As the 20th century opened, women in Canada still did not have the vote. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
Today, Laura Elizabeth McCully is not as famous as some other Canadian suffragettes, such as Nellie McClung, but when the fight for the vote was at its hottest, McCully was there. She was called one of Canada’s first-wave feminists.
She participated in this early feminist movement despite being a published author who fought personal battles against physical and mental illness. For example, one of McCully’s first attempts to draw attention to her cause was as a leader at one of the first big open-air rallies for women’s right to vote in Ontario, held in Orillia Aug. 9, 1908. She had no tie to Orillia through family, but when the cause called, she heeded it.
Not that Orillia or its denizens were a hotbed of radical thinking — quite the opposite.
Emmet Livingstone, in the McGill Daily, wrote about Stephen Leacock’s feelings on women’s rights: “Coupled with his humour were forays into social criticism — and any appreciation of his work must take these into account. For a start, Leacock was an unashamed misogynist. He regularly referred to women’s suffrage and women’s access to education as ‘the woman problem.’” In his essay The Woman Question, he portrays the feminist militating for equal rights at the time as “the Awful Woman with spectacles,” arguing the relatively new phenomenon was part of a historical trend of troublesome women. He was no stranger to violent imagery, either, pointing out that in “the Middle Ages, (they) called (a troublesome woman) a witch and burned her.”
Fortunately, they didn’t burn McCully in Orillia or anywhere else.
McCully was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1886, in Toronto to a doctor father and a great-niece of one of the leaders of Canadian Confederation — Jonathon McCully. (Yes, her father was a McCully and her mother was a part-McCully.)
She began early as an author and as a soldier in the war for women’s rights. She had poetry and letters published in the Children’s Corner of the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire (now the Globe and Mail) and was featured in a Harper’s Bazaar piece when she was 13. Her writing continued into her adult years and she published two books of poetry: Mary Magdalene, and Other Poems, and Bird of Dawn, and Other Lyrics.
In her poetry, she wove her love of nature, art and politics filtered through a moral perspective. While today her profile is comparatively low, she was well-known at the time and her work was included in John William Garvin’s anthology called Canadian Poets.
And while she didn’t have the vote, she was born at a time she could attend a major post-secondary institution, which she did, obtaining a BA and an MA. She was also invited to study at Yale, but she only partially completed her studies there — it’s believed she left early due to her parents’ divorce.
Her work in the suffrage movement came to the fore in her undergraduate years. She associated with feminists who wanted women to be recognized as persons. At the time, women were not considered persons as a matter of law. It was years later the so-called famous five — Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards — petitioned the Supreme Court to decide whether women were persons. It wasn’t until 1928 the court decided women were, indeed, persons. The fact women had to fight to be recognized as persons and have the right to vote propelled McCully to travel the country to support and organize rallies like the one in Orillia, and to join the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association.
In the January 1912 edition of Maclean’s, she outlined in an article headlined “What women want” some of the things that had to change and described suffrage as a byproduct of higher education and more responsible roles in society. McCully said, “However important education and the emancipation of the body, no human being is complete without the legal status of a citizen.”
McCully never married and so could write about the challenges women faced when they did not fall into the little spaces society had made for them. That said, she had her biases. Sophia Sperdakos in her essay for the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies, wrote, “Although she sometimes echoed the biases of the English Canadian community of which she was a part, writing, for example, that the female vote was needed to bolster Canadian voices against those of foreigners, her general approach to women’s equality was to expand the horizons of all women.”
When the First World War broke out, feminists and suffragettes faced criticism their movement hindered the necessary and patriotic work of military preparedness. But at a time many feminists viewed the war as a sign of the failure of men and their politics, McCully sought a different path. She thought women should have the right to defend their country. Within a year of the war’s start, she’d joined the Women’s Home Guard to train, with the aim of freeing up men to serve for active duty. Male-dominated newspapers attacked the idea of female soldiers. McCully, as capable of fighting with ink as anyone, wrote an article for Maclean’s, “The woman soldier: a byproduct of the war.” Her piece took a modern view that victory required women to help support the war effort in every way possible — an approach that was adopted in the Second World War.
A year later, McCully was stricken with diabetes and dementia praecox or schizophrenia. A series of hospital admissions followed after a suicide attempt in 1917.
Sperdakos summed up the last years of McCully’s life and illness: “… The nature of her fears reveals the vulnerability of women generally, and in particular single women who were leading lives for which precedents and role models were few.”
She died in Toronto July 7, 1922, a year after women won the right to vote — or, at least, many women. First Nations and other non-white women would have to wait.
