Storming the Old Boys' Citadel: Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America

By Carla Blank and Tania Martin

“Women” and “architecture” were once mutually exclusive terms. In an 1891 address, Louise Blanchard Bethune declared, “it is hardly safe to assert” that a connection even exists between the two words. Some women didn’t agree.

Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart (1823-1902) is credited with works built in the present states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and British Columbia. Born Esther Pariseau in Saint-Elzéar, Québec, the “Mother with a hammer” was honored by the State of Washington as one of two people to represent it in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C.

Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856-1913) designed and built works in the Buffalo, New York area, including the Lafayette Hotel, which was one of the eleven most luxurious hotels in the United States when it opened in 1904.

Mother Joseph’s and Louise Bethune’s signature buildings, Providence Academy, Vancouver, Washington, and the Lafayette Hotel, Buffalo, New York, are both listed on the United States’ National Register of Historic Places. Both buildings are cases of historic preservation and adaptive reuse.

Bridging disciplines from women’s studies, architecture and architectural history to the fascinating past of the Pacific Northwest and Upstate New York, Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel sheds new light on North America’s common built environment and those who made it.

In this book, based on years of research and keen story-telling skills, Carla Blank and Tania Martin also breathe new life into the lives and works of two remarkable nineteenth-century women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baraka Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771860314

Carla Blank

Carla Blank is the author of Live On Stage! and Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900–2000. Her articles have appeared in El Pais, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, Green Magazine, Hungry Mind Review, Counterpunch, and Konch. She lives in Oakland, California.

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Introduction

Carla presumed Tania was an architect, as do most people when they learn she obtained, in 1992, her bachelor’s degree in architecture. At that time, the five-year professional program was the entry point into the profession, although the Master of Architecture has since superseded it. Rather than embark on the required internship leading to written exams and registration, Tania earned a post-professional degree from McGill University, specializing in the study of built environments, before earning a Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley. These credentials allow her to teach history/theory courses as well as design studio in a school of architecture, although many institutions prefer studio instructors to have an architectural practice, and hence registration with the state or provincial architectural association. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, however, offers membership to architecture school faculty. In presenting a history of the architectural profession in North America, we thought Tania’s experiences, as a participant in this field, provide a contemporary example of the complexities surrounding the evolution of standards and women’s choices within the field of architecture. They punctuate the historical narrative.

Just as you cannot practice as a lawyer until you pass an exam that admits you to the bar, in Canada and the United States you can only be called an architect if you pass a licensing exam and are registered. A provincial or state architecture association only has the legal authority to emit a license to practice within its jurisdiction. It will consider applications once the candidate has succeeded in completing the following requirements: earned a degree from an accredited program in architecture or, more rarely, fulfilled a regimented apprenticeship; passed a battery of exams set by the National Certification Boards of the country where he or she will practice; and served the required number of hours of internship under the supervision of a practicing architect. Upon paying his or her annual dues and liability insurance, the newly approved practitioner retains the privilege of officially stamping his or her drawings as a bona fide architect.

This restrictive definition of architect is fairly recent. It dates to the late nineteenth century. Professionalization was uneven in its progress, temporally and geographically. The process of professionalization spanned the better part of the nineteenth century. In North America, the rate of formation of associations followed no regional pattern, and licensing laws were not enacted throughout all fifty states and territories until 1968, and in Canada’s provinces and territories until 2001, with the passage of the Northwest Territories Architects Act, although all of the provinces had effective legislation by 1933. When Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation in 1949, it enacted an Architects Act. When it was incorporated in 1980, the Architects Licensing Board of Newfoundland and Labrador took over responsibility for registration matters from that province’s architects association.

Moreover, the terms architect and professional have not always been synonymous. The professions—medical, legal, architectural—initially a premodern and preindustrial invention of eighteenth-century England, as architectural historian Mary Woods points out in From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America, had to evolve to respond to new conditions, namely capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization.

