1. The Role of Women

2. How Did Women Contribute?
At War:
Many volunteered to work overseas as nurses (bluebirds), ambulance drivers, field hospitals just behind front-line trenches
“We … had 291 operations in ten nights, so that will give you a fair idea of a week’s work.”

3. At Home:
Filled labour shortages
35,000 worked in munitions factories or war related industries
Work conditions poor and dangerous

4. Drove buses, streetcars, banks, police forces, civil service jobs, farming (farmerettes) to bring in harvest…
Groups of women knit socks, rolled bandages, arranged fundraising, sent food parcels, cards, letters, comfort visits to families, …

5. “We decided to become farmerettes when we read in the paper they needed people to come, and there were no men. So this friend and I said that we would go. We volunteered. Masses of young people went out and brought that all in.”

6. “I wanted to do my share, and I joined the Red Cross and helped roll bandages and knit socks. My first ones were big enough to fit an elephant, and after that, I became very proficient – so proficient that I knit a pair of socks a day without trouble.”

7. “You see, everybody felt that had to do something
“You see, everybody felt that had to do something. You just couldn’t sit there. There was a phrase, ‘Doing your bit.’ Well, that was pretty well the keynote feeling all through that First World War. Everybody was extremely patriotic, and everybody wanted to ‘do a bit’. If there’s anything we could do to help, we must do it.”

8. Struggles for Women’s Rights
Since women were contributing so much for the war effort, they wanted more say in making decisions for the country.
SUFFRAGISTS: women who organized themselves to gain the right to vote.

9. Nellie McClung (one of Canada’s great social reformers)
Began her career pre WWI in MB
“Certainly women belong in the home, but not 24 hours a day. They should have exactly the same freedom as men.”

10. When WWI broke out, she was proven right re: status of women.
Women began replacing males in the workforce.

11. She began to organize and share ideas and work towards political equality with men
equal opportunities in medicine and law
right to own property
better working conditions
better public health
better wages

12. Other famous Suffragists:
Dorothy Davis (BC)
Margaret Gordon (ON)
Emily Murphy (AB)
Alice Jamieson (AB)

13. Read p. 117 Spotlight on Nellie McClung

14. Women Get the Provincial Vote!
MB – women first received the provincial vote 1916
SK and AB followed soon after
1917 ON and BC get the vote

15. Women Get the Federal Vote!
December > Wartime Elections Act
granted mothers, sisters, wives, and nurses serving in the armed
forces the right to vote.
by the end of the war, almost all women over 21 could vote federally.

16. 1920 – The Dominion Elections Act gave women the right to run for Parliament (excluding Asians, Aboriginals, and other minority groups)
Chinese and Japanese get the vote in 1947
Aboriginals and status Indians get the vote in 1960

17. HW
Create a timeline that highlights women suffrage as represented in the two charts on page 118.

18. The End 