Nellie Letitia McClung (néeMooney; 20 October 1873–1 September 1951) was a Canadian author, politician, and social activist, who is regarded as one of Canada's most prominent suffragists. She began her career in writing with the 1908 book Sowing Seeds in Danny, and would eventually publish sixteen books, including two autobiographies. She played a leading role in the women's suffrage movement in Canada, helping to grant women the vote in Alberta and Manitoba in 1916. McClung was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta in 1921, where she served until 1926.
McClung was born Nellie Letitia Mooney on 20 October 1873 in Chatsworth, Ontario, the youngest of six children of John and Letitia Mooney (née McCurdy).[1] Her father had acquired 60 hectares (150 acres) of property in Chatsworth, but the soil was not of good quality and the family struggled to make ends meet. In 1880, when Nellie was seven, they moved to the Souris River valley, two hundred kilometers west of Winnipeg.[2] Nellie graduated from the Manitoba Normal School when she was sixteen. After receiving her teaching certificate, she acquired a teaching position in Hazel, Manitoba, earning a salary of $40 a month.[3] After teaching for eighteen months in Hazel, she moved to Manitou.[4]
While teaching in Manitou, she boarded with the McClung family. She was captivated by Mrs. Annie E. McClung, a suffragist and provincial president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Nellie stated that Mrs. McClung was the only woman she had met that she would like as a mother-in-law.[5] Nellie married Mrs. McClung's son, Robert Wesley, in August 1896. They had five children between 1897 and 1911.[6] She was involved in many local organizations, including the WCTU, the Methodist Ladies' Aid, the Epworth League, and the Home Economics Association.[7]
Career
The McClung family faced financial difficulties starting in 1905 when Wesley sold his pharmacy business.[8] To help supplement their income, Nellie sought out paid writing work, writing short stories for magazines.[9] She published her first novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny, in 1908. The book became a bestseller, selling 100,000 copies in Canada and the United States and making McClung $25,000 ($642,025 in 2021).[10] With the success of her book, McClung was invited to speak at events throughout Manitoba and Saskatchewan, launching her career as a public speaker.[11]
McClung in 1910
McClung's second book, A Second Chance, was published in 1910.[12] By then, her reputation for speaking had reached Ontario, and she embarked on a tour of the province, with stops in Whitby, Hamilton, Peterborough, Kingston, Waterloo, and Toronto.[8] Her speaking engagements were well received, with the Hamilton Herald reporting that she "took her audiences by storm".[12] McClung would go on to write three more books throughout the 1910s, including In Times Like These, which has been regarded as an important statement of first-wave feminism.[13] Throughout her career, McClung wrote sixteen books, including two autobiographies, and many poems, short stories, and newspaper articles.[14]
In 1911, the McClungs moved to Winnipeg, where Wesley had been offered a position as an insurance broker.[15] The following year, McClung and fourteen other women formed the Women's Political Equality League, an organization focused on women's suffrage.[16] In 1914, the league petitioned the Conservative Premier of Manitoba, Rodmond Roblin, for the right of women to vote, but their request was denied. The next day, the Political Equality League staged a "Mock Parliament" at the Walker Theatre, with its members imitating government ministers.[17] McClung had the role of Roblin, and repeated many of the arguments that the Premier had made the day before:
Man is made for something higher and better than voting... Men were made to support families... Shall I call man away from the useful plow and harrow to talk loud on street corners about things which do not concern him? Politics unsettle men, and unsettled men mean unsettled bills—broken furniture, and broken vows—and divorce... When you ask for the vote you are asking me to break up peaceful, happy homes—to wreck innocent lives.[18]
McClung campaigned for the Manitoba Liberal Party in both the 1914 and 1915 general elections.[19] The McClungs moved to Edmonton, Alberta, after Wesley was offered a promotion. The Liberal Party won the 1915 election in a landslide, and Manitoba became the first province in Canada to grant women the right to vote in January 1916 under the new Liberal government, exactly two years after the Political Equality League had petitioned Premier Roblin.[20][13]
In Alberta, McClung continued to fight for temperance, healthcare, and women's rights.[21] In the 1921 general election, she was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta for the constituency of Edmonton as a member of the Liberal Party. McClung was one of two women who were elected, the other being Irene Parlby, a member of the United Farmers. The United Farmers of Alberta formed the government, with 38 out of the possible 61 seats.[22] McClung often broke ranks with the Liberal Party to support the more socially progressive United Farmers' legislation, working with Parlby on resolutions that benefitted women.[23] McClung ran for office again in the 1926 general election for the constituency of Calgary, but lost by 60 votes.[24]