The term architect has its origins in the Greek word architekton, which translates to master carpenter. Although the term fell out of common usage in the Middle Ages, when those responsible for construction were referred to as master masons and builders and patrons, the term architect was re-employed to describe the Brunelleschis, Bramantes, and Michelangelos of the Renaissance. As Woods explains, they were not building craftsmen and did not belong to the construction guilds. By the eighteenth century, an architect was a Master Workman in a Building, he who designs the Model, or draws the Plot, Plan or Draught of the whole Fabrick; whose Business it is to consider the whole Manner and Method of the Building; and also to compute the Charge and Expence according to The Builder’s Dictionary, first published in 1734 and widely circulated in British America. The definition was perhaps too all-encompassing. As Dankmar Adler pointed out to the architects assembled at the Second Annual Convention of the Western Association of Architects in 1885, Every man… can constitute himself as an architect by calling himself one… We are architects only because we have called ourselves architects, that is all.

Adler was speaking of the realities of practices in his time, before the passage of distinct laws regulating architecture as a profession. Until architecture became the object of professionalization in North America, anyone who created architectural drawings and supervised construction, be they a designer, draftsman, builder, master artisan, or master mechanic, or a gentleman, planter, or merchant who undertook building contracts, all could call themselves architects as they were ultimately in positions of authority and took responsibility for the building. They directed the tradesmen and artisans actually involved in preparing the materials, assembling the structural members, cladding the exterior walls, covering the roof, installing doors and windows, partitioning rooms, and finishing the interiors. Yet even this elastic description omits those people deemed to have superior skills or knowledge of building within a culture or community, those who had a combination of expertise in assorted crafts, calculation, aesthetics, and rituals and passed them on from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter or through special initiation by elders or through long apprenticeship with an experienced practitioner.

As co-authors anthropologist Peter Nabokov and architect Robert Easton explain in their Native American Architecture:

The three hundred or so tribal groups who lived in North America when Christopher Columbus arrived built their homes and arranged their settlements according to singular patterns and principles passed on from generation to generation…

Men and women’s roles in the construction and ownership of dwellings were sharply defined. Over most of central North America, women held sway over home and hearth, either building or supervising construction of their houses. Along the West Coast from Alaska to Southern California and on the eastern seaboard, men were largely responsible for building. In parts of the Southwest, and in pockets of the Great Basin, men and women shared the labor equally. Among the Mandan Hidatsa of the upper Missouri River, women held the right to erect earth lodges, but men cut and erected the frame. Cheyenne women had a ‘guild’ which convened with fasting and prayer whenever they gathered to cut and sew covers and make porcupine quill ornaments for their tipis.

The much-admired architecture of the Shakers, a religious sect that has its origins in seventeenth-century Protestantism, distinguishable by its simplicity and utility, drew upon and improved existing models, run-of-the-mill domestic, agricultural, civic, and religious structures they would have seen in nearby towns and cities. True to vernacular architecture traditions, one adapted the plans and construction techniques of one’s forefathers and neighbors from whom one learned to build.

As architectural historian Dell Upton reminds us, every building, large or small, [high style or vernacular], is designed. Someone, or some group of people, decided what it should look like, and also the functions to which it was put. Doctors and other specialists expected architects to follow their prescriptions to the last detail for the design of jails, asylums, schools, and hospitals. Today, programming a building’s functions and layouts is a specific area of expertise not always held by architects, just as job superintendence is often devolved to site supervisors who coordinate the work of the various construction contractors on-site, solve problems as they arise, and otherwise make sure the architect’s plans are being followed.

The definition the Western Association of Architects adopted by 1886, after some members expressed their objections to the number of builders and contractors being admitted, Woods notes, did not include the word ‘architect’ or discuss the artistic aspects of the job. Coming shortly after Louise Bethune had been accepted as their first female fellow, it furthermore did not use masculine pronouns in its:

revised membership policy that required all fellows be ‘a professional person whose sole occupation [emphasis added] is to supply data preliminary to the material, construction and completion of a building and to exercise administrative control over contractors supplying material and labor… and [over] the arbitration of contract stipulating terms of obligation and fulfillment between proprietor and contractor.’

Architecture followed in the footsteps of other professions—medicine, law, and engineering—in delimiting its domain and in determining who could legally enter it. The men who established the profession fought hard battles to circumscribe the range of activities laypersons could perform without recourse to their expertise. Still in 2014, control over many areas of the field of architecture escapes architects. Anyone can design their own house and even certain buildings not exceeding dimensions set by Architects Acts.

