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  • Our Voices Must Be Heard: Women and the Vote in Ontario by Tarah Brookfield
  • Funké Aladejebi
Our Voices Must Be Heard: Women and the Vote in Ontario. Tarah Brookfield. Vancouver: ubc Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 239, $27.95 paper

The second volume in a seven-book series on women's suffrage in Canada, Our Voices Must Be Heard explores new histories to outline the complicated nature of women's voting rights in the province of Ontario. Acknowledging contemporary concerns about gender, social justice, and feminism in the twenty-first century, Tarah Brookfield broadens Ontario's suffrage history to tell a more expansive and nuanced story of women's contributions to voting rights in early Canada. Recognizing the dominant narratives that conflate Canada's suffrage movement with predominantly white, middle-class women, Our Voices Must Be Heard complicates these discussions by encouraging a more diverse reading of Ontario suffragists.

Beginning Ontario's suffrage story in the seventeenth century, Brookfield chronicles a longer movement towards voting rights that is grounded in constructions of gender before and after colonial contact. Here, she prioritizes the histories of Indigenous societies, including the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Delaware, and Wendat nations to reconfigure our understandings of women's suffrage as connected to traditional teachings and women's roles in Indigenous communities. Brookfield's recognition of the legacies of colonialism frames her analysis of the triumphs and pitfalls of women's suffrage activism into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As such, Brookfield clearly connects the ideals and personal interests of white, middle-class women, who became the dominant face of the suffrage movement in Canada, to the experiences of minority women in the province. Brookfield's analysis critically engages with the stories of Indigenous, Black, and poor women as part of the history of suffrage in Ontario and successfully intertwines new narratives alongside dominant ones of the period. For example, Brookfield discusses Charlotte Edith Anderson Monture, the only Indigenous woman serving allied forces in the First World War and one of the only enfranchised women in Ontario who held Indian status (169). Consequently, Brookfield is able to capture the precarity of voting and citizenship rights for women who were not envisioned as part of the nation. By including these carefully researched stories, Our Voices Must be Heard situates these women not as an addendum to provincial movements towards suffrage but, rather, as part of a collective push towards voting rights.

Perhaps one of the strongest elements of Brookfield's research is its analysis of the diversity of women who supported suffrage in Ontario. While there are moments when the book centres conversations around well-known figures [End Page 658] such as Dr. Emily Stowe, Brookfield spends a significant amount of time outlining the more radical agents who existed on the fringes of suffrage activism. To this end, she highlights members from the Finnish community in Port Arthur-Fort William who united their socialism and labour union activism with the suffrage cause (109). Using a transnational approach to examine women's suffrage, Brookfield argues that Finnish women's early enfranchisement in their home country made them increasingly aware of voting limitations once they migrated to Canada. To demonstrate Finnish women's activism during this period, Brookfield uses the story of Sanna Kannasto, a recruiter for the socialist party and a "dangerous radical" according to the rcmp, to spotlight how Finnish socialist women helped to make Port Arthur-Fort William a hub for suffrage activism and support in the early twentieth century (110).

There are, however, moments when Brookfield recognizes but does not discuss the broader socio-political contexts that influenced Ontario women's motives for suffrage. For example, Brookfield only briefly mentions Agnes Macphail's support of eugenics and sterilization, despite the fact that these principles significantly impacted and limited access to full citizenship rights for minority women for years to come (184). Although Brookfield clearly locates Macphail's ideologies within the dominant discourses of the time, there are missed opportunities to connect these junctures to after effects, including systemic discrimination and state-sponsored violence. This would have been an opportune moment to connect these historical experiences with contemporary social justice movements that Brookfield mentions at the beginning...

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