Wilson, Cairine (1885–1962)

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Wilson, Cairine (1885–1962)

First woman appointed to the Canadian Senate. Pronunciation: Car-EEN WILL-son. Born Cairine Reay Mackay on February 4, 1885, at Montreal, Quebec, Canada; died on March 3, 1962, in Ottawa, Canada; seventh child of Robert Mackay (a businessman and politician) and Jane (Baptist) Mackay; attended private girls' school and the Trafalgar Institute, Montreal; married Norman Wilson, in 1909; children: Olive (b. 1910), Janet (b. 1911), Cairine (b. 1913), Ralph (b. 1915), Anna (b. 1918), Angus (b. 1920), Robert (b. 1922), Norma (b. 1925).

Elected joint president of the Eastern Ontario Liberal Association (1921); organized the National Federation of Liberal Women of Canada (1923); helped establish the Twentieth Century Liberal Association of Canada; appointed the first female member of the Canadian Senate (February 15, 1930); elected president of the League of Nations Society (1936); served as a member of the Canadian delegation to the General Assembly of the UN in New York (August 1949).

In October 1929, the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council in London (the supreme legal authority of the British Empire) brought down a landmark ruling based on Section 24 of the British North America Act. According to this ruling, women were henceforth to be considered "qualified persons" and thus entitled to sit in the second chamber of the Canadian Parliament, the Senate. This decision, the welcome outcome of a long struggle waged by Canadian feminists, was warmly endorsed by Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King. MacKenzie King was particularly pleased because he was afforded the opportunity to appoint to the Senate one of his oldest friends, Cairine Wilson.

Wilson was born on February 4, 1885, into one of the richest and most influential Scots-Canadian families in Montreal, Quebec. Her father Robert Mackay, who had arrived in Canada 30 years earlier as a young and virtually penniless immigrant, had achieved rapid success in the city's burgeoning business environment. When he died in 1916, he held directorships in no fewer than 16 companies, including the highly prestigious Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Robert's Presbyterian background imbued him with a deep and profound sense of religion. He believed in the virtues of hard work and thought that the principal duty of a good Christian was to employ his or her talents and wealth for the benefit of less fortunate members of society. It was this attitude of public service which was later to blossom so fruitfully in his daughter Cairine.

Cairine's mother Jane Baptist Mackay was the daughter of a prominent lumber baron in Quebec. Little is known of her apart from the fact that she suffered constant ill health, a condition probably aggravated by numerous pregnancies. Equally sparse are details concerning Cairine's younger years. Her strict, although not apparently unkindly, Presbyterian upbringing turned her into a shy child. It was perhaps for this reason that her father decided, rather unusually considering his wealth and social position, that Cairine was not to be educated by private tutors. Instead, she was sent to a small private girls' school, located near her home, which rejoiced in the name of "Misses Symmers and Smith's School for Young Ladies."

At age 14, Cairine was placed in the Trafalgar Institute which was, at that time, the most exclusive finishing school for women in Montreal. The three years she spent there (1899–1902) were, by all accounts, productive and happy. Wilson excelled in history and mathematics and, more important for her later career, became fluent in French. The headmistress of the Trafalgar Institute, Grace Fairley , actively encouraged her pupils to embrace the principles of patriotism and service to others. For the rest of her life, Wilson never forgot the lessons taught by Fairley. Indeed, shortly before her own death, Wilson established the Fairley Prize, an annual award presented to the graduating pupil who had made the most outstanding contribution to school life at the Institute.

Wilson did not continue her studies at a higher level. Though it was possible for women to be admitted to Montreal's McGill University, it was then considered unthinkable that anyone of Cairine's social background should do so. Rather, her time was filled with a continuous whirl of social functions and receptions. In 1904, however, her father encouraged Cairine and two school friends to undertake an extensive sightseeing trip of Britain and Europe (in the company of three chaperons). She repeated this excursion twice more in the next few years.

More significantly, it was during this period that Wilson began to take an active interest in politics. James Mackay had been appointed a Liberal member of the Canadian Senate in 1901 by his close friend, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the prime minister. This position meant that James was required to spend a considerable amount of time in the nation's capital, Ottawa. Wilson began to accompany her father on these trips, and they frequently stayed at Laurier's private residence where she soon became a good friend of Lady Zoe Laurier , the prime minister's wife.

