A Liberal-Labour Lady: The Times and Life of Mary Ellen Spear Smith

The inversion of “Life and Times” in the title of Veronica Strong-Boag's insightful biography of Mary Ellen Spear Smith speaks to a historical truism that individual lives can only be understood in context. This seems to be particularly so in the case of Mary Ellen Smith. Her story speaks to the particular conjunction of class and gender politics in Britain and Canada in the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century. Remembered as the first female member of the British Columbia legislature and the first woman cabinet member in the British Empire, her significance is based in her struggle to expand the democratic rights of workers and women. But, as Strong-Boag argues, settler-colonial privilege shaped her legacy in a number of troubling ways.Her story is remarkable. She was born Mary Ellen Spear into a poor mining community in Devon, England, although the family soon moved to the relatively more prosperous coal mining region of Northumberland in northern England. There she married miner Ralph Smith. Although wages were better in Northumberland than elsewhere, this was a dismal place with cramped, rudimentary housing, slag heaps and smoke, and the raft of dangers and disease that plagued mining towns. But the community possessed a deep culture of self-improvement, reflected in well-organized unions, a strong cooperative movement, and a commitment to education and temperance rooted in Methodism. Such sentiments aligned with those of members of the radical wing of the Liberal Party, who were interested in building collaborative alternatives to class conflict and socialism. Northumberland was the center of the resulting Labour-Liberalism, a politics of consensus between employers and workers. While Mary Ellen was busy raising young children, Ralph Smith was a vocal advocate of “Lib-Labism.”The couple brought this ideology to the coal mines of Nanaimo, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. Ralph again took center stage, emerging as a leader of the local, independent miners’ union, arguing that the precarious union needed a strategy of “reason, conciliation and arbitration” to succeed (49). His rise was meteoric. Starting in 1898, he was successively a member of the provincial legislature, president of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, and member of Canada's federal parliament. Defeated following two terms as MP, he returned to the British Columbia legislature. Although pushing for labor reforms, his opposition to socialism alienated him from the British Columbian labor movement, and he grew increasingly close to the mainstream of the Liberal Party.Mary Ellen's own talents became increasingly clear as she came to play leading roles in an impressive range of community activities as well as the local Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Ladies’ Liberal League. When the family moved to Vancouver, she organized a local branch of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, led the Women's Canadian Club, and worked for the Pioneer Political Equality League. As this suggests, she rose relatively freely into British Canadian society, not just as the spouse of a member of parliament but as someone with significant political and oratorical skills. The Ottawa Citizen declared her “one of the best informed women on matters political” in the country (60).Mary Ellen shone in the local and national spotlight. Her uncanny ability to inhabit elite social networks, hosting teas and parties, dressing spectacularly, and often soft-selling her message made her an acceptable face of the progressive New Liberalism. And she functioned well among middle- and upper-class women in the suffrage movement. After Ralph's death in 1917, Mary Ellen continued the fight on her own. The following year, in the wake of women's enfranchisement, she ran as an independent women's candidate and claimed Ralph's seat in the British Columbia legislature. She rallied nonpartisan sentiments and women's votes in the tumult following World War I. And it allowed her, in Lib-Lab fashion, to distance herself both from the growing radicalism of British Columbia's unions and the antilabor and antifeminist leadership of the provincial Liberal Party. Once elected, Smith, with her feminist allies, pushed the Liberal government to adopt a number of reforms, particularly those enhancing women's well-being, suggesting the possibilities of a more statist New Liberalism in British Columbia.It was not, however, to be. Despite some immediate gains, the 1920s proved to be a decade of reaction, both against labor and against women's political gains. British New Liberalism failed to gain a foothold in Canada, and further efforts at reform floundered. The Liberal government hoped to placate Smith, and to gain from her popularity, by appointing her as a cabinet minister without portfolio. Despite its historic status, the appointment was a pyrrhic victory, as it came with no power, so she resigned, refusing to remain “an ornament” (156). Indeed, she spent the remainder of her political career frustrated, frozen out by a Liberal Party uninterested in progressive reform, an increasingly belligerent capitalist class, a union movement highly critical of the kind of class collaboration Lib-Labism promised, and feminists who lost interest in Mary Ellen's increasingly ineffective politics.For all Mary Ellen Smith's defense of democracy and championing of labor and feminist causes, Strong-Boag clearly notes the ways in her worldview was marked by prejudice. She (and Ralph) persistently campaigned to exclude Asians from Canada and sought to replicate British institutions within the context of empire. Issues of Indigenous dispossession seemed not to register throughout their political careers. This, then, is a story that Strong-Boag tells with nuance. As Mary Ellen fought for women's political inclusion, she fought against that of others.Operating within a “political caste system that feared independent women,” Mary Ellen was challenged at every turn, relying on her remarkable set of skills to rally broad support as well as on tactics to ingratiate herself among the more powerful (143). This volume fits well into Strong-Boag's impressive oeuvre of studies of early twentieth-century feminism, which wrestles effectively with the complexities of class and race, particularly within the suffrage movement. A Liberal-Labour Lady adds another layer, enlightening our understanding of the complexities of the suffrage movement, the weight of settler colonialism, and the fate of Lib-Labism in Canada.

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