she won the vote for women: the life and times of lillian beynon thomas

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.

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. 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.

Robert Hawkins is the past President & Vice-Chancellor of the University of Regina and, until 2023, he was a law professor in its Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. Bob grew up in Western Manitoba and is a graduate of St. John’s College, University of Manitoba, which has awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. Bob has published extensively in leading Canadian Law Journals on constitutional and administrative law, and on the legal history of the Prairie region, including Lillian Benyon Thomas’ role in the suffrage movement.