The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson by Veronica Strong-Boag
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson by Veronica Strong-Boag Jane Arscott Strong-Boag, Veronica –The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018. Pp. 271. Veronica Strong-Boag analyzes the life and times of social activist and elected politician Laura Marshall Jamieson, who was involved in struggles for women's enfranchisement and social justice in Canada for most of her adult life. Elected to the legislature of British Columbia three times, Jamieson also served on Vancouver City Council in 1948–1949. Political history, gender and women's studies, social and labour history provide a compelling account of the times from Jamieson's birth in 1882 to her death in 1964. Personal reminiscences written by four granddaughters remind readers that political figures may also be valued family members. "Laura," as she became known toward the end of her life, followed her passion for equality in her politics. She endured a difficult childhood, rose to public prominence, and then faded from view due to the chronic public amnesia commonly visited upon public figures who are women. Strong-Boag rescues Jamieson from oblivion in her detailed mapping of a singular life with its ebbs and flows across several generations of feminist struggles. Laura Emma Marshall had a hardscrabble childhood in mostly White settler communities that had dispossessed and displaced the Annishinaabe on most of the Saugeen (Bruce) peninsula (pp. 9–10). Orphaned at nine, the youngest of six siblings, Laura used funds provided by her oldest sister to relocate to Owen Sound to complete high school, and thereby improve her prospects for supporting herself. In the second phase of her life, Marshall became a teacher, university student, and social worker who worked and saved to continue her studies. Her circumstances [End Page 235] exposed her to unfairness and injustices that fueled this freethinking and independent New Woman. Marshall challenged conventional wisdom about women's place in society through her choices and actions. In 1911, her marriage to John (Jack) Jamieson, a lawyer, initiated a third phase of her life. The Jamiesons moved west and then settled in Burnaby, where their three children were born between 1912 and 1917. Widowed nine years later, she had a family to raise and insufficient means. She fell into the work her husband had done as a judge of the Juvenile Court. Her experience as a social worker and social reformer somewhat prepared her to juggle paid work, family responsibilities, community involvement, and activism. Despite politics having been a man's world in which she was an interloper, Jamieson was elected as a Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidate in a by-election in 1939, then re-elected in 1941 and 1952, and defeated in 1945 and 1953. Throughout, she used tact and skill to push for peace, social justice, and internationalism, adapting her positions to the time, place, and the possibilities of the day. Her longtime involvement with women's clubs, especially the Local Council of Women, the University Women's Club, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), grounded her politics. Issues such as reproductive choice, the minimum wage, poor employment opportunities, and discrimination in women's employment exposed injustices that oppressed many women, and some more than others due to confluences of race, class, gender, and citizenship status. "If women wish equality of opportunity in Canada, realizing that low income women are a depressed group, along with new immigrants, racial minorities and others, they will have to work for equality for all," she wrote in a pamphlet produced in advance of the election of 1945 (p. 152). In particular, the relation of feminism to Labour and the political Left whipsawed the few women in politics, like Jamieson, for being at once too radical and not radical enough, thereby barring her further advancement to a formal position of leadership. In addition, generalized misogyny and antifeminism contributed to society's systemic disrespect for women's agency, rights, and voices that required agents of social change to do by other means what could not be done openly and transparently. Although Jamieson was no agent provocateur, nevertheless her White...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".