Agnes Macphail, pictured on her 59th birthday, was the first female MP in the country’s history. She served as a federal member of parliament for 19 years.The Globe and Mail
Allan Levine is a historian whose most recent book is Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder.
With the recent opening of the 44th Canadian Parliament, a record 103 women – of 338 MPs – representing five political parties took their seats. Nearly a century ago, after the election of Dec. 6, 1921, the 14th Parliament had only one woman among the 235 members, the first female MP in the country’s history: the indomitable Agnes Macphail.
The election had resulted in a slim – but not durable – majority for the Liberals, led by their new leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Disillusioned with the two traditional parties and opposed to high tariffs, many voters in rural Ontario and the West had opted for the newly created agrarian oriented Progressive Party. In 1921, the Progressives won more seats than the Conservatives; no third party had ever achieved that feat.
The 1921 election also marked the first time a large number of women could vote federally, with the exception of most Indigenous women across the country, Chinese women in Saskatchewan, and Japanese, Chinese and South Asian women in British Columbia (as stipulated by legislation in each province). Four women had run, but only Macphail, a United Farmers of Ontario-Progressive, had defeated her male Liberal and Conservative opponents in the rural Ontario riding of Grey Southeast. (By then, seven women had been elected to legislatures in the four Western provinces.)
Given the various obstacles she faced, her accomplishment was impressive. As she later recalled, “I won that election in spite of being a woman.” At the time, Macphail, raised on a farm in Grey County, Ont., in the rural area south of Georgian Bay, was a 31-year-old former school teacher. She was to be an MP for the next 19 years.
After she was initially chosen as the UFO-Progressive candidate in Grey Southeast, some of the men in the riding grumbled about the outcome. On the campaign trail, it was no better. Macphail was however a sharp and witty orator always ready to tangle with hecklers. “Don’t you wish you were a man?” one fellow shouted at her. “Yes,” she retorted, “don’t you?” The crowd cheered.
After her victory, she was treated as a political novelty and received much attention in the press, though not the kind she appreciated. In a January, 1922, feature article in Maclean’s magazine, she was hailed as “the only M. P. who can – Bake, churn sew, hitch, cook, milk, teach, talk – and do ‘em all well!” And like the female politicians who have followed her, journalists frequently commented on her appearance and dress and the fact that she was still single. Though she had male suitors, she never married and had to repeatedly answer inane questions about her status as a “spinster.” She was also initially shunned by many of the male MPs who could not accept a woman in the House of Commons.
Macphail spent her political career fighting for equality for women, decency in politics, prison reform, and peace and international co-operation as the first female Canadian delegate to the League of Nations in 1929. As her biographer Terry Crowley details, she was more enlightened than most white Canadians of her generation in that she believed compelling immigrants to assimilate to a white Anglo ideal was impractical and wrong. “The idea of people of British stock that they are superior is absurd,” she said in 1928. “We have not allowed people from other countries to make contributions which would make Canada, not a little England or a little Great Britain, but Canada.”
Still, she would have been the last person to say that she was perfect. And, she wasn’t. Like many of us, her attitudes and actions were contradictory. Despite her almost multicultural view of newcomers, there is no denying that she was a white woman of her times and shared some of the prejudices that we are quick to condemn today. Indigenous peoples and their plight in prisons or elsewhere did not concern her. And as was the case with other liberal-minded social reformers, she accepted the popular eugenics theories of the day that forced sterilization of mentally challenged individuals was essential. Or as she so bluntly put it at a farm association meeting in 1935, “I just wonder how much longer we’re going to allow subnormal people to produce their kind. It is a blasphemy of the worst kind. You farmers – would you want the worse type of your cattle to be seed-bearers?”
Not too long after she arrived in Ottawa, she became disenchanted with many of her more moderate Progressive colleagues, who were content to support the King government with few questions asked. In 1924, she and 10 other Progressives formed a faction known as the “Ginger Group” to fight for their vision for economic co-operation. Several members, including Macphail, played key roles in the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) eight years later. But she feared communism and its suppression of freedom. She vehemently opposed alleged communists in the CCF ranks, which led to her leaving the party for a few years.
After she was defeated in the 1940 election, she rejoined the CCF and served two terms as an Ontario MPP; in 1943, she and Rae Luckock, also of the CCF, were the first two women elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario. There, she continued her fight for women’s equality and economic rights before losing her seat in the 1951 provincial election. In the years that followed, prime minister Louis St. Laurent was considering appointing her to the Senate. But before that was finalized, she died early in 1954 a few weeks prior to her 64th birthday.
Her flaws notwithstanding, a century later Macphail’s historical legacy remains intact. She did not want special treatment because she was a woman – just the opposite. Asked again by Maclean’s in 1949 whether she’d rather be a man, she replied: “My answer is: No. I’d rather be a woman – if the world would treat me as it treats a man.”
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