She Won the Vote for WomenShe Won the Vote for Women

Lillian Beynon Thomas' suffragist campaign succeeded where all others had failed. This full-length biography fills an important gap in the history of the 'votes for women' movement, a campaign which saw Manitoba become the earliest federal or provincial Canadian jurisdiction to grant women the franchise. Lillian's "Home Loving Hearts" page in the Prairie Farmer newspaper, a weekly column in which she advocated for a wide variety of women's rights, made her one of the most popular, pioneering women's page journalists on the prairie. During this time, she founded the rural Homemakers' Clubs affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan. To achieve the franchise, she eschewed the then traditional tools of back-room, partisan party politics by instead developing a broadly-based, grass-roots movement which stands as a forerunner of modern political campaign techniques. Facing hostile opposition to her pacifist views in Winnipeg during World War One, she and her husband went into voluntary exile in New York City where she raised money through a newspaper column describing the plight of destitute sailors in that metropolis. Returning home, she became a leading Canadian short-story writer, playwright, and public advocate for a Canadian cultural identity, distinct from that of Britain or America. This is the story of how a young girl came with her settler family to a desolate part of the hardscrabble prairie and who, despite these humble origins, succeeded in engineering a fundamental Canadian democratic reform and championing the emerging Canadian cultural nationalism.