Agnes Macphail: Champion of the Underdog

Brenda Reed is a public services librarian in the Education Library at
Queen’s University.

Motivated by her desire to improve the conditions of farmers in Ontario,
Agnes Macphail left her job as a teacher to run for the United Farmers
of Ontario in the 1921 federal election. Her win took her to the House
of Commons as the first woman elected to Canada’s Parliament. This
informative account of her life chronicles both the personal and
professional aspects of it.

Rachel Wyatt presents Macphail as a “champion of the underdog” who
fought hard on behalf of farmers, social programs, prison reform, and
the constituents of her Ontario South-East Grey riding. Wyatt provides
details of Macphail’s political life, noting the obstacles she
encountered as the first woman to sit in the House of Commons, and looks
at the momentous events that occurred in Macphail’s lifetime—the
Depression, World War II, and the postwar boom—in terms of the effect
they had on her life. As one of the founders and leaders of the
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, she worked tirelessly for the
underprivileged.

High-school students will find this biography not only inspirational,
but also highly readable and very useful, since it ties in with the past
Canadian high-school history curriculum that examines the situation of
women in the early part of the 20th century, Canadian political history,
and prison reform.

Though the book includes no list of suggested further reading, it does
provide a helpful chronology that offers a comparison between
“Macphail and Her Times” and “Canada and the World.”
Recommended.