Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

We Shall Persist

Women and the Vote in the Atlantic Provinces

by (author) Heidi MacDonald

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2023
Subjects
Atlantic Provinces (NB, NL, NS, PE), Canadian, Women, Activism & Social Justice
Categories
About Nova Scotia , About New Brunswick , About Newfoundland and Labrador
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780774863209
    Publish Date
    Apr 2023
    List Price
    $150.00

Library Ordering Options

Description

Women in Atlantic Canada won the right to vote and to run for office only after long, vigorous, and exhausting campaigns for the Great Cause. We Shall Persist explores the distinctive political contexts and common problems faced by advocates for women’s suffrage and wider rights in the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland.

 

Despite virulent opposition in public and at home, most nonindigenous women in the region won enfranchisement in the immediate post–First World War era. This victory curbed the most blatant political misogyny and prepared the way for other rights, such as improved social assistance and access to birth control. Yet progress was uneven and even the movement itself was marked by class and racial inequities.

 

We Shall Persist captures both the long campaign and the years of disappointment. Suffrage victories across Atlantic Canada were steps in an unfinished march toward full gender, race, and class equality.

About the author

Heidi MacDonald is associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Lethbridge.

Heidi MacDonald's profile page

Editorial Reviews

MacDonald has synthesized and condensed a remarkable amount of historiography and, especially, archival research into this slim book, while also doing justice to four separate provincial stories.

Journal of New Brunswick Studies