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1. Our Struggle for Rights
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
| C. Demand For Change →→ 1. Our Struggle for Rights →→ 2. Industry and Labour →→ 3. The Canadian Industrial Boom →→ 4. Gold and Imperial Adventure →→ →→ 5. The Immigration Boom 1895-1914 →→ 6. The New West 1885-1905 →→ D. World War I |
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The Problem of Poverty
Contents |
The problems within Canadian cities, aside from poverty, were immense. Despite some amenities they offered, they were unattractive and sometimes dangerous places in which to live. Tenement and row housing was the norm in the downtown core areas. Rents could be exorbitant given limited supply and high demand. Dwellings were small, run-down, and crowded. Heating was inadequate, air quality poor, and there was no running water. Because buildings were packed closely together, they became subject to the numerous fires that broke out. Lack of adequate running water, sewage treatment, and garbage collection resulted in the rapid spread of diseases.
Not surprising, diseases were rampant. Epidemics broke out frequently, as cities became veritable breeding grounds for disease and death. Working in dark, damp, and dank factories and living in crowded, dirty, and filthy tenements, without adequate clean water, was a recipe for disaster. The great killers were typhus, typhoid, smallpox, tuberculosis, and diphtheria. Particularly susceptible were babies and infants. For example, in Montreal in 1900, fully one-third of all babies died before reaching their first birthday.
Factory work was tedious and boring, and often dangerous. Pay was abysmally low. Poverty was pervasive and all consuming. Diets were poor, as were health and life expectancy. Taxes could not be raised to provide street lighting, running water, policing, and fire protection in the many poorer sections of cities. So the inhabitants did without, often well into the twentieth century. Municipal politicians did build libraries, parks, and hospitals, which apparently were to improve the lives of all within the cities. However, for the vast majority of urban dwellers life was a mere matter of survival. Crime, disease, and poverty led many to find solace and escape in alcohol.
Alcohol & the Temperance Movement
As many faced grinding poverty and tedious lives, alcohol addiction based on cheap whiskey made urban problems worse. In the 1860s, Ontario had 70 distilleries and 138 breweries, mostly near Toronto. Two thirds of inmates in the city jail were there for drunkenness or alcohol-related crimes, and half of those were women.
Critics noted an 'alcohol epidemic' in the 1870s, and the onset of a severe recession only meant more urban workers drowning their sorrows in cheap whiskey. Taverns, already numerous by this time, became even more prevalent. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Toronto had more than 800 hundred licensed and unlicensed drinking establishments. Cunningly, they were often built right beside newly constructed factories.
Reformers railed against 'the demon run' claiming that it was at the root of much urban evil. It was blamed for adding to family poverty as workers drank their pay cheques as soon as they were in their hands. Alcohol was seen as a principal cause behind poverty, crime, and family discord. Ministers decried 'intemperance' and all the ills it brought with it from the pulpit. Churches and the few charitable institutions in existence at the time had to deal with families unable to pay their bills because the husband and father had drunk away most of his earnings.
Women bore the brunt of the effects of 'intemperance,' and women rose to lead the prohibition drive. Women were left to deal with the consequences of their husbands drinking away their earnings rather than keeping them for the necessities of life. They organized to fight 'the demon rum.' The first temperance organization in Canada, the "Prohibition Women's League", was formed in Owen Sound, Ontario 24 May 1874. In that same year, a Methodist schoolteacher named Letitia Youmans founded the first Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Picton, Ontario, and started organizing other chapters across the province. She was one of the Canadian delegates to the World Temperance Congress at Philadelphia in 1876, and in May, 1882, visited the British Women's Temperance Association at London. Having a strong religious bent, the WCTU grew rapidly under her leadership. Within twenty years, the organization had over 9 000 members across Canada.
The WCTU was just one form of the many and varied reform impulses of the late nineteenth century. Many of them were evangelical and religiously inspired. They saw the serious and growing ills in their society and sought ways in which to improve them, if not eliminate them. It was no longer simply enough for preachers and ministers to decry those ills from their pulpits every Sunday morning. Rather, they and the members of their congregations had to go out and improve the lives of the less fortunate in their societies. Hundreds looked outside Canada and joined missionary expeditions to the Orient and India. But a far greater number focused on the problems at their immediate doorsteps. They aimed to help prisoners, prostitutes, young people, and the indigent.
