One Hundred Years of Struggle: The History of Women and the Vote in Canada by Joan Sangster (review)

Joan sangster's One Hundred Years of Struggle is a remarkable inaugural volume on the centenary of the federal extension of the suffrage to white women in Canada. It is an overview of the rich diversity of suffrage histories that led to the final extension of universal suffrage in 1960. Subsequent volumes will treat the topics introduced here in greater depth, but this work will doubtless become a standard text for students of Canadian women's history. At under 300 pages, its length is manageable. It is accurate and historiographically mature, but still readable. The publisher agreed to include numerous images and primary texts, all of which will facilitate classroom integration. Most importantly, Sangster has remembered the primary task of the historian, which is to tell good stories. Every chapter employs biography to tell personal stories of individual suffragists, most of whom have escaped the traditional narratives around Canadian women's history. Because of its decentralized complexity in both space and time, the story of Canadian women's suffrage is especially difficult to tell. I can't imagine anyone having done it better.

The introduction invites us to imagine suffrage as a series of concentric circles. Those in the innermost circle were focused almost exclusively on the vote, extending their activism beyond the vote only to pursue other, related objectives like expanding women's roles in society. Beyond the first circle lies a group of activists whose objectives were broader. Whereas the first group pursued the women's vote as end unto itself – political equality as a goal with inherent justice and consequent worth – the second group may be thought of as women who viewed suffrage as a means to an end. The justice of women's equality with men, for this group, was tied up with achieving a more just society generally. The third circle looked broader still, its members organizing occasionally around suffrage, but more often around religion or social clubs. All looked to leverage women's talents to improve society. Some envisioned structural transformation that would strike at the root of injustice; others accepted the basic ordering of their society but worked to make less radical improvements.

Subsequent chapters address issues that divided women, like property, race, imperialism, and war. A loose chronology is maintained, making the dense, disparate, non-linear history easier to follow. Suffrage intersected frequently, if not universally, with other struggles. Land, labour, class, religion, language, or race play parts in every story. Party politics favoured women's enfranchisement in some circumstances and hindered it in others. Ideology inconsistently supported or opposed suffrage depending on the political moment. Assumptions around progress, the superiority of white culture and Christianity vis-à-vis Indigenous, Asian, or Afro-Canadian groups, even after assimilation, permeated white discourses about suffrage extensions.

Two chapters help readers imagine the competing worldviews that emerged around the suffrage debate between those who participated in the creation of what Sangster calls "feminist countercultures" and the "antis" who opposed them. She helpfully categorizes all arguments employed by antis into five themes on gender relations: "innate sex differences and separate spheres; maternity, domesticity and the family; the protection of traditions and order…; war and military might; and culture and religion." (118) She also reminds us that there was always more at stake than gender. Race and class hierarchies intersected with gender and reinforced one another, both rhetorically and politically. Feminists pushed back with mock parliaments, women's journals, women's columns, novels, cartoons, films, and marches. Together, they created an ethos of resistance whose importance Sangster highlights. They allowed feminists to feel a certain way, a part of something shared among many across many parts of the world, something meaningful and greater than themselves.

An entire chapter is devoted to complicating the popular narrative that has associated women's participation in war with their success in achieving the suffrage. "Myths tied to patriotic versions of history," Sangster points out...