McClung was one of five women, along with Irene Parlby, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Emily Murphy, and Louise McKinney, who put forward a petition in 1927 to clarify the term "persons" in the British North America Act 1867, and determine the eligibility of women to serve in the Senate of Canada. The case called Edwards v Canada (also known as the Persons Case), was taken to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that women were not "qualified persons" and thus were ineligible to serve in the Senate.[25] The ruling was appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which at that time was Canada's highest court. In 1929, the Judicial Committee overturned the Supreme Court's decision, and the first woman, Cairine Wilson, was appointed to the Senate the following year.[26]
McClung was appointed to the board of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1936 by Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, the first woman to serve on its board.[27][28] King invited her in 1938 to serve as a delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva.[29] McClung felt that the League was "bogged down by purposeless disputation and empty speeches", and that many delegates cared more about getting credit than working towards a meaningful goal.[30]
Later life and death
McClung moved to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1933, where she lived for the remainder of her life.[31] Her health deteriorated throughout the late 1930s, and she suffered a heart attack in 1940 while attending a CBC board meeting in Ottawa, which made it difficult to travel. She continued contributing to the board through correspondence until her resignation in 1942.[32] She published the second volume of her autobiography, The Stream Runs Fast, in 1945.[33] McClung died on 1 September 1951, at the age of 77.[34]
McClung, like other members of the Famous Five, was a maternal feminist. She viewed women as "morally superior" to men and did not feel that traditional gender roles should be changed.[35] Her book In Times Like These (1915) argued that women had a biological maternal instinct that made them better suited for politics than men, stating that "men make wounds, and women bind them up".[36] In 1916, she called for suffrage to be granted to Canadian and English women first, though she withdrew her suggestion when Francis Marion Beynon criticized her view in the Grain Growers' Guide.[37]
McClung was an advocate for the eugenics movement in Alberta. She supported the Sexual Sterilization Act, which allowed "mental defectives" to be sterilized without free and informed consent (sometimes without their knowledge, contributing to Canada's genocide of Indigenous people) at the recommendation of the Alberta Eugenics Board.[38] The Act sterilized more than 2,800 people against their will and awareness from when it took effect in 1928 until it was repealed in 1972.[39]
Legacy
Mackenzie King unveiling plaque to the Valiant Five in the Person's CaseMcClung in the Famous Five statue at Parliament Hill in Ottawa
In 1954, McClung was named a Person of National Historic Significance by the government of Canada. A plaque commemorating McClung is located in Chatsworth, Ontario.[40] On 29 August 1973, McClung and the other four women who were involved in the Persons Case were honoured with an 8 cent stamp.[41] In addition, the Persons Case was recognized as a National Historic Event in 1997.[42] In October 2009, the Senate of Canada named Nellie McClung and the rest of the Five Canada's first "honorary senators."[43]
McClung's house in Calgary, Alberta, her residence from 1923 to the mid-1930s, still stands and is designated a heritage site.[44] Two other houses in which McClung lived were relocated to the Archibald Museum near La Rivière, Manitoba in the Rural Municipality of Pembina, before being moved back to Manitou in 2017 following the museum's closure.[45] The houses are open to the public. The McClung family residence in Winnipeg is also a historic site.[46]
The Famous Five, also known as The Valiant Five, and initially as The Alberta Five, were five prominent Canadian suffragists who advocated for women and children: Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy, and Irene Parlby. On August 27, 1927, they petitioned the federal government to refer the issue of the eligibility of women to be senator to the Supreme Court of Canada. This petition was the foundation of the Persons Case, a leading constitutional decision. Although most Canadian women had the vote in federal elections and all provinces but Quebec by 1927, the case was part of a larger drive for political equality. This was the first step towards equality for women in Canada and was the start to the first wave of feminism.
Emily Murphy was a Canadian women's rights activist and author. In 1916, she became the first female magistrate in Canada and the fifth in the British Empire after Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, Jane Price, E. Cullen and Cecilia Dixon of Australia. She is best known for her contributions to Canadian feminism, specifically to the question of whether women were "persons" under Canadian law.
Myrna Driedger is a former politician in Manitoba, Canada. She was a member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 1998 to 2023, and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly from 2016 to 2023.
Louise McKinney was a Canadian politician, temperance advocate, and women's rights activist. She was the first woman elected into the Legislative Assembly of Alberta and the first woman to serve in a legislature in the British Empire. She served in the Alberta legislature from 1917 to 1921 as a member of the Non-Partisan League. Later she was one of the Famous Five who campaigned successfully for the right of Canadian women to be appointed to the Senate. A former schoolteacher and temperance organizer, she came to Alberta in 1903 as a homesteader.