Using well known American 'muckrakers' (journalists and writers who exposed corruption and suffering) as models, Canadian reformers attempted to attack the same growing urban ills. They criticized factory and mine owners and the deplorable state of sanitation in cities. Wealthy philanthropists sought to give something back to their communities. Many attacked the evils as well as the tremendous disparities of wealth within emerging Canadian cities, how a few lived in opulence and decadence while the great majority lived in squalor and poverty. One of the most notable turn-of-the-century social critics was Herbert Ames who wrote 'The City Below the Hill.' It was a scathing expose of the two very different worlds in Canada's second largest city.
Other writers revealed similar gross disparities in other Canadian cities. This collective outlet to expose urban problems led to significant improvements in working and living conditions. While these 'muckrakers' could rarely agree on the optimum tactics, they did unanimously rail against the ills of their contemporary society, and demanded, often in strident voices, that something be done. Various industries, such as mining and meat- packing, were improved. Critics, and the public alike, clearly saw that if improvement was to come about it, it would only do so a coordinated effort that forced local government to implement the necessary legislation. In no small part, because of the efforts of these urban critics, health inspectors, building codes, improved services, and boards of health all appeared. Municipal reformers were elected and they attempted to keep the impulse going forward by building parks, libraries, and hospitals.
Saving the Children
Most provinces had compulsory schooling by 1900, but the problem of child neglect and abuse still had to be faced. Child Welfare Services in Canada were non-existent in the 18th and 19th century. Charity from the churches was available, but alcoholism was generally looked on as a sin or a character flaw, and children of alcoholics were regarded as cursed.
From the passage of The Orphan's Act, 1799 to the enactment of The Apprentices and Minors Act, 1851, apprenticeship was the only way made for orphaned or deserted children to get help. The 1849 Ontario Municipal Act, which created local governments, permitted relief of poverty by local authorities. Few efforts were made to care for non-apprenticed children.
Things started to improve in 1891, when Toronto journalist J.J. Kelso founded the Children's Aid Society, which fought for a Child Protection Act, which was passed in 1893. Kelso himself became Superintendent for the Province of Dependent and Helpless Children.
Public responsibility for the care of children grew over the next 25 years, as adoption, foster parenting, orphan homes and industrial training schools emerged as alternatives to apprenticeship. Charitable societies were allowed to intervene to prevent the maltreatment of apprentices. The Charity Aid Act, 1874 regulated public aid to charitable organizations and allowed for government supervision of institutions.
In 1884, an amendment to The Industrial Schools Act, 1874 allowed local school trustees to delegate responsibility for the establishment of residential training schools for children under age 14 to any incorporated philanthropic society, subject to Provincial approval of the society's by-laws. This development marked the emergence of shared public/private responsibility which was to become a feature of the Children's Aid Societies of the future.
The Children's Protection Act of 1888 let courts make children wards of institutions and charitable organizations, and required local governments to pay the costs of wards. Childrens Aid Societies became semi-public agencies with legal mandates and private Boards of Directors. They were given wide powers including apprehension of children, their "supervision and management" in municipal shelters, and the status and prerogatives of legal guardians. In addition, they were empowered to collect a "reasonable sum" from each municipality for maintaining wards.
Women and Reform
Women played a unique - and significant - role in this reform movement. Women, as the prime family caregiver, often felt the greatest effect from many of the social ills. They saw and felt most immediately and directly the inequities of the social order. At the same time, they had to fight against two contradictory contemporary notions. One was that women were seen as innately different from men and were in some unknown way more moral and less corrupt. On the other hand, women were also viewed as somehow lesser beings. Their primary role, according to the majority view, was in the home, dependent on men, especially during the years of child rearing.
