Among the pantheon of leaders who crashed the doors and shattered the glass ceiling that held women back from the professions and business, few have done as much crashing and shattering as Clara Brett Martin (1874-1923) of Toronto. A member of a prominent Anglican-Irish family, Martin was an iconoclast even as a teenager. At […]
Tag: Misogyny
Bloomers ignite an apoplectic fit of misogyny
Women who wore trousers in the mid-nineteenth century were known as Bloomers, after Amelia Jenks Bloomer, U.S. campaigner for temperance and women’s rights. The impending arrival of Mrs. Bloomer in Toronto caused the Daily Leader to suffer this apoplectic fit of misogyny, September 12, 1853. Bloomerism, women’s rights ism! and the Maine Law ism […]
When children drank whisky at breakfast
Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North America’s Indians by giving them firewater—whisky, brandy, rum, port, sherry—in exchange for furs. Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their […]
Woman preacher silenced
A daring female preacher in Nova Scotia was “completely extinguished,” the Halifax Novascotian reported, April 3, 1828 in the following item. We received by the Mail from Miramichi, a printed discourse, delivered at Newcastle, by a Mr. Coony, from the text “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” It was delivered for the purpose of […]