The Famous Five with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackensie King.

In 1928, the government of Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act – a piece of legislation that ultimately led to the sterilization of 2,834 people, the vast majority of whom were women.[i] The practice continued until 1972, when the new Alberta government led by Progressive Conservative Premier Peter Lougheed rescinded the Act and disbanded the Alberta Eugenics Board, which had recommended nearly 5,000 Albertans for the procedure in the course of its fifty-four-year existence.[ii]

In the mid-1990s, a woman named Leilani Muir sued the government of Alberta for her sterilization in 1959. After being sent to a Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives by her own abusive parents, Muir, who was fourteen years old at the time, was designated “mentally deficient” by the Board after scoring poorly on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test, and recommended for sterilization.[iii] Like hundreds of others, Muir never had the opportunity to say no. She had, in fact, been told she was receiving an appendectomy.[iv] Muir’s case brought significant public attention to the history of Alberta’s eugenics program and succeeded in 1996 in forcing the province to pay out $740,780 in damages, plus $230,000 for her legal fees.[v] In the years that followed, 703 others filed for damages, with claims totalling $764 million.[vi]

Before the dust had settled, however, a new controversy arose surrounding the erection of a statue in downtown Calgary of the Famous Five – five Albertan women who in 1927 successfully challenged the British North America Act’s definition of a “person” to include women.[1] These women – Emily Murphy, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Henrietta Edwards – were also instrumental in winning the vote for women in the 1920 federal election,[vii] and have conventionally been credited as leaders in the Canadian suffrage movement. What suddenly made them controversial, however, was their role in the passage of the Sexual Sterilization Act. For many, the monument was intended as a celebration of Alberta’s contribution to the progressive politics of Canadian national identity, but it came at a time when they were simultaneously forced to confront the fascistic and white-supremacist tendencies of the Five. “In casting Emily Murphy in stone today,” wrote editor Peter Menzies in The Calgary Herald, “we make history in the present by excusing her racism in order to prove her feminism.” The statue was nonetheless unveiled in downtown Calgary in October 1999. In a nod to modern ideals of multiculturalism and social progress, a young First Nations woman participated in the ceremony. The plaque installed at the site was also unveiled, proclaiming, “The Persons’ Case was a landmark victory in Canadian constitutional law. Its triumph symbolizes the equality and the importance of the contributions of both women and men as nation-builders.”[viii]

This story speaks in many ways to the difficulties of memorializing first-wave feminism in Canada.[2] The question as to why the early women’s movement in this country was so closely connected to these policies is an interesting one, and must take the concept of nation-building closely into consideration. Beyond a succinct explanation of the historical context of the movement, this paper will argue that the eugenics movement brought a new and unprecedented amount of attention to the female body, which then created an opportunity for women to articulate their vision for their own role in the dual project of Canadian nation-building and British empire-building. That their willing participation in this project was so well-received at the time is illustrative of the social milieu which defined them and their movement.

In viewing this history through the lens of nation-building, it becomes doubtful that the movement would have made such tremendous strides forward were it not for the brand of eugenicist feminism they espoused. Indeed, the strongest proponents of said feminism went the furthest of any of their peers within the mainstream political establishment.

The implementation of the Act was stringent and broad. Rates of sterilization remained quite high throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, with the Board sterilizing between 6 and 9 people per 100,000 Albertans.[3] Amendments to the Act in 1937 and 1942 broadened the mandate of the Board by eliminating the legal necessity of consent, and by expanding the definition of mental deficiency.[ix] Throughout the lifespan of the Act, youth, women, the poor, Aboriginals and people of colour were targeted for sterilization in disproportionately high numbers.[x] Aboriginal people in particular were targeted by the policy: six percent of all those who came before the Board were Aboriginal, while they comprised only about 3 percent of the total population of the province.[xi] In the final years of the Board’s existence this imbalance became wildly enhanced, with 25 percent of those sterilized being Indian or Métis.[xii] And although the practice of sterilization had been discredited among professional researchers by the 1940s, there was no coherent and vocal opposition to the practice, and the Board continued to mandate sterilizations right up until its end in 1972.[4][xiii] (A law virtually identical to the SSA was also passed in British Columbia in 1933 and eventually abandoned in 1979. Virtually all of the B.C. Eugenics Board’s documents have been lost or destroyed,[xiv] but it is estimated that the total number of sterilizations that took place there was close to 10 percent of those conducted in Alberta.[xv])

The eugenics movement was an international phenomenon beginning in the late nineteenth century. From Germany to California, the white world was self-consciously entering a new phase of the modern nation-state. The European colonization of virtually the entire globe, the attendant growth of state apparatuses, the fear of war, and the ascension of scientific and medical thought were all central to the construction of eugenic ideology. In Canada, Australia and the United States, the settlement of frontier hinterlands during this time period further provoked the question of national definition, leading to a social milieu that was amenable to the promotion of the quintessential nation-building family.