If the European tradition of architecture centered on the figure of the gentleman whose considerations, unlike those of merchants or tradesmen, were never financial and whose actions were guided by honor rather than by the hope of selling his services, at least in theory, in America money entered into the equation, as Dell Upton emphasizes. Indeed, Louisa Tuthill, author of A History of Architecture from Earliest Times, the first architectural history published in the United States, in 1848, counseled young men to consider architecture as a career, because in her analysis it was a "lucrative and honorable profession" [emphasis added].

Would-be architects had to identify something that would set them apart from mere builders and artisans in the public’s eye. Upton posits that they presented themselves as arbiters of taste, whose command of style and artistic expression lent an image of originality to the designs they sold their clients. While the conception of architect as artist drew its roots from Renaissance ideas, in North America the professional also had to demonstrate sound mastery of technical innovations and apply the managerial theories of modern business in his practice.

Some practitioners working south of the forty-ninth parallel were able to convince Canadian businessmen of their superior abilities in each of these areas, much to the frustration of local architects. Toronto-based Canada Life Company repeatedly hired Buffalo-based architect Richard Waite (1848-1911) to design its new offices buildings, first in Hamilton (1882), then Toronto (1889), and later in Montreal (1895-1896, now St. Regis Condos), observed architectural historian Kelly Crossman. Waite had an advantage over Canadian architects in that he was willing to introduce American innovations in commercial building to Canada: new buildings types, such as multi-storey office buildings; new building techniques using fire resistant materials, including the use of iron and steel framing; and new architectural fashions, such as the colored stone favored by Richardson’s Romanesque Revival. Other American architects followed suit. Frederick Law Olmsted designed about one hundred projects in Canada; Bruce Price (1845-1903) built railroad stations and grand hotels in revival styles for the Canadian Pacific, most famously Quebec City’s Château Frontenac (1893) and Montreal’s Place Viger (1897). Beaux-Arts-trained Carrère & Hastings displayed their mastery of historical styles in designs for the Trader’s Bank Building (1905) and Bank of Toronto head office (1913, demolished).

The manner in which Waite secured the coveted commission for Toronto’s Ontario Legislative and Departmental Buildings (1892) became a controversy among Canadian architects. The only American member of a three-man jury to decide who would win the building’s 1880 competition, Waite rejected his Canadian co-members’ entries as not competent, and was awarded the commission without undergoing further peer review of his own design. The resulting outrage probably helped motivate Canadian architects to put aside their professional jealousies that had defeated earlier attempts to form durable professional associations.

Architects sought to establish reliable standards of performance through professionalization, guaranteeing the quality of building to the public and to individual clients, thus giving them some semblance of control over the whole construction process, from initial design through project completion. Professional bodies certified one’s credentials and one’s character. They also initially presumed that only men of good standing having the proper education would join.

The first organization of architects in the United States, the short-lived Association for the Advancement of Architectural Science, was founded in 1836, two years after the Institute of British Architects, predecessor of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and was succeeded in 1857 by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). When the forty-nine men signed the constitution, the AIA was little more than a gentlemen’s club whose mission, as stated in their 1867 Constitution, was to promote the scientific and practical perfection of its members and elevate the standing of the Profession. Prominent AIA members—such as the Chicago-based architects Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, William LeBaron Jenney, John Root, and Louis Sullivan—dissatisfied with its autocratic practices and unsuccessful in their efforts to have the AIA run democratically by its members rather than a board of trustees, bolted from the AIA and formed the Western Association of Architects (WAA) in Chicago in 1884.The one hundred male architects who joined the new association heralded from the Midwest and the South of the United States.

In Canada, architects began to organize into provincial associations in the last decade of the nineteenth century, well before incorporation by the Dominion Parliament in 1909 of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC). In the province of Ontario, Canada, the proposed Architects Act of 1889, a bill to incorporate the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), contained licensing provisions restricting practice in that province to those having passed examination or able to present previous evidence of professional training. The Act, which probably drew inspiration from the RIBA’s revised Charter of 1887, was officially adopted the following year, minus the principle of compulsory registration. The province of Quebec created a similar organization and enacted a similar law in 1890. British Columbia attempted to do so in 1892-1893, but failed. Architects on the west coast of Canada were unregulated until 1906, Alberta being the first to pass legislation.

Despite the governments’ and architect associations’ best efforts to make registration obligatory, unqualified men continued to practice architecture, Kelly Crossman asserts. Moreover, Whatever the profession felt about the distinctions between registered and non-registered architects, the Canadian public was prepared to ignore the distinction entirely. And this was undoubtedly true south of the border as well.

The OAA would remain, like many architects’ associations in the United States and Canada, a voluntary association until 1931, when a new Architects Act was adopted in Ontario making membership obligatory in order to legally practice in that province. Quebec succeeded in securing statutory registration by 1898 requiring architects practicing in that province to pass PQAA exams. The Architectural Institute of British Columbia finally succeeded in establishing itself by provincial statute in 1920. The Atlantic provinces followed suit in the early 1930s.

In the United States, WAA chapters pushed for licensing laws in 1886, but the Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Texas, and Kansas legislatures defeated those attempts until 1897, when the state of Illinois passed its Architecture Licensing Act, most closely followed by California (1901), and New Jersey (1902). New York was the tenth state to approve a licensing law, in 1915, and Vermont and Wyoming were the last, in 1951, followed by the territories of Guam (1960) and the U.S. Virgin Islands (1968).

Under those laws, architects’ associations gained the right to restrict entry into the profession, establish postgraduate and apprenticeship-training criteria, set and maintain standards of architectural education, hold compulsory admission exams, control standards of practice, collect membership dues, and enforce codes of ethics. Once states and provinces did pass licensing laws that established boards to examine applicants, they grandfathered-in those who could prove they had been practicing architecture for a specified number of years prior to the enactment of licensing laws. Registration conferred the exclusive right to the title of architect; the seal with which they stamped all their drawings and specifications signified they were liable for defective construction, injuries, and death. The AIA’s first code of ethics was adopted in 1909, after associations had obtained exclusive rights in other areas.

Neither the AIA, which had subsumed the WAA in 1889, nor the RAIC had legal power over its members. Rather, these national organizations, really a federation of local associations, advocated on behalf of the membership, organized platforms for debating issues of importance to the profession, and generally provided a collegial network. As early as 1866, the AIA proposed a fee schedule defining who an architect was and what an architect did (and what he should be paid!). Four years later, it adopted a document ensuring architects would be involved in planning, overseeing, and judging competitions for building design, as reported on the AIA’s web site, www.aia.org. In 1888, the AIA helped create standardized construction contracts to be used across the United States, the first being an architect and owner agreement for construction.

Laws passed at the federal level of both countries addressed issues of national concern, such as the highly controversial subject of regulating design competitions. In the United States, the Tarsney Act of 1893 was endorsed by the AIA, who had campaigned for such legislation since the 1870s to discourage abuses of power. It advocated that in competitions to design buildings funded through federal commissions, the selection process should only be presided over by AIA judges, and over the next thirteen years, twenty-some architects received commissions in major U.S. cities under these guidelines. Illustrating how difficult it was to institute regulations, this law’s provisions were limited in scope, being advisory rather than compulsory, and it was repealed in 1912.

An Architect’s Training and Education

During the nineteenth century, one of the most common and acceptable ways for men to become architects was through apprenticeship. It was a practice that existed earlier in New France (1608-1763) than in the thirteen British colonies. Claude Baillif (c. 1635-1699), a ‘stone-cutter, master mason, plasterer, contractor, architect’ who emigrated from France to Québec in 1675, had up to twenty apprentices relates Upton, adding that Baillif’s library included books on mathematics, and civil and military architecture, and his drawings were sophisticated and carefully executed.

In Canada as in the United States, young men started out as draftsmen, ideally under the tutelage of a successful architect. The standard of training and conditions of work varied from one office to the next, so much so, as Crossman recounts, that architect A. C. Hutchison told the Province of Quebec Architect Association in 1890 that he often advised young men who wished to obtain a knowledge of architecture to go to the United States and obtain education where collegiate programs of architecture existed. University-centered architectural education was offered by 1910 in Canada.