Today, Laura Elizabeth McCully is not as famous as some other Canadian suffragettes, such as Nellie McClung, but when the fight for the vote was at its hottest, McCully was there. She was called one of Canada’s first-wave feminists.
She participated in this early feminist movement despite being a published author who fought personal battles against physical and mental illness. For example, one of McCully’s first attempts to draw attention to her cause was as a leader at one of the first big open-air rallies for women’s right to vote in Ontario, held in Orillia Aug. 9, 1908. She had no tie to Orillia through family, but when the cause called, she heeded it.
Not that Orillia or its denizens were a hotbed of radical thinking — quite the opposite.
Emmet Livingstone, in the McGill Daily, wrote about Stephen Leacock’s feelings on women’s rights: “Coupled with his humour were forays into social criticism — and any appreciation of his work must take these into account. For a start, Leacock was an unashamed misogynist. He regularly referred to women’s suffrage and women’s access to education as ‘the woman problem.’” In his essay The Woman Question, he portrays the feminist militating for equal rights at the time as “the Awful Woman with spectacles,” arguing the relatively new phenomenon was part of a historical trend of troublesome women. He was no stranger to violent imagery, either, pointing out that in “the Middle Ages, (they) called (a troublesome woman) a witch and burned her.”
Fortunately, they didn’t burn McCully in Orillia or anywhere else.
McCully was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1886, in Toronto to a doctor father and a great-niece of one of the leaders of Canadian Confederation — Jonathon McCully. (Yes, her father was a McCully and her mother was a part-McCully.)
She began early as an author and as a soldier in the war for women’s rights. She had poetry and letters published in the Children’s Corner of the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire (now the Globe and Mail) and was featured in a Harper’s Bazaar piece when she was 13. Her writing continued into her adult years and she published two books of poetry: Mary Magdalene, and Other Poems, and Bird of Dawn, and Other Lyrics.
In her poetry, she wove her love of nature, art and politics filtered through a moral perspective. While today her profile is comparatively low, she was well-known at the time and her work was included in John William Garvin’s anthology called Canadian Poets.
And while she didn’t have the vote, she was born at a time she could attend a major post-secondary institution, which she did, obtaining a BA and an MA. She was also invited to study at Yale, but she only partially completed her studies there — it’s believed she left early due to her parents’ divorce.
Her work in the suffrage movement came to the fore in her undergraduate years. She associated with feminists who wanted women to be recognized as persons. At the time, women were not considered persons as a matter of law. It was years later the so-called famous five — Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards — petitioned the Supreme Court to decide whether women were persons. It wasn’t until 1928 the court decided women were, indeed, persons. The fact women had to fight to be recognized as persons and have the right to vote propelled McCully to travel the country to support and organize rallies like the one in Orillia, and to join the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association.
In the January 1912 edition of Maclean’s, she outlined in an article headlined “What women want” some of the things that had to change and described suffrage as a byproduct of higher education and more responsible roles in society. McCully said, “However important education and the emancipation of the body, no human being is complete without the legal status of a citizen.”
McCully never married and so could write about the challenges women faced when they did not fall into the little spaces society had made for them. That said, she had her biases. Sophia Sperdakos in her essay for the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies, wrote, “Although she sometimes echoed the biases of the English Canadian community of which she was a part, writing, for example, that the female vote was needed to bolster Canadian voices against those of foreigners, her general approach to women’s equality was to expand the horizons of all women.”
When the First World War broke out, feminists and suffragettes faced criticism their movement hindered the necessary and patriotic work of military preparedness. But at a time many feminists viewed the war as a sign of the failure of men and their politics, McCully sought a different path. She thought women should have the right to defend their country. Within a year of the war’s start, she’d joined the Women’s Home Guard to train, with the aim of freeing up men to serve for active duty. Male-dominated newspapers attacked the idea of female soldiers. McCully, as capable of fighting with ink as anyone, wrote an article for Maclean’s, “The woman soldier: a byproduct of the war.” Her piece took a modern view that victory required women to help support the war effort in every way possible — an approach that was adopted in the Second World War.
A year later, McCully was stricken with diabetes and dementia praecox or schizophrenia. A series of hospital admissions followed after a suicide attempt in 1917.
Sperdakos summed up the last years of McCully’s life and illness: “… The nature of her fears reveals the vulnerability of women generally, and in particular single women who were leading lives for which precedents and role models were few.”
She died in Toronto July 7, 1922, a year after women won the right to vote — or, at least, many women. First Nations and other non-white women would have to wait.
