Sarah Carter's much-welcomed Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice is only the second published work—and the first in 70 years—to examine female suffrage across all three Canadian Prairie provinces. The book is a synthesis of accounts of suffrage campaigns in the three provinces and highlights “the contributions of . . . activists and the steps they took toward equality and justice while also recognizing the blind spots, shortcomings and exclusions that resulted in equality and justice for only some” (6). Regarding the latter, Carter emphasizes especially the “settler colonial context and the long shadows of racism,” which (along with the Prairie culture of patriarchy) are key themes of the book. Carter asserts that “the Prairie suffrage movement coincided with years of intense colonization” that included the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their land, livelihoods and rights. In this context, Carter argues, the efforts of settler suffragists helped to “advance the cause of settler domination” (6) and their success was “a step toward consolidating settler power” (99).
While the emphasis on the settler colonial context is a significant contribution to suffrage scholarship, the claim that suffrage was a significant step toward consolidating settler power warrants further empirical consideration. The clearing of the Prairies for white settlement was undoubtedly colonialism at its most brutal. For First Nations peoples, it resulted in “their demographic nadir in the aftermath of the influenza epidemic of 1889–90” (Daschuk, Reference Daschuk2013: 180). It was in 1891 that female suffrage was first officially endorsed by any organization on the Prairies—the Manitoba Woman's Christian Temperance Union (45). To be sure, suffragists would not subsequently challenge the settler colonial project. They shared in the material benefits of Indigenous dispossession and often held views that were implicitly or explicitly racist. That said, further argument and evidence would be required to compellingly establish that, in comparison with the brutal clearing of the Plains two and a half decades earlier, the “granting” (in Carter's words) of the vote to settler women was a “decisive step” in curbing the power of First Peoples (145). This claim also raises a puzzle. If female suffrage was such an obvious step in the direction of consolidating settler power, why did male settler-colonialist leaders resist it so vigorously? Why did women activists have to wage such “long and arduous campaigns in each of these three provinces,” triumphing only after defeating “powerful opponents” (1)?
Suffragist success may well have been even more contingent than Carter suggests. Had it not been for a major scandal in Manitoba in 1915, the Conservative Roblin majority government (which had been elected in 1914 and was unalterably opposed to female suffrage) would have persisted through 1918 or 1919. As it was, the government resigned and the Liberals, assured of victory, immediately called an election campaigning on their pre-existing platform (adopted in 1914, when they had no chance of winning), which included a commitment to suffrage. Thus, Carter's explanatory account would be stronger if she had explored the origins of the 1914 Liberal platform beyond the somewhat vague assertion that this commitment was “part of their strategy to create a coalition of anti-government forces” (89).
Similarly, female suffrage in Saskatchewan would likely have been significantly delayed had it not been for the governing Liberals being publicly accused in early 1916 of accepting bribes to oppose Prohibition. The Liberals knew that their survival in the next election depended on demonstrating an unflinching commitment to Prohibition, and women's votes were key in this endeavour. Suffrage legislation was enacted just in time to allow women to vote in the upcoming plebiscite on bar licensing, ensuring Prohibitionist victory and reaffirming Liberal bona fides on the issue. Suffrage activist Alice Lawton's now famous exclamation, “Mr. Premier, this is so sudden,” was most likely a facetious reference to the premier's blatantly opportunistic volte-face on suffrage—coming as it did a mere four days after the bribery allegations were made public.
Regarding Alberta, Carter concludes that “unlike in Saskatchewan, farm women leaders and organizations played a secondary . . . role” and focuses her account instead on urban suffrage activists (156). Suffragists at the time (and suffrage scholars more recently) did not appear to be aware that when the premier publicly told suffragist leader Nellie McClung in February 1915 (in the suffragist-occupied legislature) that he could not make promises in regard to suffrage, he had privately promised government support for suffrage just days earlier to the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA)—support that would only be publicly announced eight months later. The UFA demand for suffrage likely reflected male leadership's perceptions of the organizational capacity of female members in the “women's section” to mobilize rural women to vote in support of the UFA program. In this alternative account, grassroots rural women's organizational potential within the UFA explains why suffrage was achieved in Alberta in the absence of a precipitating political crisis. Indeed, were it not for political crises in the other two Prairie provinces, we might well now be asking why Alberta moved ahead with female suffrage while Manitoba and Saskatchewan did not. It would be challenging to account for such differences, had they emerged, by recourse to suffrage as a tool for the consolidation of settler power or with reference to the efforts of organized card-carrying suffragist activists, although both remain important factors.
A contemporary account sparking such debates is most welcome and suggests myriad avenues for further empirical research. As such, Carter's book is undoubtedly required reading not only for students of suffrage history, Prairie history and Canadian history more generally but also for scholars interested in the empirical investigation of that history.
