The Suffragette Movement In The Early Twentieth Century

Sometimes, in order to have justice in this world, violent actions need to be taken to be able to get a point across and fight for what is fundamentally right. In today’s society, feminism is viewed as a non-violent way of having the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. However, it was not always like that. In order to have the level of equality modern societies have today, daring and sometimes violent things took place. A case in point being the Suffragette movement in the early 20th century. Over the years, the Suffragettes faced many challenges and winning feats such as being granted their right to vote federally, but their actions and the actions taken by one of their most successful groundbreakers, Thérèse Casgrain, are the reason why women can now be treated equally in Canadian society.

Quite ironically, the spark that pioneered the Suffragette movement was the fault of a man. The Constitutional Act of 1791 stated that tenants or owners of land can be granted the right to vote. However, the act

It started off small, and the group faced much opposition from the clergy, their government, and other more conservative women. This opposition, while mainly driven forward by decades of unconscious internal sexism, was also founded on the more violent acts taken by some members of the movement. For example, in 1909, Montreal Mayor Louis Payette was assaulted in his office by Helen Wright, a Suffragette, when she smashed his inkstand because she got impatient. However, the movement also helped women in a more peaceful way with campaigns and petitions, and making it known by going door-to-door that certain women could vote in Montreal’s municipal elections in 1910, like unmarried or widowed property owners. On a federal level, women who were connected to men that were in the war effort could legally vote in 1917. This led to the bill letting women vote federally in