The term eugenics, meaning “good breeding,” was first introduced in an 1883 book called Inquiry into Human Faculty and its Development by the British anthropologist and statistician Frances Galton.[xvi] Its impact on the western zeitgeist was broad and immediate. It cohered with the writings of intellectuals like Herbert Spencer and others who had begun applying Darwinian thought to social problems; it was in some ways bolstered by the growing acceptance of the Mendelian understanding of genetics; it responded to the anxieties provoked by the works of Thomas Malthus; and, finally, it seemed to provide a straightforward policy proposal for the problems of crime, delinquency, prostitution, addiction, mental illness, and virtually any other social ill plaguing the growing urban centres of the Victorian empire.

Eugenics was embraced in the United States with an astounding zeal. As John  Radford notes, American eugenicists were extremely rigorous in the development of standardized medical terminology, the introduction of intelligence testing, pedigree studies, and the implementation of involuntary sterilization programs.[xvii] As in Canada, these programs were embraced in the U.S. by early white feminists fighting for birth control,[5] by wealthy industrialists such as the Kelloggs and Carnegies, and, of course, by several state governments.[xviii] Compounding pre-existing prejudices surrounding race, class, and mental health, the eugenics movement in the U.S. was ultimately responsible for the forced sterilization of over 60,000 people by the early 1960s.[xix] [6] Data gathered by some American social scientists indicated that African Americans had a lower life expectancy, which reinforced the social Darwinian notion of “the gradual decline and extinction of weaker and inferior types of individuals,”[xx] whilst simultaneously stoking fears about miscegenation and enhancing whites’ obsession with  racial purity. Such notions would also come to the fore in Canada, especially through the writing of Emily Murphy.

Ultimately then, eugenics fit snugly into the growing trends of ethno-nationalism that rose very explicitly to dominate public discourse at this time, as identified by Eric Hobsbawm, who notes that “ethnicity and language became the central, increasingly decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood.”[xxi] In Britain, as in North America, it appealed to a vast swathe of the political spectrum, “from Tory to Fabian socialist.”[xxii] It introduced a new technology of pseudo-science by popularizing terms like “idiot”, “imbecile,” and “moron”[xxiii] – labels that bore greater medical connotations than they do today. “Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal,” wrote the leading British eugenicist H.H. Goddard,[xxiv] who had conducted a study linking “mental deficiency with hereditary tendencies toward criminality.”[xxv] As Jana Grekul notes, “It became an accepted belief that mental deficiency and immorality were synonymous.”[xxvi] Britain’s Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded in 1904 led to the Mental Deficiency Act, and further public inquiries in 1929 and 1934 continued to sensationalize the problem of feeblemindedness. (The 1934 inquiry, for instance, raised alarm bells by claiming that 250,000 “defectives” were still “at large”.[xxvii]) These endeavours led primarily to the establishment of segregationist policies embodied by asylums, as well as a promotion of “voluntary” sterilization – measures that still paled in comparison to their more violent American counterparts.[xxviii]

Within this context of rising eugenicist ideology, the Boer War in the early years of the twentieth century served to heighten concerns for the strength and integrity of the British nation. Cecily Devereux points to the anxieties raised by the “widely noted failure of many recruits to meet military standards”[xxix] – standards that in many ways epitomized eugenicist ideals and were consolidated by the increasingly ubiquitous iconography of the young male soldier that would later dominate in the war years. Although some professional eugenicists pointed to the dysgenic nature of war, (in that it kills off the nation’s best stock of young men,) the swell of patriotism tended to win out. In her 1945 memoir, Nellie McClung writes,

The South African war assumed a very serious aspect when our young men were recruited, and went. To us, there seemed no good reason for fighting the Boers, who had worked their land and minded their own business, people much like ourselves… In Canada, the tide of patriotism rose. Everyone was singing a new song called “The Soldiers of the Queen,” which fanned the flame of Imperialism, and Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” made a soaring climax of many an address. It gave the whole business of war the high purpose of a Crusade and threw a glamour around the fighting man.[xxx]

McClung then quotes the first two couplets of the poem: “Take up the White Man’s burden,/Send forth the best you breed,/Go bind your men to exile/To serve your Captive’s need.”[xxxi] It is ironic that McClung takes this passively critical approach to the war, given that her own writings and beliefs perfectly fit the mould of what Antoinette Burton would later call “The White Woman’s Burden,” whereby racial prejudice underpins a progressive vision of colonialism.[xxxii]