Efforts to formalize architectural training, especially by instituting college and university programs, preceded efforts to have architecture sanctioned as a bona fide profession. An academic degree in architecture, while limiting access to education for many, standardized cultivation of taste, perhaps the only qualification, Upton argues, distinguishing the credentials of an architect from those of a builder. Formal schooling in the classroom and the design studio was an alternative, and an infinitely more predictable way of inculcating the internal values of the profession than interactions with one’s employers and colleagues, even though the design studio replicated to some degree the peer learning that went on in the office. Design studios were also modeled on the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts atelier, where students in varying stages of training were supervised and guided by a practicing architect through a series of design competitions. Junior students helped advanced students represent the project to be submitted. The drawing of plans, sections, elevations, and perspective views was a chance to apply their lessons in architectural history and theory.

Standard histories of architecture in the United States credit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as having implanted the first collegiate program in architecture in 1865, but it was the Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania that paved the way for technically-oriented training in 1861. Before 1900, most architectural programs, like the one Columbia University established in 1881, leaned towards the polytechnic and therefore pragmatic curricula that covered drawing, mathematics, geometry, architectural history and ornament, heating and ventilation, estimating, contracts, specifications, and superintendence—rather than the highly romanticized Beaux-Arts atelier. Its director, William Robert Ware, also a founder of the program at MIT, considered construction and engineering more germane to the education of an architect than painting and sculpture. He was more concerned with a student’s thorough knowledge of the building trades, an ignorance of which could not be made up for in an architecture office than a student’s design abilities, architectural historian Michael J. Lewis affirms. Ware did, however, invite practitioners to lead Beaux-Arts-inspired design studios at Columbia, and many other schools would follow the example.

The University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal were the first to offer university-level architecture programs in Canada, in 1890 and in 1896 respectively, although the Quebec government had introduced architecture courses to the curriculum at the Écoles des Arts et Métiers—schools which had been established throughout the province during the 1870s to improve the quality of Canadian design. The French-language École Polytechnique de Montréal, now affiliated with the Université de Montréal, had also added a course in design to its curriculum. French-Canadian students supplemented this grounding in architectural science by working in an office or studying abroad until an architectural program independent from engineering was established at the École in 1907, explains Crossman.

However, going to Paris to study at l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts was more prestigious for North American students. Its course of study was based in the traditions and principles laid out in the Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman civil engineer and architect Vitruvius (born c. 80-70 BC, died after c. 15 BC), which demonstrated how to render buildings according to the five archetypal Greek and Roman classical orders, namely the Tuscan, Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, and Composite Orders. Architects schooled at the Beaux-Arts, or in programs under that influence in North America, were just as likely to refer to Regola delle cinque ordini d’architettura (1563), a book on the five orders by Renaissance architect Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573) and study the buildings by Italian Renaissance master architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Americans Richard Morris Hunt, Henry H. Richardson, Thomas Hastings, and Charles Fuller McKim were École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts graduates, as was Canadian J. Omer Marchand (1873-1936); Louis Sullivan and John Merven Carrère attended but left before graduating; Frank Lloyd Wright purposely avoided it; and after being refused admission on her first try, Julia Morgan (1872-1957) was accepted in 1898, and became their first female graduate in 1902.

By 1906, the AIA Committee on Education insisted on the artistic rather than the technical competencies in its definition of an architect as "one ranking in the class of men of culture, learning, and refinement, differentiated from the others of his class solely by his function as a creator of pure beauty, as an exponent through material forms of the best secular, intellectual, and religious civilization of his time, and as an organizer and director of manifold and varied industries and activities [emphasis added]."

Three years of full-time study in a university or college program was prohibitive for most individuals. The United States census identified over 10,500 individuals calling themselves architects in 1900, yet less than 400 students were attending architecture schools in 1898, estimates Dana Cuff, author of Architecture: A Story of Practice. Apprenticeship or office training remained the usual route for aspiring architects at the turn of the twentieth century and would continue to be an alternative path well into the twentieth century even as formal study in a college or university-level architecture program supplanted it.

