Record number of women to sit in BC Legislature
NORTHERN BC- The first woman elected to a provincial legislature in Canada was Louise McKinney in the 1917 Alberta general election, while the first woman elected to the House of Commons was Agnes Macphail, in the 1921 federal election. That was also the year women were allowed to run for office.
“If you think back, the suffragette movement, right? The late 1800s and then into the early 1900s, really the first women that got to vote was in I think it was 1917,” says Dawn Hemingway, a member of the Northern Feminist Institute for Research & Evaluation. “And it was because either they or their partners were in the military. And so they got to have a vote.”