‘The path through the forest’
Women Who Woke Up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada
by Karin Wells
Toronto: Second Story Press, 2025
$24.95 / 978177264191
Reviewed by Janet Pollock Millar
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Karin Wells’ background as a lawyer, as well as an award-winning documentary film maker and author, serves her well in her most recent book. Women Who Woke Up the Law provides the more-than-century-long backstory of ten different areas of Canadian law, including divorce, property rights, sexual assault, maternity benefits, abortion rights, intimate partner violence, racial discrimination, and rights specific to Indigenous women. One of the book’s most important implications is that women’s rights are hard won, by women themselves, rather than awarded by a benevolent government or other entity. The stories in the book also show how although an individual woman might have failed in her quest for a legal remedy, she laid a path for others to build on.
Canadian women’s property rights have had a long evolution. “Dower” existed in English common law to protect widows but was abolished in western Canada. However, although dower ensured that a widow had an interest in her husband’s property upon his death, it still conceived of the family home as belonging to the husband. Resistance to women’s property rights was strong, for both social and economic ‘reasons.’ The words of the Canadian Federal Minister of the Interior, Frank Oliver, establish the link between access to property and women’s independence: “To ‘admit women into the opportunities of the land grant would be to make them more independent of marriage than ever.’” Rural Alberta women pressed for married women’s property rights in the early 20th century; the provincial government passed the Dower Act in 1917, but “[c]ourts were not enthusiastic when it came to enforc[ement].” In response to the case of Lela O’Leary in the early 1920s, although lawyers in the Attorney General’s department admitted that the law did not treat men and women equally, they declared “any move toward ‘community property’ would be ‘too costly, too radical, inconvenient, unjustifiable as well as, generally too disruptive to the economy and therefore bad for business.” In what is an all-too-common move, human rights were seen as optional, subservient to business interests.
Decades later, Irene Florence Murdoch was single-minded in her quest for her share of their ranch upon her separation from her abusive husband, even though she was advised to divorce her husband and sue for support payments instead. Regarding the 1973 Supreme Court decision that denied Murdoch’s request, Wells comments, “[h]er work, and for that matter the work of any ‘housewife,’ was merely what a wife owed her husband by virtue of being married. It did nothing to earn her a share in ‘her husband’s’ property.” However, a dissenting judgment captured the attention of the media. Thanks to the women’s movement, the zeitgeist was right. Finally, by 1978 “nine provinces had passed legislation that guaranteed, with some exceptions, a fifty-fifty split of all assets acquired during a marriage.”
At the same time as the author recognizes the accomplishments of the figures in the stories, she acknowledges their faults. Emily Ferguson Murphy was a privileged white woman who became the British Empire’s first female magistrate in 1916. She was also one of the “Famous Five” women who had women legally recognized as ‘persons.’ However, Murphy both supported eugenics and expressed classist attitudes about the women who appeared in her court. She also made blatantly racist statements, “[a]ll of which,” Wells writes, “makes Emily Murphy a complicated and dubious feminist icon.”
Male allies are similarly presented in all their contradictions. Thanks to the groundwork laid by another woman, Eliza Campbell, Eleanora Tudor-Hart became the “first woman in Canada to successfully sue her husband for divorce on the grounds of adultery alone,” in 1888—a right previously granted only to men. At that time, divorces were granted through Senate vote. In response to Tudor-Hart’s divorce petition, Senator James Gowan wrote of the message the Senate would send women if they refused to pass the bill:
What but saying to a virtuous woman: ‘You are to remain to your life’s end under the dominion of a profligate [sic] man who could only desire to retain his hold for unworthy purposes’…. Under the dominion of a shamless [sic] man, who uncovered his evil doings to his wife and flaunted his impurities in her face! Is the maintenance of a decent society, the preservation of purity in family relations a matter of slight concern….Will the Senate of Canada affirm by its decision that adultery may be practiced with impunity by husband and father in our Christian community, in the midst of our Christian homes?