However, even at this early point, this latter view overlooked the reality. Thousands of women worked both inside and outside the home. The legal and social view took a long time to catch up to the new reality. Women were given the right to own property in 1859. However, even then, inside a marriage, it was anything but equal. Even after this law, a wife had to obtain the consent of her husband in order to sell any property. In the event of a marital separation, almost invariably the husband received all the property and the children. 'Reasonable' corporal punishment of wives was even allowed into the middle of the nineteenth century.
However, very gradually the status of women began to improve. An 1872 law passed in Ontario gave women the right to control their own earnings. (Nevertheless, it would take more than another half century before women were legally recognized as 'persons.') Many women suffered serious discrimination in the workplace. Not only were they paid significantly less than their male counterparts, but also often, they were barred from certain fields. For example, in 1890 Clara Brett Martin was rejected for admission to the Law Society of Upper Canada because she was not a 'person.' Dr. Emily Stowe, Canada's first female doctor, faced similar barriers. She had to take her medical training in the United States because no Canadian medical college would accept her.
Stowe and others like her quickly recognized that if meaningful change in their status was to ever come about it would only do so through the political arena. They saw that women had to gain the right to vote. Social and economic improvements would never come about if matters continued to rest exclusively in the hands of men. One of their earliest victories came in 1882 when women in Ontario were allowed to vote on municipal by-laws. However, even that was a small step since the men who passed it declared that only women who were widowed or unmarried could vote. The following year, 1883, the Canadian Women's Suffrage Association was formed to in order to win full voting rights for women. Other suffrage associations sprang up across the country. Almost all of them were modeled on similar organizations in Britain and the United States.
Many critics and criticism stood in their way. There was the argument of tradition, that women had never had the vote, so why give it to them now? A pervasive challenge was the contemporary mindset that saw women as less able, less competent than men. Why, the argument ran, give women the right to vote if they could not 'understand' the issues of the day? Further, many contended that it was 'unladylike' for women to be involved in the muck and mire of political discourse and debate. Would it not, they argued, bring women done from their morally elevated position? Finally, many contended that giving women the right to vote was largely useless since they would simply vote the way their husbands voted.
However, women of the day were not easily dismayed or put off. They persevered against tremendous opposition. Canadian suffragettes tended to be less radical than their British and American sisters. They preferred plays and petitions to demonstrations and arrests. However, it would be a long, hard struggle and in truth, it was really only with women's great contributions during World War One that they were finally given the right to vote.
Other reformers also emerged to try to lessen the ills of contemporary society. Labour reformers attempted to address the needs of the workingman. An important development occurred in 1872 with the repeal of the 1833 British Combination Act, which held that workers combining together was a seditious conspiracy and therefore illegal. After Prime Minister Macdonald's passage of the Trade Union Act, organizations of workers to improve their conditions became legal. Many joined nine-hour leagues to try to reduce the length of the working day.
Another important aspect of the reforming impulse was the humanitarian reform movement. It had a strongly religious origin. Various denominations established relief missions, which housed and fed the poor. The Social Gospel movement did considerable good in improving the lives of the disadvantaged. It began in the Methodist church and then quickly spread to other denominations. Protestant reformers argued strenuously that it was every Christian's duty to help the less fortunate. Settlement houses, notably Toronto's Fred Victor Mission in 1894, helped lead to the formation of the Social Service Council of Canada.
So while the newly emerging urban centers offered progress and some advantages, at the same time, they pointed out, in dramatic fashion, the disparity between the have and the have-nots. Organized groups began to emerge to fight the abuses of the new system - muckrakers, the WCTU, the suffragettes, labour organizations, religious, and humanitarian missions. All saw that the current system, while it brought untold wealth to the few, brought much misery to the masses. They fought tirelessly to rectify that situation.
Women and the Right To Vote
One of the hallmarks of civic equality is the right to vote. Women, comprising half of the population of the country, had been denied this most fundamental right for the first half-century of Canada's existence. Around the turn of the century, old attitudes were beginning to change. Women in Britain and the United States, like their Canadian counterparts, were challenging the political status quo by demanding, often very vocally, the right to vote.
