Robert E. Hawkins Winnipeg Launch
Thursday Jan 23 2025 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium | Streaming on YouTube
Join Robert E. Hawkins for the Winnipeg launch of She Won the Vote for Women: The Life and Times of Lillian Beynon Thomas (Great Plains Press). Hosted by the Council of Women of Winnipeg.
This event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a YouTube stream.
Lillian Beynon Thomas’ suffragist campaign succeeded where all others had failed. This full-length biography fills an important gap in the history of the ‘votes for women’ movement, a campaign which saw Manitoba become the earliest federal or provincial Canadian jurisdiction to grant some women the franchise.
Law professor and historian Robert E. Hawkins describes how Lillian used her work as a journalist, playwright, and activist to lobby for the rights of women. This is the story of how a young girl came with her settler family to a desolate part of the hardscrabble prairie and who, despite these humble origins, succeeded in engineering a fundamental Canadian democratic reform and championing the emerging Canadian cultural nationalism.
Robert E. Hawkins is the past President & Vice-Chancellor of the University of Regina and, until 2023, he was a law professor in its Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. Bob grew up in Western Manitoba and is a graduate of St. John’s College, University of Manitoba, which has awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. For the past twelve years, Bob has served on Regina City Council. Bob has published extensively in leading Canadian law journals on constitutional and administrative law, and on the legal history of the Prairie region, including Lillian Benyon Thomas’ role in the suffrage movement.
Council of Women of Winnipeg operates as a non-partisan, non-sectarian diverse network of organizations and individuals who advocate for the welfare of Winnipeg women, families and society. Since 1894, CWW has made an incredible difference to the quality of life for Winnipeggers, in particular women and children.
See:
She Won The Vote For Women
- Robert E Hawkins 
Trade paperback
$28.95
Reader Reward Price: $26.06
Lillian Beynon Thomas' suffragist campaign succeeded where all others had failed. This full-length biography fills an important gap in the history of the 'votes for women' movement, a campaign which saw Manitoba become the earliest federal or provincial Canadian jurisdiction to grant women the franchise.
Lillian's "Home Loving Hearts" page in the Prairie Farmer newspaper, a weekly column in which she advocated for a wide variety of women's rights, made her one of the most popular, pioneering women's page journalists on the prairie. During this time, she founded the rural Homemakers' Clubs affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan. To achieve the franchise, she eschewed the then traditional tools of back-room, partisan party politics by instead developing a broadly-based, grass-roots movement which stands as a forerunner of modern political campaign techniques.
Facing hostile opposition to her pacifist views in Winnipeg during World War One, she and her husband went into voluntary exile in New York City where she raised money through a newspaper column describing the plight of destitute sailors in that metropolis. Returning home, she became a leading Canadian short-story writer, playwright, and public advocate for a Canadian cultural identity, distinct from that of Britain or America.
This is the story of how a young girl came with her settler family to a desolate part of the hardscrabble prairie and who, despite these humble origins, succeeded in engineering a fundamental Canadian democratic reform and championing the emerging Canadian cultural nationalism.
