Where Once Our Mothers Stood We Stand: Women's Suffrage in Newfoundland, 1890-1925

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

The title, and some of the inspiration for this lively feminist history,
comes from the “bothersome” final verse of “Ode to
Newfoundland.” Substitute “fathers” for “mothers” and you’ll
get the idea. Just where, Margot Duley wonders, did our mothers stand?
“What exactly our foremothers thought, aspired to, took joy in,
laboured for, suffered because of, led, or participated in; in short,
the texture of their lives and times, was as faint and diffuse as the
beacon of Cape Spear lighthouse on a foggy day.”

Duley’s sources include newspapers, correspondence, theses, and
interviews with descendants and friends of the suffragists. As the
jacket copy notes, “in winning the support of women who lived in
traditional ‘outport’ communities and making links with activists
like [American] Carrie Chapman Catt ... the leaders of the Newfoundland
women’s movement bravely forged an unusual alliance across religious,
geographic and economic differences.”

Duley covers the movement’s origin and its links with the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union; the advances made by women through their
work during World War I; the revival of the suffrage movement after that
war; and its success in 1925, when suffrage was passed by a new
legislature. By then, Newfoundland and South Africa were the only
British dominions where women remained disenfranchised.

Well-researched and well-written, Where Once Our Mothers Stood is a
solid contribution to women’s history.