June 4th: Votes for Women
St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.
Handwritten minutes from 1973’s Vestry, at which the Association of Women finally succeeded in gaining proportional representation on the Parish Advisory Board.
By the early 1970s, the St. Matthias’ Association of Women had expanded to include enough subsidiary groups that they occupied over half the page count of each year’s annual report, had financial statements as long as those of the church proper, and were getting a little tired of being ignored when it came to church governance. Certainly, Wardens’ and Rector’s Reports for over six decades had lauded the Association’s financial and social contributions to the church and to the wider community, but it had not been until the late 1960s that the Association’s President was allowed to become a member of the Advisory Board. Counting six member organisations and one affiliate (the Chancel Guild), the Association of Women was ready to be allowed to push church decision-making.
The first year that we have a record of the Association of Women is 1901, when they were called the Women’s Auxiliary. “Women’s Auxiliary” is short for “Woman’s Auxiliary to the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada,” an organisation founded in 1886 after a year of campaigning by Roberta E. Tilton of the Diocese of Ottawa. Roberta was the vice-president of the Ontario Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the founder of the Girls’ Friendly Society (which created space for young Christian women to be mentored by older Christian women) and she held a number of different roles in the Women’s Auxiliary until she finally retired in 1908. Her legacy is a complicated one, but her affirmation that women in the church, just like their male counterparts, were “longing to labor more abundantly, to consecrate all their talents to the Lord’s work”, was powerful. At the time, women were not legally persons, and would not be in Canada until 1929, but Roberta and her compatriots carved out an official space within the church to support and recognise the work of women.
This energy thrummed through the St. Matthias’ Association of Women, who by the 1930s had split into two distinct arms: one that served inside the church, and one that served in the larger community. Their work within St. Matthias’ included not only parish receptions and the bulk of the Rector’s discretionary fund, but also major infrastructural gifts like hallway floors. The Junior Auxiliary and the Girls Auxiliary got girls as young as 8 involved in fundraising, caring for church space, and learning practical skills like sewing and first aid. The Social Service Club, the Association’s outreach arm, supported hospital maternity wards and elderly shut-ins, and continued to disburse funds to a variety of local charitable organisations throughout the Association’s history. Indeed, looking at financial records, we can see that as of the mid-1910s, the majority of St. Matthias’ financial contributions to non-Diocesan projects were made via the Association, a tradition continued by today’s Fellowship Committee. The Association also founded Quebec’s first Meals on Wheels program.
The Association’s various branches were honoured with official induction services, with liturgies produced by the Women’s Auxiliary at the national level. Much like choir induction services of years past [link to appropriate blog post], this formality is no longer exercised. But unlike those choir inductions, we have no evidence that women and girls were inducted into the Association at regular services. Were these quiet, in-house affairs, like the bridge games and learning presentations that the Association hosted for members?
We might well suppose that the Association was as quiet about inductions as it was about the role of women in church governance, but in the late 1960s, something cracked. Perhaps it was the rising tide of second-wave feminist rhetoric, perhaps it was the political urgency of the Quiet Revolution, perhaps it was simply that after at least 70 years of financial support and missional prominence the Association of Women was tired of being left out of decision-making. Eleanor Dorrance, in her report to Vestry for the year 1969, gives us the first written complaint; the following year, she notes that the Association’s six organisations have been granted two seats on the Parish Advisory Board, “to keep pace with the changing times.” In the Vestry minutes pictured at the beginning of this post, we finally see proportional representation – one seat on the Board per group.
These days, when almost all of our elected positions are held by women, it is easy to forget how hard the women of St. Matthias’, and indeed all Anglican women in Canada, fought to be allowed to serve even before they were persons, to be given rights proportional to the responsibilities they had undertaken, and to have their voices heard outside of their own membership.