A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith

A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith
ISBN-10
0774867272
ISBN-13
9780774867276
Category
Political Science
Pages
289
Language
English
Published
2021-11-15
Publisher
UBC Press
Author
Veronica Strong-Boag

Description

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

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