Pay Equity scheme) suggest it will follow a version of the “equal value” theme.
26. Crowley at 197 notes this bill required equal pay for “work of comparable character or work on comparable operations, or where comparable skills are involved.”
27. Crowley at 199 notes that the legislation referred only to the “same work” rather than to comparable work.
28. Some would quarrel with the equation of these two concepts, suggesting that the “race–neutrality” inherent in thinking of all races “as one” is unrealizable in a racially discriminatory society such as Canada has been throughout its history and today. Certainly many First Nations peoples would have contested any claims by a “pioneer” farmer such as Campbell that there was no distinction between their communities and that of whites—claims which were often used to deny the authenticity of First Nations land titles and justify the take-over of lands by whites.
29. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 138.
30. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 92.
31. The only mention in either biography of Macphail's perspective on First Nations' peoples is in Crowley at 30, where he reports a speech to the Minister of Finance in 1921 in which Macphail maintained that “farmers had been treated no better by the federal government's fiscal policy than Indians [sic] had been by the Hudson's Bay Company.” This is not only an example of false parallelism, but is also obliterates the existence of First Nations farmers.
32. I use this term in the feminist sense reclaimed by Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978)Google Scholar.
33. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 8.
34. Ibid. at 241.
35. Stewart and French, supra, note 1 at 189. Stewart and French insert the phrase “sex perverts” into their quotation after the word “them,” but this appears to be the authors' own term. Crowley at 137 notes that Macphail herself used the term “inversion,” which he notes “was progressively obsolete after the decade of her birth.”