Nellie McClung was a speaker much in demand. She spoke
before women's groups, temperance groups, literary groups,
and churches. Articulate and passionate, McClung addressed
family life, women's roles, women's rights, prohibition,
nation-building, and female suffrage. Using her often comic
sense of timing and an uncanny ability to mimic, McClung's
involvement with the Mock Parliament is the most
well-known—and perhaps effective—occasion on which she put
these skills to good use.
In 1914, the Political Equality League scheduled a
women's parliament to parody Manitoba's stand against
women's right to vote. The gathering had a twist: the women
who enacted the parliament refused the vote and the right to
earnings or joint guardianship of children to men, all
rights that were not held by women at the time. The
audience, including Opposition politicians from the Manitoba
legislature, laughed at McClung's first statement: " any
civilization which has produced such noble man as I see here
before me is good enough for me...."
At the end of that Manitoba evening, McClung and her
colleagues had captivated their audience so completely that
the newspaper covered the story on their first pages. The
combination of the Mock Parliament within the wider context
of the suffrage movement culminated in Manitoba women
winning the vote on January 28, 1916, followed by
Saskatchewan on March 14, 1916 and Alberta April 19, 1916. Many
other Canadian provinces soon followed the Western lead. |