A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. Ralph’s 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a historian specializing in the history of Canadian women and children. She is a professor emerita in the Social Justice Institute and the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia and an adjunct professor in history and gender studies at the University of Victoria. She is the general editor of the seven-volume series Women's Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy. She is the author of many publications and the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canada, Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, the Raymond Klibansky Prize, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond and Golden Jubilee Medals, the Canada Prize in the Social Sciences, the Riley Fellowship in History, the James R. Mallory Lectureship, and a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa (University of Guelph, 2018). In 2012, the Royal Society of Canada awarded her the J.B. Tyrrell Historical medal for “outstanding work in the history of Canada.” In July 2018, she was appointed to the Order of Canada.

Not quite a woman for her times, let alone ours, Smith seemed destined to disappear. Until, that is, Strong-Boag took on the task, uncovering both the good and the bad, using Smith as a lens onto gender relations and gender politics, British Columbia and Ottawa, and electoral politics and the power of connection. The result is a refreshingly complex picture of early twentieth-century Canada and of the crooked path to power.