This long-overdue account of the suffrage campaigns in the first region to grant women the vote in Canada shatters cherished myths about how the West was won.

Many of Canada’s most famous suffragists – from Nellie McClung and Cora Hind to Emily Murphy and Henrietta Muir Edwards – lived and campaigned in the Prairie provinces, the region that led the way in granting women the right to vote and hold office.

In Ours by Every Law of Right and Justice, award-winning author Sarah Carter challenges the myth that grateful male legislators simply handed western settler women the vote in recognition that they were equal partners in the pioneering process. Suffragists worked long and hard to overcome obstacles, persuade doubters, and build allies. But their work also had a dark side. Even as settler suffragists pressured legislatures to grant their sisters the vote, they often approved of that same right being denied to “foreigners” and Indigenous men and women.

By situating the suffragists’ struggle in the colonial history of Prairie Canada, this powerful and passionate book shows that the right to vote meant different things to different people – political rights and emancipation for some, domination and democracy denied for others.

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Carter’s book is undoubtedly required reading not only for students of suffrage history, Prairie history and Canadian history more generally but also for scholars interested in the empirical investigation of that history.

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"Sarah Carter’s decades-long expertise in Prairie history ensures that the objective of viewing women’s suffrage in both the wider socio-political context and the local environmental setting are handled with aplomb."

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With clarity, sensitivity and deftness, Carter shows that these activists’ accomplishments, and the oppression they furthered, were equally real… she sets a useful template for historians to examine and understand other similarly complex events and figures in Canadian history.