Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice
Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces
This long-overdue account of the suffrage campaigns in the first region to grant women the vote in Canada shatters cherished myths about how the West was won.
Description
Many of Canada’s most famous suffragists lived and campaigned in the Prairie provinces, which led the way in granting women the right to vote and hold office. In Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice, Sarah Carter challenges the myth that grateful male legislators simply handed women the vote when it was asked for. Settler suffragists worked long and hard to overcome obstacles and persuade doubters. But even as they petitioned for the vote for their sisters, they often approved of that same right being denied to “foreigners” and Indigenous peoples. By situating the suffragists’ struggle in the colonial history of Prairie Canada, this powerful and passionate book shows that the right to vote meant different things to different people.
Awards
- Short-listed, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 2021
- Short-listed, Margaret McWilliams Prize in Manitoba History 2020
- Winner, WILLA Literary Award, Scholarly Nonfiction 2021
Reviews
Carter’s book is undoubtedly required reading not only for students of suffrage history, Prairie history and Canadian history more generally but also for scholars interested in the empirical investigation of that history.
- Gerard Boychuk, University of Waterloo
Outstanding research and a fluid writing style make this book an impressive, useful, and accessible history of Canadian women's fight for suffrage. Carter's portraits of the women leading the efforts bring the period to life for the reader ... It delves into complex political and sociological aspects of the movement and the unsettling biases of the movers. It includes the perspectives of Indigneous peoples, white British settlers, ethnic minorities, farm women, and the working class. An important contribution to women's studies.
- WILLA Literary Award for Scholarly Nonfiction Judges
With clarity, sensitivity and deftness, Carter shows that these activists’ accomplishments, and the oppression they furthered, were equally real… she sets a useful template for historians to examine and understand other similarly complex events and figures in Canadian history.
- Amy Shaw, associate professor, University of Lethbridge