Local Council of Women of Halifax

The Local Council of Women of Halifax (LCWH) is an organization in Halifax, Nova Scotia devoted to improving the lives of women and children. One of the most significant achievements of the LCWH was its 24-year struggle for women's right to vote (1894-1918). The core of the well trained and progressive leadership was five women: Anna Leonowens (famous for The King and I), Edith Archibald (who eventually became the leader of the National Council), Eliza Ritchie, Agnes Dennis (president from 1906–20) and May Sexton. Halifax business man George Henry Wright left his home in his will to the LCWH, which the organization received after he died in the Titanic (1912). Educator Alexander McKay also was a significant supporter of the Council.

In 1851 women were excluded from the vote in Nova Scotia. In 1870, Hannah Norris began to mobilize women into the public sphere through establishing the Woman’s Baptist Missionary Aid Society across the Maritimes. Following Frances Willard's visit to Halifax in 1878, Nova Scotia women organized local unions and a provincial Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In 1884, the WCTU successfully lobbied for married women’s property legislation. In 1891 the WCTU officially endorsed the suffrage cause, the first major women's organization to support women's suffrage. Edith Archibald became the leader of the Maritime chapter of the WCTU the following year. (Women joined the WCTU “in numbers that greatly surpassed their participation in any other women's organization in the nineteenth century,” making the WCTU “the first women's mass movement.”) Two years later, in 1893, Edith Archibald and others made the first official attempt to have a suffrage bill for women property holders passed in Nova Scotia. The bill was passed by the legislature but quashed by Attorney General James Wilberforce Longley (who opposed unions and female emancipation for the twenty years he was in office).

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