Episode 5 English: The 18th of October is known in Canada as Persons Day

In Canada, the 18th of October is marked as Persons Day in official calendars. It is an important day in the journe of women towards equality. While preparing for the very first anniversary of the founding of my company as a writing and language consultant, I thought about other anniversaries. This is the one I would like to tell you about today.

The Famous Five (left to right): Nellie McClung, Irene Parlby, Emily Murphy, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Muir Edwards.
Quelle: https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/commemorations-celebrations/womens-history-month/persons-day.html

Until 1929, the wording of the Canadian Constitution, stating that all “qualified persons” could be appointed to the Canadian Senate, was interpreted to mean that only men could be considered for the position of senator. To explain: the Senate represents the government of Canada, comparable to the British House of Lords. It is the Supreme Court, the highest court, that appoints the senators for this government.

Women's rights activist Emily Murphy wanted to challenge this interpretation. A little-known legal provision in the Canadian Constitution, according to which any group of five or more people could request an explanatory interpretation of the Constitution, gave her the opportunity to do so.

Murphy found four other activists: Nellie McClung, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, and Irene Parlby. These women, who later became known as “the famous five”, asked whether the Supreme Court could also appoint a woman as a senator (https://www.famous5.ca/the-persons-case; the famous five from Canada should not be confused with Enid Blyton's famous five, from the British children's book series the “five friends”). In the course of the inquiry, the question was simplified in accordance with the wording of the Constitution to ‘does the word “person” in the Constitution also refer to women’. After five weeks of deliberations, the Supreme Court in Ottawa ruled on 14 March 1928 that women were not to be considered “qualified persons” under the Constitution at that time (British North America Act).

And this despite the fact that women were already able to hold public office at that time. For example, biologist Carrie Matilda Derick had been appointed as Canada's first female professor in 1912, sixteen years earlier (11 years before the first German female professor, chemist Margarete von Wrangell). An obviously highly qualified person – but not, in the opinion of the Supreme Court, in terms when it came to the office of senator …

The ruling of the Supreme Court on 14 March 1928 thus granted women fewer rights than men. Among other things, the highest court in Ottawa argued on linguistic grounds that the pronoun “he” had a clear masculine meaning that excluded women. Similar arguments were also heard in German-speaking countries around 1900. For example, in Switzerland in 1887, Emilie Kempin Spyri was denied a licence to practise law; in the Bohemian Parliament, where in 1912 the first majority-elected European female member of parliament, Božena Viková-Kunětická, was prevented from taking office because the text of the law used the masculine form only. As such court rulings established, women were not included in such generically masculine formulations.

Incidentally, Viková-Kunětická would have been the first woman and representative of the people in Central Europe to serve as a member of the Czech Parliament. Just like the Persons Case, her case attracted a great deal of public interest at the time (for Karl Kraus's sharp-tongued comments on the preposterous distortion of linguistic facts during the 1912 Bohemian provincial elections, see Die Fackel, 351, page 65, https://fackel.oeaw.ac.at/ or at some point here). But back to the Canadian Persons Case.

In 1928, Ellen Smith, British Columbia's cabinet minister – the first female minister and speaker of parliament in the British Empire – found moving words to describe the ruling of the Supreme Court in Ottawa:

‘The iron fell on the souls of women in Canada when we heard that it took a man to declare that his mother was not a human being.’

The case went to the next level of jurisdiction in England, where a ruling with implications far beyond the borders of the British Empire was announced in 1929: women were indeed persons and could therefore become senators. Lord Sankey, then Lord High Chancellor, accompanied his ruling on 18 October 1929 with the comment:

‘Keeping women out of all public offices is a remnant of times that were more barbaric than ours!’

96 years ago, the Person Case marked an important milestone in the fight for equality for women in Canada.

The Famous Five: Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, and Irene Parlby. Source: https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/commemorations-celebrations/womens-history-month/persons-day.html

It should be added that despite this triumph, Emily Murphy never became a senator for a variety of reasons.

And the fight for equality was not the same for all Canadian women. While white women in Manitoba were granted the right to vote in 1916, it took until 1960 for First Nations women to be granted the same right.

Incidentally, throughout October, Canada commemorates the fact that women had to fight long and hard for equality with various activities, as this has been Women's History Month since 1992. The following Canadian government website has interesting materials on the topic. I hope all interested parties, learners and teachers alike, enjoy browsing here: https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/commemorations-celebrations/womens-history-month.html

Take care and see you soon!