Women were a vital part of the reform movements sweeping Canada around 1900. They championed the cause of the poor, the downtrodden, and the weak. Through the W.C.T.U. (Women's Christian Temperance Union), which had over 9 000 members, they railed against the evils of the "demon rum" and they way in which tore families apart, destroyed moral character, and took food out of the mouths of hungry children. But they also targeted four main areas of concern: child welfare, public health, temperance, and the right to vote (the suffrage).
The suffragette movement was born out of repeated refusals by various governments to grant women the right to vote. Women perceptively noted that the reforms they were demanding in other areas would never come about if decisions continued to be left completely in the hands of women. Winning the right to vote was the key. Women rejected out of hand the arguments against their proposal - that it was "unladylike and that women would merely duplicate the vote of their husbands. Canadian women across the country, such as British Columbia's Helena Gutteridge, Manitoba's Nellie McClung, and Ontario's Dr. Augusta Stowe-Gullen, inspired by their more militant American and British sisters, campaigned tirelessly for the right to vote for women. They employed more moderate tactics such as plays, petitions, and mock parliaments.
However, as much as they worked, the catalyst for their winning the right to vote was World War One. With over 600 000 Canadian men fighting overseas in Europe, women stepped to the fore and played essential roles in the economy. Thirty thousand women worked in newly created munitions factories. Many thousands more replaced men in other skilled and unskilled occupations. Thousands of women took over the family farm. Hundreds of women served overseas. With women playing such vital roles, their demand for recognition and rights took on new urgency.
Prime Minister Borden called an election for December 1917 with the chief issue being conscription. Borden carefully engineered a series of politics tactics to increase the likelihood of victory. The Military Voters Act gave the right to vote to all individuals, men and women, serving overseas. The Wartime Elections Act gave the right to vote to women at home who were married to or had relatives fighting overseas. This marked the first time in Canadian electoral history that women were permitted to vote in a federal election. Borden extended this limited franchise in the following year, and on May 24, 1918, the Canadian Elections Act was passed, giving women the right to vote in federal elections.
Even prior to that federal election, in 1916, some Canadian provinces gave women the right to vote in provincial elections. It was not altogether surprising that it was the three prairie provinces, where women had taken over thousands of farms, that marked the first instance of women, anywhere in Canada, obtaining the right to vote. In fact, it was on January 28, 1916 that Manitoba's newly installed Liberal government acted first in awarding women the right to vote. Manitoba was quickly followed by Saskatchewan and Alberta, and in 1917, Ontario and British Columbia followed suit. A few years later, the three Maritime provinces also gave women the right to vote. It was not until 1940 that the last province, Quebec, came onboard largely because of the spirited campaign by Thérèse Casgrain against the combination of Union Nationale leader Maurice Duplessis and the Roman Catholic Church.
Sidelight: O Canada First Performed Calixa Lavallée and Le chant national  O Canada! Our home and native land! O Canada was first performed on June 24, 1880 at a banquet for Governor General Lord Lorne and his wife Princess Louise, who was Queen Victoria's daughter. It took place in the "Pavillon des Patineurs" in Quebec City as the climax of a"Mosaïque sur des airs populaires canadiens" arranged by Joseph Vézina, a prominent composer and bandmaster. The music was composed by Calixa Lavallée, a concert pianist from Verchères, Québec. Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, later chief justice of Quebec, wrote the French lyrics to accompany the music. O Canada gained steadily in popularity. Many English versions have appeared over the years. In 1908, Montreal lawyer and Judge Robert Stanley Weir wrote the version on which the official English lyrics are based. The official English version includes changes recommended in 1968 by a Special Joint Committee of the Senate and House of Commons. The French lyrics remained unaltered. O Canada was proclaimed Canada's national anthem on July 1, 1980, 100 years after it was first sung. |
| Our Struggle for Rights - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Student Activities | Shared Projects | Quizzes |
| C. Demand For Change →→ 1. Our Struggle for Rights →→ 2. Industry and Labour →→ 3. The Canadian Industrial Boom →→ 4. Gold and Imperial Adventure →→ →→ 5. The Immigration Boom 1895-1914 →→ 6. The New West 1885-1905 →→ D. World War I |
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