By Andrew Thomson | December 2, 2021 12:12pmET
Canadian women who had recently become eligible to vote in federal elections gained the ability to run as candidates themselves in 1919.
Five stepped forward during the next campaign. But only one was victorious on Dec. 6, 1921: Agnes Macphail, the first woman elected to the House of Commons.
Macphail had already defeated 10 men for the United Farmers nomination in Grey Southeast, Ont. She immediately faced calls to step aside for another vote in which “saner judgment would be possible,” according to biographer Margaret Stewart.
Macphail refused. Instead, she delivered 55 campaign speeches and focused on farm and labour issues, on a $600 budget financed mainly by one-dollar donations.
The result: 50% of the vote and headlines across Canada and abroad.
"It took strenuous campaigning for two months just to stop people saying, 'We can't have a woman,'" Macphail wrote in 1949.
"I won that election in spite of being a woman."
Watch more on the groundbreaking life of Agnes Macphail in this Telling Times profile:
Macphail took her seat for the first time in March 1922 alongside other Progressive MPs. Her first intervention? Asking a Liberal cabinet minister about a boost to civil service salaries.
One week later Macphail delivered her first speech during a debate on women's voting rights:
“I think that in the very few remarks I have made I have voiced the opinion of Canadian women," she told the House. "I think women just want to be individuals, as men are individuals – no more and no less.”
On paper, her reception was warmly received. Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, party leaders, and fellow MPs rose to salute her historic place in the chamber.
But Macphail would also contend with media ridicule, constant scrutiny, jeering, and "members (who) resented my intrusion" in Parliament.
As she later recalled for Maclean's:
When I first came to the House of Commons and walked out into the lobby, men sprang to their feet. I asked them to sit down ... I didn't want them doing me favours. I figured I was going to have trouble enough. I was right. I found that I couldn't do my job without being ballyhooed like the bearded lady.
I couldn't open my mouth to say the simplest thing without it appearing in the papers. I was a curiosity, a freak. And you know the way the world treats freaks.
The 31-year-old Macphail would continue to face opposition from traditionalists and her own party, But she remained an MP until 1940, focusing on agriculture, labour, and prison reform (the latter memorably portrayed in a 1992 Heritage Minute).
Four elections would occur before a second woman joined Macphail in the House of Commons.
Martha Louise Black won Yukon in 1935 after her husband, the Speaker of the House, was too ill to stand for re-election.
Dorise Nielsen was third in 1940; the 37-year-old communist won North Battleford, Sask. as a United Progressive.
Eight decades later, about 40% of 2021 election candidates were women. A record 103 MPs elected were women, representing 30.5% of the House of Commons.
But taking the House and Senate together, Canada still ranks 59th worldwide for its percentage of women in national legislatures, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
The 1921 federal election was also the first where a majority of women had the vote.
Women cast their first federal ballots in 1917 under the Wartime Elections Act and Military Voters Act. The legislation did not extend the right to vote to all women – only 1) wives, widows. mothers, sisters, or daughters of soldiers, or 2) women themselves serving in the military.
Eligible women 21 and older formally received the federal franchise in 1918.
This doubled the electorate. But many were not included.
Most Indigenous Canadian women -- and men -- remained disenfranchised, some until 1960.
And the 1920 Dominion Elections Act later excluded the federal vote from those banned from voting in their own provinces "for reasons of race." This applied to Asian Canadians in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, both women and men. The restrictions were not lifted until the 1940s.
Watch more on the events that led to the franchise for Canadian women:
Another eight years would follow Macphail's election before the landmark "Persons Case" made women eligible to be a "qualified person" for Senate appointment.
Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby and Nellie McClung -- the Famous Five -- fought to be recognized as persons under the law.
On Oct. 18, 1929, after an arduous legal and political battle, the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council recognized women as persons under the British North America Act.
Watch more on the Persons Case and the Famous Five:
It's also worth noting some of the other Canadian women who preceded Macphail as political trailblazers.
- Women were barred from sitting in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1902. But Margaret Haile still ran as Canadian Socialist League candidate in Toronto North, finishing a distant third with 1% support.
- Calgary's Annie Gale became the British Empire's first female municipal alderman -- and Canada's first woman elected to government office -- in 1917.
- 1917 also saw the first women elected as provincial MLAs: Louise McKinney, a long-time suffragist and later one of the Famous Five, to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta as a member of the Non-Partisan League. (the first woman elected to a legislature anywhere in the British Empire.) Lt. Roberta MacAdams, a nurse in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, also became an at-large MLA elected by Albertans serving abroad.
- Mary Ellen Smith, the first woman in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly, also became Canada's first woman to be appointed a cabinet minister in 1921, serving in the provincial Liberal government as a minister without portfolio.
