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 the author of numerous articles on women's and gender history in Atlantic Canada. She is co-author, with Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Elizabeth Smyth, of Vatican II and Beyond: The Changing Mission and Identity of Canadian Women Religious. From 1999 to 2018, she taught at the University of Lethbridge and served as the founding director of the Centre of Oral History and Tradition from 2013 to 2017. In 2019, she became dean of arts and professor of history and politics at the University of New Brunswick Saint John.
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.
- Lisa Pasolli, Queen's University (Journal of New Brunswick Studies)Book Information
ISBN 9780774863179
Author Heidi MacDonald
Format Hardback
Page Count 300
Imprint University of British Columbia Press
Publisher University of British Columbia Press
Weight(grams) 460g