Relations with Militants and Organizations in Other Countries
Like many of her fellow suffragists, the dressmaker, author, innkeeper, and spiritualist Flora MacDonald MERRILL (Denison) joined the international suffragist movement and forged links with many women working outside Canada:
“[Flora] attended two of the annual world conventions of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, in Copenhagen in 1906 and Budapest in 1913. She knew and greatly admired Emmeline Pankhurst, the British suffragist leader, who stayed with her during her Canadian tours in 1909 and 1911. … Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, would hire Flora as a full-time paid lecturer in the successful campaign for the franchise in New York State in 1917.”
The contacts established with people and organizations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere had a direct impact on the Canadian suffragist movement, as illustrated in the biography of the physician Emily Howard JENNINGS (Stowe):
“Stowe is best known for her contributions to the enfranchisement of women. She campaigned to win women the same property and voting rights as men, and she helped to obtain passage by the province in 1884 of the Married Women’s Property Act, which placed spouses on an equal footing with regard to property they owned separately. The suffrage association lost energy after 1885, in Stowe’s view because ‘we admitted the opposite sex as members and the effect was demoralizing. That old idea of female dependence crept in and the ladies began to rely on the gentlemen rather than upon their own efforts.’ Stowe breathed new life into the association by arranging for the American suffragist Dr Anna Howard Shaw to speak in Canada. The occasion of that address, on 31 Jan. 1889, led to the formation of a national organization – the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association.”
The biographies listed below allow us to take stock of relations between suffragists in Canada and their counterparts in other countries:
