March 14, 1868 - Emily Murphy - a podcast by Stephen Hammond

Future suffragist, journalist and judge Emily Murphy is born. Emily Ferguson was born into a wealthy and influential Canadian family on March 14, 1868 in Cookstown, Ontario. Years later, she and her Anglican minister husband, Arthur Murphy, moved to Alberta, where she took up the cause of women’s equality. Her constant pressure led the Alberta government to pass the Dower Act in 1911, ensuring the right of a wife to one-third of her husband’s property. When Alberta’s attorney general made Murphy an Edmonton magistrate in 1916, she was the first woman in the British Commonwealth to hold such a position. She pushed for the abolition of drugs and narcotics. Articles she wrote under the pen name Janey Canuck were full of stereotypes and prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities.On her first day as a magistrate, a lawyer challenged her authority, saying women were not “persons” under the British North America Act, and therefore ineligible for appointment to the bench or the Senate of Canada. To silence such opinion, Murphy became one of the “Famous Five” (Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby and Henrietta Muir Edwards being the other four) who challenged women’s lack of status. Although the Famous Five lost their case at Canada’s Supreme Court, the judicial committee of the Privy Council of the House of Lords in England ruled in their favour on October 18, 1929. Months later, on February 15, 1930, Cairine Wilson was appointed Canada’s first woman senator for Ontario. Murphy died on October 27, 1933.

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