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.
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