A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.
Introduction: Worker, Settler, Liberal, Feminist
1 Setting the Stage in British Mining Villages, to 1892
2 Replenishing the Empire, 1892–1900
3 From Nanaimo to Ottawa and Back Again, 1900–11
4 Boom, Bust, War, and Death, 1912–17
5 Independent Liberal Lady? 1917–20
6 From Hope to Disillusion, 1920–28
7 On the Margins, 1928–33
Conclusion: British Columbia’s Famous Pioneer
Politician: Making History
Notes; Index
Veronica Strong-Boag is a historian specializing in the history of Canadian women and children. She is a professor emerita in the Social Justice Institute and the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia and an adjunct professor in history and gender studies at the University of Victoria. She is the general editor of the seven-volume series Women's Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy. She is the author of many publications and the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canada, Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, the Raymond Klibansky Prize, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond and Golden Jubilee Medals, the Canada Prize in the Social Sciences, the Riley Fellowship in History, the James R. Mallory Lectureship, and a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa (University of Guelph, 2018). In 2012, the Royal Society of Canada awarded her the J.B. Tyrrell Historical medal for “outstanding work in the history of Canada.” In July 2018, she was appointed to the Order of Canada.
As an acclaimed scholarly chronicler of Canadian, especially British Columbian, herstory, Veronica Strong-Boag is determined that Mary Ellen Spear Smith will not slip from recorded memory.
~Phyllis Reeve, The British Columbia Review
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