It was at one of the many social events organized in Ottawa that Cairine met her future husband, Norman Wilson. Like Cairine, Norman was descended from a prominent Scots-Canadian family that had achieved considerable business success in Quebec. When they first met, he was a member of Parliament for the Liberal Party. Although no intellectual, Norman had a gregarious and out-going character and was widely considered to be the most eligible bachelor in Ottawa.

Senator Wilson has made a contribution that is recognized throughout the world.
—John Diefenbaker

Shortly before their marriage in February 1909, Norman resigned his seat in Parliament. In April of that year, the couple moved to a new home in Rockland, a small town in Eastern Ontario, where Norman had become manager of the W.C. Edwards Company lumber mills. For the next ten years, Cairine devoted herself to running their large home and raising a rapidly growing family (her first child, Olive , was born in 1910). In 1912, Cairine's responsibilities were aggravated following the death of her mother. By this time, the family home in Montreal was inhabited only by her father and brother Edward, and Cairine had to frequently return from Rockland to help manage the house (as well as another family property in St. Andrews, New Brunswick).

These activities left Wilson very little time for other interests or concerns. When World War I broke out in 1914, however, she organized local women in Rockland into an auxiliary branch of the Red Cross to produce knitted woollen goods for Canadian military personnel overseas. Not long after, in 1916, her father died, leaving an estate valued at over $10 million (approximately $100 million at the close of the 20th century). The legacy which Wilson received made her family financially secure and allowed Norman to give up his job as manager of the lumber mill. He, Cairine and their children then returned to Ottawa.

In an interview given in 1931, Wilson explained how these early years of marriage had brought her "great happiness." She then went on to recount, however, how a family friend had remarked to her, on her return to Ottawa, that he had never "seen a person deteriorate mentally as I had" and that she had become "a most uninteresting individual." It was this frank, if rather brutal, assessment which prompted Wilson to seriously question the role she had adopted for herself in life. Deciding that she could do much more to be of service to others, she immediately plunged into an active involvement in political and social issues.

In 1921, Wilson was elected joint president of the Eastern Ontario Liberal Association and in this capacity traveled widely throughout Ontario speaking on behalf of the Liberal Party for the forthcoming federal election. This election, held in December of the same year, was the first occasion on which all Canadian women were allowed to vote. The then Liberal Party leader (and eventual victor in the election) was a close friend of her husband's named William Lyon MacKenzie King. MacKenzie King recognized the important contribution which Cairine had made to the party's success. Shortly after, he encouraged her to found the Ottawa Women's Liberal Club, an increasingly influential political association for which she served as president for three years.

Over the next few years, Wilson became more and more involved in various forms of political activity. In 1923, she began to organize the National Federation of Liberal Women of Canada, a country-wide coalition of women's Liberal Clubs. She then turned her attention to the party's youth and helped establish the Twentieth Century Liberal Association of Canada. This organization, which regularly convened young people in Ottawa for the purposes of dialogue and debate, was personally financed by Wilson. At the same time, her interests extended beyond the political realm. She became an executive member of the Victorian Order of Nurses and was an enthusiastic participant in the meetings of the Young Women's Christian Association.

On February 15, 1930, four months after the historic ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, Prime Minister Mackenzie King appointed Cairine the first female member of the Canadian Senate. Although Agnes Macphail had been the first woman elected to the House of Commons in 1921, Wilson's appointment had only been made possible thanks to the efforts of Emily Gowan Murphy and other feminists from the province of Alberta. Indeed, it had been widely anticipated that it would be Murphy, and not Wilson, who would be given the Senate seat. The former, however, was a prominent supporter of the opposition Conservative Party and MacKenzie King preferred

to select someone closely affiliated to his own party. Although Wilson was a personal friend of the prime minister, her appointment was due to the combination of her leading role in Liberal Party organizations, the fact that she was fluent in French (an important consideration in Canadian politics) and, finally, because she was in a position to contribute financially to the party's funds.

