UNA celebrates April 19, the 100th anniversary of the day most women won the right to vote in Alberta.

Today marks 100 years of women’s right to vote in Alberta

It has been 100 years since women won the right to vote in Alberta.

It was Western Canada, starting in Manitoba in 1915 and moving to Alberta in 1916, where Canadian women first won the right to vote. On April 19, 1916, the Equal Suffrage Statutory Law Amendment Act was passed by the Alberta legislature.

Not until 1960, though, did all Alberta women win the right to vote, when changes to federal laws finally acknowledged that Indigenous women had that fundamental right.

In politics, gender parity in cabinets and caucuses remains the exception, not the rule. Only in Alberta – under New Democratic Party Premier (and former United Nurses of Alberta Labour Relations Officer) Rachel Notley – do women actually outnumber men in Cabinet.

An excellent column by the Edmonton Journal’s Paula Simons tells the stories of some of the women who fought for this fundamental right.

“As we mark the 100th anniversary of their great, subversive insurgency, they deserve our thanks for their courage, their conviction – and their political cunning,” Simons wrote