From Silence to Suffrage: Women's path to citizenship in Newfoundland, 1803-1949

From Silence to Suffrage reveals the full history of how Newfoundland women claimed their right to participate in the public sphere, despite fierce opposition. It builds on historian Margot Duley’s pathbreaking study of the Newfoundland women's suffrage movement (Where Once Our Mothers Stood We Stand, published in 1993) with newly uncovered information and deeper research. 

Duley documents the long struggle of Newfoundland women to organize on their own behalf, starting in the early 19th century. She follows the women’s temperance movement, and public debates about poverty, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, prison reform, and other issues considered too delicate for “respectable” women to discuss.

Duley identifies women who rose up in the face of their historical powerlessness and worked to change it—the forgotten, boundary-pressing heroines of women’s history. This volume includes biographies of Armine Gosling, a remarkably advanced thinker for her time, and other inspiring suffragists who took up the cause.

Through persistence, the Newfoundland Women's Franchise League overcame determined political resistance and popularized the once radical idea of women voting and running for office. In a singular achievement, votes for Newfoundland women 25 and over passed unanimously 1925. Labrador was finally included in 1946 and the voting age equalized to 21 for all citizens.