Nellie McClung (1873-1951)

When Nellie McClung was asked if she believed that woman's place was in the home, she said, "Yes I do, and so is father's - but not twenty-four hours a day for either of them. Woman's duty lies not only in rearing of children but also in the world into which those children must some day enter."

Nellie McClung was very young when her family moved from Ontario to Manitoba. Nellie loved writing poetry and reading. By the time she was seventeen, she was in charge of a one-room school house. While teaching school, Nellie wrote novels and stories. She married and had five children. Nellie joined the Temperance Movement, which wanted to ban alcohol so that men would stop drinking. Nellie saw how women and children suffered when men spent their money and time drinking.

Nellie became known as a writer and a public speaker and was known to charm audiences with her personality even though they didn't always agree with what she said. Nellie and the women in the Temperance Movement believed that if women had the right to vote they would quickly do away with alcohol. So Nellie became a suffragette and joined the fight to give women the right to vote.

The government loved to ignore what the suffragettes were saying, so the women tried to win support by being funny. They set up a mock government and invited the public to hear what women would say if men had to ask for the right to vote. Nellie played the premier of Manitoba and used the same words that he had used when she said, "Politics unsettle men, and this will mean unpaid bills, broken furniture, broken vows and divorce. Men's place is on the farm." The suffragettes had people laughing and won public support for their cause.

In 1916, after years of fighting, women won the right to vote in Manitoba and Alberta, where Nellie then lived. "Old Nell" then joined a struggle to make women "persons" in the eye of the law so that they could hold a seat in the Senate. Nellie and the four other women who fought with her won again. Nellie remained active and vocal until she died.

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