Divided by the Ballot Box: The Montreal Council of Women and the 1917 Election

Prime Minister Robert Borden created the Wartime Elections Act in September 1917 – a move that granted temporary voting rights to women who had close relatives serving in the military. Their votes were positioned as key to winning the war because it was assumed that newly enfranchised wives and mothers would support Borden’s controversial conscription plans to reinforce their husbands and sons at the front. Suffragists across the country were divided by the act’s limited enfranchisement and its connection to conscription. This turmoil reached its pinnacle in Montreal, a city that was at the centre of nationalistic and ethnic strife caused by the war, and triggered rifts within the city’s largest Anglophone women’s organization, the Montreal Council of Women. One result of this tension was the impeachment trial of the council’s long-time president, Dr Grace Ritchie-England, for her criticism of the Wartime Elections Act and conscription during the 1917 federal election. Calling attention to the resistance of and conflicts between middle-class club women who were normally viewed as hegemonically supportive of the war effort widens our understanding of women’s disparate opinions and activism during the First World War and the fragile nature of suffragists” political unity.

The Wartime Vote

FDR owed his reelection in both 1940 and 1944 to wartime conditions, breeching the two-term tradition dating back to the time of George Washington. War in Europe virtually turned the 1940 presidential contest into a wartime election, although the United States was still technically at peace. The American electorate deemed it more important to keep the commander in chief than observe the third-term taboo. Responses to a hypothetical polling question show that FDR would have lost in 1940 if no war had been going on; in 1944 he would have lost if the war had been over. Each time voters also expressed more confidence in him than in his challengers to lead the nation in time of war. In contrast, the White House party has lost wartime elections under presidents Truman, Johnson, and George W. Bush.

Wartime Elections in Ireland

The cardinal principle of political philosophy has been formulated as “politique d'abord”—politics comes first. This is true in the sense that whatever other advantages a country has, it will not be able to enjoy them in peace and security, unless its political order is firmly established. However, “politique d' abord” has little meaning unless we realize that we must also say “gouvernement d'abord”—government comes first. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was so much aware of this fact that, in his incomparably clear analysis of the problem of political organization, he, in the end, simply quoted Solomon: “Where there is no government, the people shall fall.” In this age of individualism we sometimes forget this simple fact, but history abounds with illustrations, both ancient and modern, of its abiding truth.