The Gilded Ghetto: Women and Political Power in Canada

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and the
editor of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800.

The history of Canadian women’s involvement in formal political life
is confined almost entirely to the 20th century. While women were
granted suffrage at the federal level in 1918, provincial jurisdictions
dribbled out the privilege, beginning with Manitoba in 1916 and ending
with Quebec in 1940. Journalist Sydney Sharpe has produced a highly
readable survey of women’s experience in federal and provincial
politics. Drawing upon the growing body of academic literature on the
topic and extensive interviews, she explores the problems faced by the
female minority in the “testosterone tabernacle” of formal politics,
where, she argues, women are at best tolerated and at worst harassed and
outmaneuvred into remaining behind the scenes.

Writing shortly after Kim Campbell’s career as Canada’s first
female prime minister was cut brutally short at the polls, Sharpe found
female politicians, past and present, eager to tell their story. The
litany of misogyny they reveal makes shocking reading and helps to
explain why women think twice before running for political office.
Fortunately, women can also point to achievements, most notably their
growing numbers at federal and provincial levels. However, Sharpe
argues, only when they reach a critical mass, calculated at 15 to 25
percent, will women be liberated from the “gilded ghetto” that makes
every female politician a man in drag.

Although a few errors have crept into the text—Monique Bégin is
listed as still sitting in the Commons, and John Akenson’s mischievous
claim that 19th-century MP John White was really a woman is taken at
face value—this book remains a useful reference. The tables in the
appendixes are invaluable, providing, among other things, the dates when
suffrage was achieved provincially and federally, the number and success
rate of women who ran in every federal election since 1921, and a list
of all the women who have ever sat in the House of Commons and Senate.
There is also a selected bibliography of further reading, which includes
the most widely consulted academic treatment of the topic: Sylvia
Bashevkin’s Toeing the Lines: Women and Party Politics in English
Canada (1993).