Although Gowan clearly showed sympathy for the women in such circumstances, Wells writes that “it was widely known that Gowan had had an affair with his cousin’s wife.” Wells’ willingness to include the less-than-honourable characteristics of her subjects strengthens the credibility of the book.
Wells devotes a chapter each to the intersectional struggles of Black women and Indigenous women. As a result of the Indian Act, an Indigenous woman, along with her children, lost her Status when she married a non-Indigenous man. In contrast, Indigenous men kept their Status regardless of whom they married; in fact, if they married a non-Indigenous woman, she (and their children) acquired Status. Mary Two-Axe Earley, a Mohawk woman, began the fight in 1967, when she and thirty other women presented a brief in Ottawa. Later, two Indigenous women, Yvonne Bedard and Jeannette Corbiere, fought their cases independently, not meeting for decades. Both were successful, thanks to rulings that the Canadian Bill of Rights superseded the Indian Act. However, these judgments were appealed to the Supreme Court in 1973. Additionally, many male leaders of Indigenous groups opposed the women’s actions, fearing that overriding the Indian Act threatened Indigenous self-determination. The women ultimately lost their cases. However, with the advent of the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the early 1980s, the government checked all legislation for compliance, and with the passing of Bill C-31, 117,000 Indigenous women were reinstated and their children acquired Status. Another woman, Sharon McIvor, successfully challenged the government of Canada at the Supreme Court level in 2006 so that she could pass her Status on to her grandchildren, and two more women, Lillian Dyck and Dr. Lynn Gehl, also won court cases. The Famous Six, as they became known, were honoured by the Senate in 2018.
The book is also engaging in its consideration of legal strategy employed in creative attempts to deal with unjust law. Lawyer Ernest Shymka attempted to break new legal ground when he argued that the labour of his client Florence Murdoch entitled her to an interest in the ranch that was in her husband’s name only. In the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, activists pushed for the inclusion of the phrase “the equal benefit of law,” which came directly from the Stella Bliss case concerning unemployment insurance benefits. Wells writes that “[a]t the time, it was the strongest guarantee of equality to be found in any modern democracy in the world.” Although the provinces subsequently succeeded in implementing a notwithstanding clause, feminists “advocated for a notwithstanding clause of their own, intended to maintain equality: section 28 specified that the rights of the Charter would be enjoyed equally by men and women notwithstanding other Charter provisions.”
Wells’ decision to use a narrative structure for the book dodges the hazard of potentially dry legal subject matter. Within each chapter, narratives featuring different characters are threaded together in a way that shows their significance for each other. Additionally, the individuals involved are described in imaginative detail, such as, “[w]hen Robert looked at his bride, he saw a modest, pious—he wanted pious—young woman who he never doubted would be a good and obedient wife.” However, although the somewhat speculative nature of this kind of description enlivens the prose, I found myself at times distracted by wondering how the author could know some of these details, even considering that she spoke to people connected with the individuals she describes.
Injustice can be overwhelming, especially that encoded in law. A key takeaway of the book is that although one person might not be able to change things completely on their own, they can be a necessary catalyst—even though they might not benefit personally from their efforts. This is where thinking collectively can inspire effort and courage. As Wells writes in the epilogue,
[i]t is the stories, the “this-is-how-it-started” stories, the tenacity and credibility of the women and men telling the stories, that lead to the heavy thinking, the new thinking, and the changes. Seldom is there a happily ever after for the person who cut the path through the forest. It’s those who come next who benefit.
Women Who Woke Up the Law reminds us that ordinary people can and do make a difference in the face of enormous odds.
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Janet Pollock Millar is a writer, editor, and educator living on lək̓ʷəŋən territory in Victoria, British Columbia. She writes fiction, poetry, essays, creative non-fiction, and book reviews. Exploring topics such as the natural world, grief and loss, relationships, and human rights, Janet writes to render the world as it is and to nudge it toward what it could be. Her work has appeared in publications including Herizons, Prairie Fire, The Fiddlehead, Pangyrus, and The Malahat Review. Janet works in the Writing Centre at Camosun College, and she is pursuing an MFA in Writing at the University of Victoria.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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