Alpha female – An Irishman’s Diary about Irish-Canadian women’s rights activist and jurist Emily Murphy

Canada’s national holiday, July 1st, the anniversary of the dominion’s founding document, the British North America Act of 1867, passes largely unnoticed in Ireland.

That’s a pity and it’s surprising because, apart from Great Britain and the United States, and with the possible exception of Australia, Ireland has closer historical connections with Canada than with any other country.

Irish-Canadian

In recent years these connections have been renewed by the emigration of so many young Irish people but I wonder how many of us could name a single prominent Irish-Canadian, apart, perhaps, from Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the ex-Young Irelander who became one of the fathers of the Canadian Federation? Another Irish-Canadian, Emily Murphy, is almost completely unknown here.

In 1916, Murphy, a member of a prominent legal family, became the first female magistrate in the British Empire and, coincidentally, she heard her first case 100 years ago, on July 1st in Alberta. She was given the position after complaining that women were expelled from a court because the evidence in a case involving prostitutes was not considered suitable for mixed company.

When a lawyer challenged her appointment on the grounds that she was not a “person” as defined by the 1867 Act, the Supreme Court of Alberta found in her favour but it was a limited ruling.

Most Canadian women became eligible to vote in national elections in 1918 but the federal government maintained that they could not become senators. It claimed that the term “qualified persons” in the sections of the Act relating to the senate, when read in conjunction with a common law ruling in 1876 that “women are persons in matters of pains and penalties but not in matters of rights and privileges”, excluded them.

Murphy and four other women led the campaign to challenge this interpretation. In March 1928, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against them but they took their case to the judicial committee of the Imperial Privy Council in London, at the time the highest court of appeal for Canada, and, in October 1929 , it ruled that “for those who ask why the word person should include females, the obvious answer is why should it not?”

Constitution

The Lord Chancellor, John Sankey, made the judg

ment of more general interest when he declared that the Act, the constitution of Canada, was a “living tree” capable of growth and expansion and that its provisions must be given a large and liberal interpretation.

Murphy and her colleagues had won a considerable victory but she was a Conservative, the Liberals were in office and the honour of becoming the first female senator went to a government supporter.

In 2009, she was made an honorary senator posthumously.

Earlier, in 1917, Murphy had convinced the Alberta legislature to pass an Act to give property rights to wives. At the time, a husband could dispose of his possessions as he wished and leave his family destitute. She also campaigned successfully for the banning of cannabis, then a legal drug, in 1923.

Immigration

However, although she is generally honoured for her contribution to Canadian social and political life and, like McGee, has a statue on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, she had other views that would not find approval nowadays. In particular, she believed in the natural superiority of white people and claimed that other races, especially the Chinese, had a disproportionate tendency to abuse drugs. In the early 1920s, influenced by her experience on the bench, she wrote a series of sensational magazine articles about the illicit drug trade over the pen-name Janey Canuck. They were re-published in 1922 in a book

The Black Candle

that contributed to the temporary ending of Chinese immigration.

More generally, she advocated population control because she believed that the need for land to support growing numbers of people caused nations to go to war with one another.

She also took a prominent part in a campaign to sterilise “the insane and feeble-minded” as a condition of their release from mental hospitals “in order to prevent the transmission of their disability to progeny”, and Alberta passed a sexual sterilisation act in 1928 that lingered on the statute book until 1972.

Ferguson

Murphy used the surname of her husband Arthur, an Anglican priest, in her public life but her maiden name was Ferguson. Her father Isaac and his parents had left Cavan when he was 12 years old and her mother Emily Gowan was the daughter of a Wexford man, Ogle Robert Gowan, who had established the Grand Orange Lodge of British North America in Montreal in 1830.

He, in turn, was one of 16 children of John Hunter Gowan of Mount Nebo, Gorey, the notorious magistrate, landlord and yeoman captain who led the “Black Mob” that hunted down rebels in Wexford after the rebellion of 1798.