The western provinces proved extremely fertile ground for this nationalistic rhetoric. White settlement was an extremely recent development in the prairies. Indeed, from 1686, it was illegal for white women to even venture into the terrain then known as Rupert’s Land, and there is no evidence that that rule was ever contravened until it was abandoned around the beginning of the nineteenth century.[xxxiii] Prairie folk – goaded by publications such as Emily Murphy’s “What is a Canadian?”[xxxiv] – felt the need to consolidate the image of the type of society they were building on the frontier. The image that emerged was one of consummate modernist discipline and austerity, and it had far-reaching effects on policy. Radford notes that the construction of asylums during this period “were as much eugenically inspired as were programs of involuntary sterilization.”[xxxv] In Alberta, the asylum system was established at a fairly significant scale with the Provincial Training Schools for Mental Defectives, (which Muir had experienced,) and the connections between that system and the Alberta Eugenics Board were extremely close.[xxxvi] So too with the establishment of the residential schools: the Sexual Sterilization Act had unique ramifications for First Nations children trapped in that system as well, as they could be “sterilized upon the approval of the school principal,” without too much fuss about red tape.[xxxvii] Likewise, the temperance movement, which was spearheaded by the women in the Famous Five and other members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, tapped into this narrative of discipline and purity. “Indeed,” writes Devereux, “both campaigns are readily comprehensible as eugenic measures: they are undertaken to ‘conserve the race’ by eliminating ‘poisons’ that diminish the strength of the national community.”[xxxviii]

In Ontario, this culture of settler nation-building was best exemplified by another iconic professional woman of the times: Helen MacMurchy, who in 1915 became Ontario’s Inspector of the Feeble-minded and was a staunch proponent of forced sterilization. (“Insane people,” she proclaimed, “are not entitled to progeny.”[xxxix]) MacMurchy’s work was not simply limited to the question of mental health and degeneracy, however. Like Murphy and McClung, her writings conveyed a holistic image of what modern Canadian society should look like. Beyond her eugenicist works like “The Almosts: A Study of the Feeble-minded,” she also published tracts and pamphlets such as “Beginning a Home in Canada”, “The Canadian Mother’s Book”, “Canadians Need Milk”, “How to Take Care of Household Waste”, “How to Take Care of the Baby”, “How to manage housework in Canada”, “How to take care of the children”, “How to take care of the father and family,” among many others. The brand of feminism espoused by MacMurchy, Murphy and McClung is best understood, then, as an explicit nation-building project encompassing cultural propaganda that did not leave much space for social diversity.

By the 1920s, McClung was already a high-profile member of provincial and indeed federal society. Her 1915 treatise on women’s rights “In Times Like These” had made a significant contribution to the suffrage discourse,[7] and she had become a widely read writer of fiction – a status she would maintain until her death.[xl] And she had proved herself a shrewd and charismatic activist in the fight for suffrage throughout the war years. In 1914, for instance, she staged a mock parliamentary session in which a group of female legislators assembled in downtown Winnipeg to hum and haw about whether they ought to extend the vote to men. The press and the public were overwhelmingly impressed.[xli] Her involvement with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had also enhanced her public profile as a smart, wholesome and down-home protector of Canadian values. She also served as a member of the Alberta Legislative Assembly from 1921 to 1926.[8]

Some of her writings on pregnancy and childrearing were indeed very progressive, and in many ways anticipated second-wave norms of birth control. A favourite maxim of hers was “every child a wanted child; every mother a willing mother.”[xlii]

Progressive though these writings may have been, McClung’s writings consistently espoused a politics that, in consolidating the image of the modern Canadian mother, reinforced traditional gender roles and promoted a white-supremacist ideology. This passage, for instance from “In Times Like These” encapsulates her attitudes on the role of women in society: “The woman movement, which has been scoffed and jeered at and misunderstood most of all by the people whom it is destined to help, is a spiritual revival of the best instincts of womanhood – the instinct to serve and save the race.”[xliii]

These same rhetorical strategies – designated “maternal feminism” by historian Jennifer Henderson[9] – can be found throughout the writings of Murphy as well, which were more explicitly racist than McClung’s and even more obsessed with the protection and cultivation of the young white Canadian woman. Writing under the pen name of Janey Canuck, (though every one knew the author’s true identity,[xliv]) Murphy assumed the mantle of a sort of national matron-saint, thus positioning herself well in defining acceptable and unacceptable cultural identities. Nikolas Rose writes that the new mentality of rule that pervaded the early twentieth century in Canada “empowered a certain type of individual to set out norms of conduct, creating at the same time a new ethos of authority. …and it was here that the literary figure of Janey Canuck came into play, embodying the expertise of the ‘normal’ that I call maternal authority.”[xlv] Her professional as well as literary persona had strong parallels to the careers of McClung and MacMurchy. Appointed in 1916 as the first ever woman magistrate in the British Empire, she presided over a Calgary court for “fallen women,” who were mostly young and poor, and had been led into such criminal circumstances as prostitution and pre-marital pregnancy.[xlvi]

