Marie Thérèse Casgrain was born in Saint-Irénée-les-Bains, Canada, to a wealthy family. At the age of 8, she was sent to a boarding school of the Dames du Sacré-Coeur order at Sault-aux-Récollets. After graduation, she wanted to attend university, but her father refused, believing that a woman of her status should learn to manage a household. In 1916, at 20, she married Pierre-François Casgrain, a wealthy Liberal politician. In 1918, she traveled to Ottawa with her husband for the Parliament session opening. There, she became aware of the importance of women’s right to vote, given in the previous year by the Wartime Elections Act only to wives, widows, mothers, and sisters of soldiers serving overseas and in reality excluding the majority of women. She became a leading figure of the women’s suffrage movement in Quebec, using her family and husband’s political contacts to promote the cause. She wrote letters to influential people, made public speeches, and in 1921, at the age of 25, she founded the Provincial Franchise Committee for women’s suffrage. In 1928, Casgrain started heading the Ligue des droits de la femme for 14 years. The organization fought for women’s right to vote at the provincial level, which was eventually approved only in 1940, making Quebec the last province in Canada in which women could vote. During WW2, she founded and was co-president of the Women’s Surveillance Committee for the Wartime Prices and Trade Board. In 1942, at the age of 42, Casgrain ran for Canadian Parliament as the Independent Liberal candidate for Charlevoix-Saguenay – a federal electoral district in Quebec and reached second place. She tried six more times, both federally and provincially, but lost. She continued to advocate for women’s rights, and in 1945 she triumphantly campaigned to enable women in Quebec to receive family allowance cheques in their name, not in the husband’s name alone. After the war, Casgrain left the Liberal Party to join the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Two years later, she was nominated as the national vice-chair of the party, the only woman at its management level. In 1951, at 55, she was elected as the leader of the Québec wing of the CCF, becoming the first woman in Canada to head a political party. In 1960, she founded the League for Human Rights, and in the following year, she established and later served as president of the Québec branch of the Voice of Women – an anti-nuclear pacifist movement. Over time, she founded several more human rights organizations, including the Fédération des femmes du Québec and the Quebec Civil Liberties Union. In 1969, at 73, Casgrain was elected president of the Quebec section of the Consumers’ Association of Canada. In this position, she successfully lobbied for forming a federal minister of consumer affairs. In the following year, 74 years old Casgrain was appointed by the Prime Minister to the Senate of Canada, serving only nine months before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75. Afterward, she lobbied against compulsory retirement from any job. Even in the last decade of her life, Casgrain did not stop her activism work and continued fighting for various social causes, such as education, housing, health care, unemployment, workers’ rights, and Indigenous rights. She died at the age of 85. Read more...

Jeanne Mance was born in Langres, France, to a minor nobility family. From an early age, she decided not to marry and serve God and people in need. When the Thirty Years War reached her region, she started to work with charitable societies, developed nursing skills, and even attended to the victims of the plague that burst in her area and killed more than 5,000 people in Langres. In 1640, at the age of 34, Mance was recruited by Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve as a member of the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, to travel to the New World and establish a new French colony on the Island of Montréal. Her role in the mission was to find a hospital for the settlers. Devoted to the cause, she persuaded donors to finance the mission and recruit more members. Thanks to her, the donations doubled, and the number of new settlers expanded from 8 to 38. Nine of them were women. On May 9th, 1641, the expedition embarked on three months journey across the Atlantic, reaching the Island of Montreal on May 17th, 1642. On her arrival, she got the responsibility for all “indoors,” including food, housing, health, and property, while Maisonneuve was in charge of “outdoors and war.” In that same year, Mance began to operate a hospital in her home, and within three years, she founded the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, serving as a nurse, director, and treasurer. The hospital was small, containing only eight beds (six for men and two for women). The equipment was poor, and the funds were running out. In addition, the living conditions were difficult, the climate was harsh, and many of the first settlers left the colony. Given the circumstances, in 1650, 44 years old Mance traveled to France and managed to recruit more donations and more colonists, one of them was Marguerite Bourgeoys, a French nun and the founder of the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal. Seven years later, Mance went on another recruiting mission in France, returning with enough money and three nuns who helped in the hospital. With the new staff, Mance was able to work less at the hospital and focused on the colony’s administration. She died at the age of 67 after a long illness. Read more...