INTERVIEW WITH RUTH LATTA
about her new novel,
Votes, Love and War
coming out in the fall of 2019 from Baico Publishing, Ottawa.
Q: Your title
Votes, Love and War suggests that the novel is about the women’s suffrage movement. Is that so?
A: Yes, specifically about the women’s suffrage campaign in Manitoba in the early 20th century. Two of my main characters, Lillian Beynon Thomas and Francis Marion Beynon, were active in the movement, the Political Equality League; indeed, Lillian Beynon Thomas was one of its founders. These two sisters, who came from farm backgrounds, started out as teachers and subsequently became journalists and editors of women’s pages. Letters from readers leading hard lives on pioneer farms helped to inspire the Beynon sisters to work for the enfranchisement of women. Thanks to the Beynons and many other activists, Manitoba was the first province to pass legislation giving women the right to vote - in January 1916.
Q: Nellie McClung is the name that first springs to mind when the women’s suffrage movement in Canada is mentioned. Did the Beynon sisters know her?
A: Yes. Nellie and Lillian used to go on speaking engagements together. In my view, the Beynon sisters are the unsung heroines of the Manitoba women’s suffrage movement. Nellie McClung was nationally famous for her novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny, when she moved to Winnipeg and got involved in the Political Equality League, and her fame was an asset to the suffrage movement. In 1917 there was a split in the League, with the Beynon sisters and Nellie McClung on opposite sides of an issue, a situation I present in my novel.
Q: How do “love and war” come into the story?
A: The first person narrator in my novel is a fictional girl named Charlotte, eighteen years old when the story opens. Charlotte moves to Winnipeg to find work and recover from a broken heart, and gets to know the Beynon sisters. When World War I, the “Great War”, breaks out in the summer of 1914, her boyfriend enlists and is sent overseas. Two other young men who love her also go to war in the years that follow.
The Great War took the lives of many young Canadian men, and took a tremendous toll worldwide. It also forced women’s suffrage and other progressive movements onto the back burner. In Canada it split the western women’s movement. By 1916-1917, due to the great death toll and the drying up of volunteer enlistments, the British government decided that Britain and her dominions should institute compulsory military service. In Canada, the federal election of 1917 was fought on that issue. Western Canadian farmers, a group that included many immigrants from the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, needed their sons to work on the land, so conscription was not popular among them.
To win the election and bring in conscription, the government of Sir Robert Borden enfranchised some but not all Canadian women. His Wartime Elections Act included women who had husbands, fathers and sons fighting overseas, excluded “enemy alien” naturalized since 1902, unless they had relatives serving in the armed forces. This act excluded a lot of women in the western provinces where they had won the right to vote. The Borden administration’s intention was to enfranchise the women most likely to vote for conscription and leave out those who might not.
This issue split the women’s suffrage movement in Manitoba. Nellie McClung, who had previously been a champion of newcomers to Canada, supported the Wartime Elections Act. The Beynons thought it was undemocratic, and did not.
Q: Why did you choose to present the story through a fictional character?
A: Rather than presenting the novel from the point-of-view of the Beynon sisters, I decided to create the fictional Charlotte to lead readers along with her, hand in hand, as she learns about the women’s suffrage movement and the issues of the day.
My cast of female characters includes several farm women, a housemaid, a housekeeper, some teachers and a department store clerk as well as several homemakers. I wanted to show a variety of women’s lives in addition to journalists like the Beynon sisters. I also refer to women factor workers who were starting to organize during this period.
Q: What sources did you consult in researching
Votes, Love and War?
A: I read Francis Marion Beynon’s “Country Homemaker” pages in the
Grain Growers’ Guide, from 1913 to 1917, and several of Lillian Beynon Thomas’s articles in the
Manitoba Free Press. I also read many scholarly articles about the Manitoba women’s suffrage movement, and about Francis Marion Beynon as an advocate of peace during the Great War. As well, I read her semi-autobiographical novel,
Aleta Dey, first published in 1919.
The research I’d done for my novel,
Grace and the Secret Vault (Ottawa, Baico, 2017) was relevant to
Votes, Love and War, so I applied it. I also read a great many books about the era, including Tim Cook’s war histories and Eslet Wynne Jones’s account of the 1918-1919 flu epidemic in Winnipeg.
Q: Why did you write
Votes, Love and War?
A: I wanted to show in an engaging, entertaining historically accurate way the Beynon sisters’ contribution to women’s rights in Canada. I also wanted to show the impact of the First World War on women at home in Canada. To my knowledge, the only other Canadian novel about “home front” women’s experiences of the Great War is
Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery. Although I was raised on L.M. Montgomery and admire her books, I felt that
Rilla was limited in its depiction of the war’s impact, and wanted to show a different point of view.