Henrietta Muir Edwards was a Canadian women's rights activist, author and reformer. She was the eldest of "The Famous Five", along with Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby, who fought to have women recognized as "persons" under the law, and for the woman's right to vote in elections.
Mary Irene Parlby was a Canadian women's farm leader, activist and politician. She served as MLA in the United Farmers of Alberta government from 1921 to 1935, serving as Minister without portfolio in the Cabinet of Alberta during that time. She worked to implement social reforms that helped farm women and children and was an advocate of public health programs. As a member of the Famous Five, she was one of five women who took the Persons Case first to the Supreme Court of Canada, and then to the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council for the right of women to serve in the Senate of Canada. From 1930 to 1934, she was one of three Canadian representatives at the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Doris Mae Oulton is a Canadian advocate for women’s rights.
Edwards v Canada (AG), also known as the Persons Case (French: l'Affaire « personne »), is a Canadian constitutional case that decided in 1929 that women were eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada. The legal case was put forward by the Government of Canada on the lobbying of a group of women known as The Famous Five—Henrietta Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby. The case began as a reference case by the federal Cabinet directly to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that women were not "qualified persons" and thus ineligible to sit in the Senate. The five women then appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council in London, at that time the court of last resort for Canada within the British Empire and Commonwealth. The Judicial Committee overturned the Supreme Court's decision. (The case name lists Edwards as the lead appellant, as her name came first alphabetically.)
Ella Cora Hind was a Canadian journalist, agriculturalist, Women's rights activist and suffragist. During the Great Depression, she became famous internationally for her accurate predictions of Canadian prairie crop yields. "Her predictions so regularly proved correct that grain handlers across the world came to rely on them."
Robert Chambers Edwards was a Canadian newsman, humorist, editorialist, entrepreneur, and provincial politician. He is best known, as the writer and publisher of the early 1900s weekly newspaper, the Calgary Eye Opener.
Women's suffrage in Canada occurred at different times in different jurisdictions to different demographics of women. Women's right to vote began in the three prairie provinces. In 1916, suffrage was earned by women in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The federal government granted limited war-time suffrage to some women in 1917 and followed with full suffrage in 1918, at least, granting it on same basis as men, that is, certain races and status were excluded from voting in federal elections prior to 1960.
Persons Day is an annual celebration in Canada, held on October 18. The day commemorates the case of Edwards v. Canada , more commonly known as The Persons Case – a famous Canadian constitutional case decided on October 18, 1929, by the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council, which at that time was the court of last resort for Canada. The Persons Case held that women were eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada.
Maternal feminism is the belief of many early feminists that women as mothers and caregivers had an important but distinctive role to play in society and in politics. It incorporates reform ideas from social feminism, and combines the concepts of maternalism and feminism. It was a widespread philosophy among well-to-do women in the British Empire, particularly Canada, from the late 19th century until after World War I (1914–18). The concept was attacked by later feminists as accepting the paternalist view of society and providing an excuse for inequality.
The Grain Growers' Guide was a newspaper published by the Grain Growers' Grain Company (GGGC) in Western Canada for grain farmers between 1908 and 1936. It reflected the views of the grain growers' associations. In its day it had the highest circulation of any farm paper in the region.
Francis Marion Beynon was a Canadian journalist, feminist and pacifist. She is known for her semi-autobiographical novel Aleta Day (1919).
The Political Equality League was a group active in Manitoba, Canada between 1912 and 1916 that successfully lobbied for women's suffrage at the provincial level. One of the highlights of the campaign was a mock parliament in which Nellie McClung parodied the Conservative premier Rodmond Roblin, with a parliament of women dismissing men's claims for rights using the same arguments used by men to dismiss women's claims.
Lillian Beynon Thomas was a Canadian journalist and feminist.
Amelia Yeomans was a Canadian physician and suffragist. She and her adult daughter Lilian B. Yeomans, M.D., were the first female physicians in Manitoba.
Miriam Green Ellis was an agricultural journalist best known for her 25-year career as western editor of the Family Herald and Weekly Star. Along with her mentor Cora Hind, she was a pioneering Western woman journalist at a time when the field was dominated by men. Her writing documented the early 20th century experience of the Canadian West, from country fairs to the impact of the Depression to the development of the oil sands.
Edna Parliament Jaques was a Canadian poet. Born in Collingwood, Ontario, and raised on a homestead in Saskatchewan, by the 1950s, she was "possibly the best-selling poet of her generation."
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