MONTREAL – Just over 68 years ago, on Aug. 8, 1944, Quebec women voted in a provincial general election for the first time. They could do so thanks to a resolute, decades-long campaign by suffragists, not just female but also male, and none among them more resolute than Thérèse Casgrain.

Women had been able to vote in federal elections since 1919, and that same year New Brunswick ceased being the last provincial holdout — the last, that is, except for Quebec.

Here, curiously, it was a kind of lost right. The Constitutional Act of 1791 had given the vote to certain “persons” in Lower Canada who were property owners, and a few women who so qualified took advantage of this loophole to start voting. They were probably the first in the British Empire to do so.

(In one election a Trois-Rivières man who had put his property into his wife’s name was turned away from the poll as being no longer eligible. He suffered the double humiliation of being denied the vote and of seeing his wife vote in his stead.)

In any event, the breakthrough for women was temporary, and what was called the Constitutional Act’s “historical irregularity” was removed in 1849.

The case against Canadian women voting, which was felt most strongly in Quebec, sounds absurd today. Votes for women would undermine men’s rightful place as the head of a household. A woman’s proper place was in the home, tending to her husband and children, and not near a polling booth where she could be exposed to strong emotions, even violence. Nor did women have the needed mental equipment to understand politics.

Such attitudes, persisting into the 20th century, were galling to Thérèse Casgrain and feminist allies like Idola Saint-Jean and Marie Gérin-Lajoie. Between 1922 and 1939, they saw 13 suffrage bills introduced in the Quebec legislature, all rejected.

Casgrain, born into a prominent and wealthy Montreal family, set up the Ligue des Droits de la Femme in 1928. Along with Saint-Jean and Gérin-Lajoie, she ceaselessly trumpeted the injustice of the male-only franchise. Her arguments, as the Great Depression took hold, were often grounded more on practicalities than on abstract principle. For example, if women — who, after all, were closer to such problems as Quebec’s high infant mortality rate — could vote, then perhaps such problems could be more effectively addressed.

Casgrain organized delegations of activist women that met from time to time with provincial legislators, including Premier Louis Alexandre Taschereau, a Liberal, and his Union Nationale successor, Maurice Duplessis. They got publicity, but no results.

Opponents of women’s suffrage ranged from the hidebound through the fatuous to the downright rude. “It goes against Christian ideals,” fumed Ernest Poulin, Montréal-Laurier MLA, in 1933. “Women don’t need the right to vote. When Canada was discovered, women didn’t have this right, and no one complained then,” Pierre Gauthier, MLA for Portneuf, offered in 1935. “There are too many foxes in politics to let hens in,” said Robert-Raoul Bachand, Shefford’s MLA, that same day.