As the 20th century opened, women in Canada still did not have the vote. It wasn’t for lack of trying.
Today, Laura Elizabeth McCully is not as famous as some other Canadian suffragettes, such as Nellie McClung, but when the fight for the vote was at its hottest, McCully was there. She was called one of Canada’s first-wave feminists.
She participated in this early feminist movement despite being a published author who fought personal battles against physical and mental illness. For example, one of McCully’s first attempts to draw attention to her cause was as a leader at one of the first big open-air rallies for women’s right to vote in Ontario, held in Orillia Aug. 9, 1908. She had no tie to Orillia through family, but when the cause called, she heeded it.
Not that Orillia or its denizens were a hotbed of radical thinking — quite the opposite.
Emmet Livingstone, in the McGill Daily, wrote about Stephen Leacock’s feelings on women’s rights: “Coupled with his humour were forays into social criticism — and any appreciation of his work must take these into account. For a start, Leacock was an unashamed misogynist. He regularly referred to women’s suffrage and women’s access to education as ‘the woman problem.’” In his essay The Woman Question, he portrays the feminist militating for equal rights at the time as “the Awful Woman with spectacles,” arguing the relatively new phenomenon was part of a historical trend of troublesome women. He was no stranger to violent imagery, either, pointing out that in “the Middle Ages, (they) called (a troublesome woman) a witch and burned her.”
Fortunately, they didn’t burn McCully in Orillia or anywhere else.
McCully was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1886, in Toronto to a doctor father and a great-niece of one of the leaders of Canadian Confederation — Jonathon McCully. (Yes, her father was a McCully and her mother was a part-McCully.)
She began early as an author and as a soldier in the war for women’s rights. She had poetry and letters published in the Children’s Corner of the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire (now the Globe and Mail) and was featured in a Harper’s Bazaar piece when she was 13. Her writing continued into her adult years and she published two books of poetry: Mary Magdalene, and Other Poems, and Bird of Dawn, and Other Lyrics.
In her poetry, she wove her love of nature, art and politics filtered through a moral perspective. While today her profile is comparatively low, she was well-known at the time and her work was included in John William Garvin’s anthology called Canadian Poets.
And while she didn’t have the vote, she was born at a time she could attend a major post-secondary institution, which she did, obtaining a BA and an MA. She was also invited to study at Yale, but she only partially completed her studies there — it’s believed she left early due to her parents’ divorce.
Her work in the suffrage movement came to the fore in her undergraduate years. She associated with feminists who wanted women to be recognized as persons. At the time, women were not considered persons as a matter of law. It was years later the so-called famous five — Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards — petitioned the Supreme Court to decide whether women were persons. It wasn’t until 1928 the court decided women were, indeed, persons. The fact women had to fight to be recognized as persons and have the right to vote propelled McCully to travel the country to support and organize rallies like the one in Orillia, and to join the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association.
In the January 1912 edition of Maclean’s, she outlined in an article headlined “What women want” some of the things that had to change and described suffrage as a byproduct of higher education and more responsible roles in society. McCully said, “However important education and the emancipation of the body, no human being is complete without the legal status of a citizen.”
McCully never married and so could write about the challenges women faced when they did not fall into the little spaces society had made for them. That said, she had her biases. Sophia Sperdakos in her essay for the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies, wrote, “Although she sometimes echoed the biases of the English Canadian community of which she was a part, writing, for example, that the female vote was needed to bolster Canadian voices against those of foreigners, her general approach to women’s equality was to expand the horizons of all women.”
When the First World War broke out, feminists and suffragettes faced criticism their movement hindered the necessary and patriotic work of military preparedness. But at a time many feminists viewed the war as a sign of the failure of men and their politics, McCully sought a different path. She thought women should have the right to defend their country. Within a year of the war’s start, she’d joined the Women’s Home Guard to train, with the aim of freeing up men to serve for active duty. Male-dominated newspapers attacked the idea of female soldiers. McCully, as capable of fighting with ink as anyone, wrote an article for Maclean’s, “The woman soldier: a byproduct of the war.” Her piece took a modern view that victory required women to help support the war effort in every way possible — an approach that was adopted in the Second World War.
A year later, McCully was stricken with diabetes and dementia praecox or schizophrenia. A series of hospital admissions followed after a suicide attempt in 1917.
Sperdakos summed up the last years of McCully’s life and illness: “… The nature of her fears reveals the vulnerability of women generally, and in particular single women who were leading lives for which precedents and role models were few.”
She died in Toronto July 7, 1922, a year after women won the right to vote — or, at least, many women. First Nations and other non-white women would have to wait.