Although Wilson's appointment met with general public approval, a number of critics (particularly from Alberta and Quebec) argued that some other, more qualified woman deserved this great honor. Wilson herself had her own doubts about her suitability and was only half-jesting when she wrote to MacKenzie King that "you are going to make me the most hated woman in Canada." Although her fears were unfounded, she was deeply concerned with the problem of reconciling her public duties with what she viewed was the proper role of a wife and mother. During her maiden speech before the Senate, delivered on February 25, 1930, she said, "I trust the future will show that while engaged in public affairs, the woman, the mother of a family, by reason of her maternal instinct and her sense of responsibility, will remain the faithful guardian of the home."

Over the next few years, Wilson used her influential position to advance many socially progressive causes. She spoke in favor of liberalizing the (highly restrictive) divorce laws and was in favor of legislation designed to limit the number of hours each individual was required to work each week. In 1936, she was elected president of the League of Nations Society in Canada which sought to oppose aggression and promote peace between nations through international arbitration and the creation of collective security agreements. The principal test of the League came in 1938. In September, the British and French prime ministers (Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier) went to Munich, Germany, and signed an agreement with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler which ceded the Sudetenland, the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia, to Germany. Chamberlain and Daladier called this policy, which effectively endorsed the dismemberment of a foreign sovereign state, "appeasement." Wilson, and her fellow members of the League, called it a "sell-out."

This courageous and principled stand put her in a difficult position. The Munich agreement was strongly supported by MacKenzie King and other important Liberal Party executives. Although no admirers of Hitler, they were extremely reluctant to be dragged into another European war on behalf of the British. Moreover, MacKenzie King remembered the divisive effect which the First World War had had on Canadian society when attempts, by another Liberal administration, to introduce national conscription had been fiercely resisted in the predominantly French-speaking province of Quebec. MacKenzie King correctly reasoned that a new war would require similar measures of conscription, and he was afraid that this would cause a split in his party which traditionally drew much of its support from Quebec. When Wilson publicly denounced the Munich agreement, along with the irresolute stance of the Liberal Party, she almost precipitated a complete break between herself and MacKenzie King. However, when Hitler attacked Poland in September of the following year, Wilson's position was fully vindicated.

Immediately prior to and during the war itself, Wilson served on the board of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees. This commission endeavored to raise public awareness of the plight of (particularly Jewish) refugees from Nazi tyranny. After the war, it continued to press the Liberal government to open the country's doors and admit any displaced person who wished to come to Canada. Unfortunately, the Canadian public, which had strong memories of the economic depression of the 1930s, was in no mood to countenance any program of largescale immigration. Bowing to popular pressure, MacKenzie King refused to act. This narrow attitude came as a deep disappointment to Wilson, especially when the full enormity of Nazi crimes became evident. She continued to do what she could for individual refugees but was unable to effect any real alteration in government policy.

Another important issue during this period centered around policies for the reconstruction of postwar Canadian society and the reintegration of demobilized armed forces personnel back into the community. Some proposed a welfare state that would combine social security provisions with universal health insurance and a program of family allowances. Wilson took an active part in this debate, stressing, in particular, women's special needs for preventative health care and the extension of educational opportunities to the new generation of Canadian youth. Although proponents of these reforms initially met with stiff opposition from MacKenzie King (who was appalled at the potential cost of such measures), their proposals were eventually largely enacted. The progressive welfare legislation currently in effect in Canada is a direct result of their efforts.

In the years following the war, Wilson served on a wide variety of Senate committees, including banking and commerce, public health, and external relations. It was her prominence in the latter area which caused the new prime minister, Louis St. Laurent, to invite her to serve as a member of the Canadian delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. Wilson, the first Canadian woman to be accorded this distinction, took up her appointment in August 1949. At the General Assembly, she was elected to what was known as the Third Committee, a standing commission of the United Nations which dealt with social, humanitarian, and cultural issues. Another member of this committee and subsequently a friend of Wilson's was the wife of a former president of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt .

Wilson served at the United Nations for two years before returning to Ottawa and her senatorial duties. In these last years, she continued to speak out on behalf of a variety of social issues, including the divorce laws and the injustices and abuses of the immigration system. Her husband Norman died in 1956 from Parkinson's disease and shortly afterwards Cairine was diagnosed with a heart condition. Three years later, she was found to be suffering from uterine cancer. Even then, Wilson refused to rest, and she continued to address various groups especially on immigration issues. In early 1962, her cancer entered a terminal stage, and she was admitted to the Civic Hospital in Ottawa where she died peacefully on March 3.