Murphy also became known for her book “The Black Candle,” an exposé on the drug trade in Canada which was published serially in five articles in Maclean’s Magazine in 1920,[xlvii] and here, her racist attitudes toward non-whites came into sharp relief: “Chinamen, Negroes and Jews thrive by reasons of the (drug) traffic,” she wrote. “One becomes especially disquieted – almost terrified – in the face of these things, for it sometimes seems as if the white race lacks both the physical and moral stamina to protect itself, and that maybe the black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy.”[xlviii] Much of her work on the drug trade centred around the “amazing phenomenon of an educated gentlewoman, reared in a refined atmosphere, consorting with the lowest classes of yellow and black men.”[xlix] The “Chinaman” took on an especially vilified image in her writings, in which she depicted the danger of young white woman “putting herself in the way [of temptation] by visiting Chinese chop-suey houses, or other places of business.”[l] Weaving an abstract narrative of sexual danger, which seemed especially directed at Vancouver’s Shanghai Alley, she presented the image of the “bland smiling Oriental” administering opium and other intoxicants to the girl, so that he may perform his “evil deed.”[li] Thus the mandate for a policy of racially targeted sterilization was spelled out perhaps most explicitly by Murphy, who depicted delinquent and retarded people of colour as a liability to the nation-state, if not a threat to its integrity. “Seventy percent of the patients in our mental hospitals were born outside Canada,” she erroneously claimed at one time.[lii] “It is a matter of humanity. Insane people are not entitled to progeny.”[liii]

These racist and ableist fears gained traction throughout the political establishment. In the 1920s, the provincial governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta together established the Bureau of Social Research – a government think-tank with an essentially eugenicist and anti-crime mandate. In one of its first publications, the Bureau warned Canadians, “Mental defectives are here in hundreds, they are multiplying rapidly, more are coming in every ship load of immigrants.”[liv] In 1924, Margaret Gunn, the president of the United Farm Women promoted a policy of “racial betterment through the weeding out of undesirable strains” in a public address.[10] [lv] Both the major parties, the United Farmers of Alberta and the Social Credit Party, supported eugenics.[lvi] Increasing numbers of academics were following suit,[lvii] including at least two at McGill University.[11] Even Tommy Douglas, probably the most celebrated Canadian progressive of the time, was a staunch supporter of eugenics. In his M.A. thesis, Douglas had identified the “subnormal family” as “the most appalling of all family problems,” and asserted that the burden these families represented to society included a three-fold increase in the rate of sexually-transmitted diseases, and a lowering of community-wide intellectual and moral standards.[lviii]

The identification of subnormal people and immigrants with heightened and dangerous sexual activity was further promoted by sensational reports that claimed to prove that they proliferate at a higher rate than normal, white people.[lix] One small-town Alberta newspaper claimed in a 1928 editorial, “It is an established fact, we believe, that nitwits, both male and female, are uncannily gifted with reproductive power and the sum total of this is more nitwits.”[lx]

The propagandized fears that laid the foundation for the widespread support for the Sexual Sterilization Act were thus part of a totalizing cultural phenomenon that cannot be divorced from the active and deliberative nature of the Canadian national project around the turn of the century. The extent of participation in the project of eugenics by progressives was perhaps even greater than those who we today would be inclined to identify as the conservative or right-wing elements of the political landscape, which ultimately meant that there was no vocal or coherent opposition to the policy.

Indeed, the heightened focus on the female body as the locus of the eugenicist project allowed first wave feminists presented an opportunity for political participation that women had not had until that point. In Devereux’s words, it enabled them to exercise a “gynocentric agency” that was amenable to their own political interests.[lxi] Sensational narratives of sexual danger and fears of the white woman’s “miscegenating womb”[lxii] were part and parcel of this trend. So too was the nationalistic reconceptualization of the white woman, who Murphy deemed “the basic material of the race, [who] must not be permitted to decay from any cause whatever.”[lxiii] The maternal feminism identified by Devereux can thus be seen as exploiting the new focus on the white woman for political gain at the expense of others. Writes Devereux:

First-wave feminism is not something that occurred as a reaction to imperialism but within it; white women cannot occupy the position of ‘the colonized’ because their work – suffrage, missionary, social purity activist – was crucial to imperial colonization. White women…achieved ‘advancement’ through the construction of categories of subordinate and needy alterity.[lxiv]

In this sense, an open question that begs to be theoretically resolved is as to whether first wave feminism should be seen as an imperial technology, or rather as a function or by-product of imperialism. Either answer would probably be too glib, however. The former perspective would run the risk of overlooking the true exclusion from the political and public sphere that white women experienced in Canada in the early twentieth century, while the latter would potentially elide the agency of women like Murphy and McClung in actively and enthusiastically contributing to the racist, classist, and ableist, aspects of the Canadian nation-building project.