Today, Laura Elizabeth McCully is not as famous as some other Canadian suffragettes, such as Nellie McClung, but when the fight for the vote was at its hottest, McCully was there. She was called one of Canada’s first-wave feminists.
She participated in this early feminist movement despite being a published author who fought personal battles against physical and mental illness. For example, one of McCully’s first attempts to draw attention to her cause was as a leader at one of the first big open-air rallies for women’s right to vote in Ontario, held in Orillia Aug. 9, 1908. She had no tie to Orillia through family, but when the cause called, she heeded it.
Not that Orillia or its denizens were a hotbed of radical thinking — quite the opposite.
Emmet Livingstone, in the McGill Daily, wrote about Stephen Leacock’s feelings on women’s rights: “Coupled with his humour were forays into social criticism — and any appreciation of his work must take these into account. For a start, Leacock was an unashamed misogynist. He regularly referred to women’s suffrage and women’s access to education as ‘the woman problem.’” In his essay The Woman Question, he portrays the feminist militating for equal rights at the time as “the Awful Woman with spectacles,” arguing the relatively new phenomenon was part of a historical trend of troublesome women. He was no stranger to violent imagery, either, pointing out that in “the Middle Ages, (they) called (a troublesome woman) a witch and burned her.”
Fortunately, they didn’t burn McCully in Orillia or anywhere else.
McCully was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1886, in Toronto to a doctor father and a great-niece of one of the leaders of Canadian Confederation — Jonathon McCully. (Yes, her father was a McCully and her mother was a part-McCully.)
She began early as an author and as a soldier in the war for women’s rights. She had poetry and letters published in the Children’s Corner of the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire (now the Globe and Mail) and was featured in a Harper’s Bazaar piece when she was 13. Her writing continued into her adult years and she published two books of poetry: Mary Magdalene, and Other Poems, and Bird of Dawn, and Other Lyrics.
In her poetry, she wove her love of nature, art and politics filtered through a moral perspective. While today her profile is comparatively low, she was well-known at the time and her work was included in John William Garvin’s anthology called Canadian Poets.
And while she didn’t have the vote, she was born at a time she could attend a major post-secondary institution, which she did, obtaining a BA and an MA. She was also invited to study at Yale, but she only partially completed her studies there — it’s believed she left early due to her parents’ divorce.
Her work in the suffrage movement came to the fore in her undergraduate years. She associated with feminists who wanted women to be recognized as persons. At the time, women were not considered persons as a matter of law. It was years later the so-called famous five — Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Henrietta Edwards — petitioned the Supreme Court to decide whether women were persons. It wasn’t until 1928 the court decided women were, indeed, persons. The fact women had to fight to be recognized as persons and have the right to vote propelled McCully to travel the country to support and organize rallies like the one in Orillia, and to join the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association.
In the January 1912 edition of Maclean’s, she outlined in an article headlined “What women want” some of the things that had to change and described suffrage as a byproduct of higher education and more responsible roles in society. McCully said, “However important education and the emancipation of the body, no human being is complete without the legal status of a citizen.”
McCully never married and so could write about the challenges women faced when they did not fall into the little spaces society had made for them. That said, she had her biases. Sophia Sperdakos in her essay for the Dictionary of Canadian Biographies, wrote, “Although she sometimes echoed the biases of the English Canadian community of which she was a part, writing, for example, that the female vote was needed to bolster Canadian voices against those of foreigners, her general approach to women’s equality was to expand the horizons of all women.”
When the First World War broke out, feminists and suffragettes faced criticism their movement hindered the necessary and patriotic work of military preparedness. But at a time many feminists viewed the war as a sign of the failure of men and their politics, McCully sought a different path. She thought women should have the right to defend their country. Within a year of the war’s start, she’d joined the Women’s Home Guard to train, with the aim of freeing up men to serve for active duty. Male-dominated newspapers attacked the idea of female soldiers. McCully, as capable of fighting with ink as anyone, wrote an article for Maclean’s, “The woman soldier: a byproduct of the war.” Her piece took a modern view that victory required women to help support the war effort in every way possible — an approach that was adopted in the Second World War.
A year later, McCully was stricken with diabetes and dementia praecox or schizophrenia. A series of hospital admissions followed after a suicide attempt in 1917.
Sperdakos summed up the last years of McCully’s life and illness: “… The nature of her fears reveals the vulnerability of women generally, and in particular single women who were leading lives for which precedents and role models were few.”
She died in Toronto July 7, 1922, a year after women won the right to vote — or, at least, many women. First Nations and other non-white women would have to wait.
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
