A Liberal-Labour Lady

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbias first female MLA and the British Empires first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (18631933) demanded a fair deal for deserving British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminisms privileging of white women. Ralphs 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canadas compromised struggle for greater justice.