Apprentices, who received one-on-one instruction from an experienced practitioner, supplemented their training by enrolling in drawing schools, which were offered as early as 1735 in a number of major North American cities, notes Upton, and their wide-ranging curricula quite possibly inspired collegiate programs. Instructors probably used the same architectural publications that gentlemen architects and practitioners had in their personal libraries. Before William Robert Ware (1832-1915), who Woods calls the father of American architectural education, authored The American Vignola (1902-1906), he required his students to own copies of its inspiration, Vignola’s Rules (the Regola referred to above), which codified the rules of classical architecture for the Italian Renaissance. Abbé Jérôme Demers’ Précis d’Architecture (1828), the first architectural treatise written in Canada, inspired by Jacques-François Blondel’s Cours d’Architecture (1771-1777), adapted European teachings to Canadian and American audiences. Illustrated builders’ guides and pattern books such as James Gibb’s Book of Architecture (1728), John Haviland’s The Builder’s Assistant (1821), Asher Benjamin’s The American Builder’s Companion (1806), The Rudiments of Architecture (1814) and The Elements of Architecture (1843), or Edward Shaw’s The Modern Architect or Every Carpenter His Own Master (1855), Andrew Jackson Downing’s The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) circulated widely. They explained the aesthetic rules, ideal proportions, and fashionable styles as well as basic construction techniques and building systems for classical vaults and arches, gabled roofs and domes, doors and windows, walls, wall treatments and ceilings, steps and staircases. Such publications informed the choices of master builders, too.

If one wanted to keep abreast of latest developments, one traveled not only to study canonical masterpieces but also to see newly erected edifices, whether in Europe or leading American cities. Extant buildings inspired many an architect, builder, and client. The man credited as architect of the White House in Washington D.C., James Hoban (1762-1831), modeled his design on Leister House in Dublin, Ireland, an existing building in the Palladian style. The Irish-born builder had studied architectural drawing and apprenticed in the building trades in Dublin before immigrating to America in 1785. Known first in the U.S. for his design of South Carolina’s State Capital at Columbia, he may have also consulted Gibbs’ pattern book cum building manual for his 1792 winning competition entry for the President’s House, later renamed the White House.

Professional journals were also a source of continuing education, in addition to being a forum for professional architects and a showcase for their works. Readers could learn how their colleagues had solved design problems and seek inspiration from projects published in their pages. In the United States, The American Architect and Building News or The Inland Architect and News Record were founded respectively in 1876 and 1883; Canada’s first professional journal, Canadian Architect & Builder, was launched in 1888. Early on, these and similar professional journals published articles on drafting, architectural history, sanitation, office management, and building law.

No matter how broad their training and culture, architects nonetheless had to take the expertise of their clients and general contractors into account, as they often possessed greater knowledge of construction, financing, real estate and building law. Architects, at least in the eighteenth century, as Upton points out, were expected to defer to the wishes of their clients and favor ideas that had been proved in practice over those merely theoretical, which differs substantially from late twentieth-century perceptions of ‘starchitects’ and people’s expectations of unique architectural conceptions. But as he, Woods, and Crossman argue, by late nineteenth century, architecture was more than an art or a science; it was above all a totally male-dominated for-profit business enterprise.

Women’s Battles and Experiences

The architecture profession remains male-dominated in 2014, despite the great efforts women have exerted to batter down the walls of overt and systemic discrimination. Those walls had been erected during the course of the nineteenth century to exclude persons of the female sex, people of color, and the majority of common builders. Women and all racial and ethnic minorities evidently were not capable of being considered in the same class as gentlemen, so how could they hope to become architects? In addition, women’s ability to properly conduct business was restricted by laws which had their basis in the U.S. Constitution and were of course not limited to the field of architecture. For instance, a person had to be a white male landowner over the age of twenty-one to vote in the country’s first presidential election. This meant only five percent of the population was eligible to vote in 1789. Women, men without property, indentured servants, free and enslaved blacks, and Native Americans were excluded. By 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to former slaves, it established some precedents through the judicial system for guaranteeing equal protection under the law for all citizens.

In Canada, women were excluded from the vote because only individuals who owned property or significant assets were eligible, with the exception of Québec, where between 1809 and 1849 female property owners were allowed to exercise that right until Québec’s franchise act specified only men could vote. At the provincial level, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta became the first provinces to legislate in favor of women’s suffrage in 1916; Québec would be the last to do so in 1940. Starting in 1918, all Canadian-born women over the age of twenty-one who met the property requirements of their home province, a stipulation that was abolished in 1920, could cast their ballots in federal elections.

Because the U.S. Constitution also followed the British common law tradition of Doctrine of Coverture, in which the husband controlled the body of his wife, women had no right to control their own property, even if inherited, and generally a woman could not sign contracts in her own name. The same was generally true in Canada. Starting in 1872, women in Ontario could keep their