March 10, 2025
Women Who Woke Up the Law, by Karin Wells
Karin Wells’ Women Who Woke Up the Law is hardly a feel-good book—it tells the stories of women who had to fight for very little, and often didn’t even get it—but it made me feel good anyway. Not because of good triumphing over evil, because in the end justice prevails, nope, not that at all. But instead because it tells the stories of women (and their lawyers, many of whom were also women) who nevertheless persisted, planting seeds that might take decades to grow, if ever, stories of the incremental pace of progress (along with requisite setbacks). Progress is not inevitable, as we’ve never learned in starker clarity than we’re learning right now as decades of progress are ripped apart and there are even people cheering for it. But progress is still possible, and it takes courage, and grit, and the work of it is hard and often unrewarding. And yet.
Wells, whose previous works instead one of my favourite books about Canadian history, The Abortion Caravan, once again brings the past to life with Women Who Woke Up the Law, each chapter telling the stories of the women behind fundamental changes to Canadian law. These include Eliza Campbell, whose gravestone at Mount Pleasant Cemetery still proclaims “I Did NOT Commit Adultery,” after she was accused by her husband, and fought valiantly for her reputation (and alimony), leading to eventual changes to Canadian divorce law. Also Emily Murphy, the first female magistrate in the British empire, “a complicated and dubious feminist icon,” who was part of a push to give women a share of their husband’s estates. Florence Murdoch, a ranch wife and survivor of brutal spousal abuse (she was beaten so hard to had to have her jaw wired shut) who fought for a portion of the ranch she’d put years of work into, though the Supreme Court of Canada would declare her not eligible, that her “twenty-five years of cutting hay, moving, dehorning, vaccinating and driving cattle… ‘was the work done by any ranch wife.'”
Wells shares stories of women whose courage helped to slowly move the needle on consent laws; of a woman who fought the system for unemployment insurance when she left work to have a baby (judges that argued that women could not be victims of sexual discrimination because in order for there to be discrimination, men and women would have to be equal, which they were not); of Jeannette Corbiere Lavell who fought to keep her Indigenous status after she married a non-Indigenous man (Indigenous men did not suffer such a penalty when they married non-Indigenous women); Chantale Diagle whose abusive partner tried to prevent her from accessing an abortion in the 1980s; Jane Hurshman who killed her sadistic partner after years of abuse and would go on to speak publicly about domestic violence; and Viola Desmond and Rachael Baylis, two Black Canadian women who, decades apart, would help to bring intersectionality in legal parlance. And so many more ordinary extraordinary lives.
As with her previous books, Wells is skilled at pulling threads and making connections, weaving these wide-ranging tales into a fascinating tapestry.
