Constructing Wartime Citizenship: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Voting Rights in Canada, 1914–20

During the First World War the voting rights of women, immigrants, aboriginal peoples, and soldiers were thrown into question. In 1917, Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced two crucial pieces of legislation – the Military Voters Act and the Wartime Elections Act. The former ensured that soldiers serving in the military, regardless of gender or age, could vote, while the latter enfranchised the female relatives of soldiers and disenfranchised citizens of enemy origin who had been naturalized in Canada after 1902. The first provinces to enfranchise women also did so during the war, with most others following suit shortly. Finally, the federal electoral law passed in 1920 enshrined the federal vote for women, as well as for aboriginal peoples who had served during the war.

When these changes have been analyzed by scholars, the emphasis has been placed on the fact that they were designed to ensure a victory for Borden’s Union Government. While I do not dispute this interpretation, this paper attempts to place the debates within the broader history of citizenship in this period. The vote was rarely seen as a natural right, but was bound up in the notion that a citizen had to fulfill certain duties to the state. A citizen’s ability to fulfill those duties depended on their class, gender and race. Did the context of war change or reaffirm this conceptualization of citizenship? Did voting become a less or more important way of being an engage citizen? Did the war change the way in which race and gender shaped discussions of citizenship? How did notions of imperial identity shape the debate, particularly as francophone Quebec was so virulently opposed to the war? To explore these questions, this paper will rely largely on the debates in the House of Commons and newspaper coverage.