Profiles of Alberta Women
Irene Parlby
Irene Parlby. Image courtesy of the United Farmers Historical Society Archives' UFHS photo collection. Public domain.
Early life
Mary Irene Parlby (nèe Marryat) was born on January 9, 1868 in London to Colonel Ernest Lindsay Marryat and Elizabeth Lynch Marryat. The eldest of seven, Irene spent her earliest years at home with her siblings and a beloved nanny. At six Irene’s father enrolled her in an Anglican boarding school, an institution she little enjoyed. She did not stay there long, and was allowed to return home after developing an illness.1 After that experience, Irene and her siblings would spend the rest of their upbringing learning from a series of governesses who tutored them at their home.
Ernest’s work as an engineer had him travelling frequently, particularly to India. He lived in India for most of Irene’s youth, coming home on vacations to visit. When Irene was about twelve, he took a managerial position overseeing the Bengal and Northwest Railway, a railway running from Lahore to Peshwar, in what is modern day Pakistan.2 For the new position Ernest moved the whole family to Rawalpindi, in the Punjab province of what was then India. While living in India, the family traveled frequently for Ernest’s work, visiting famous and exotic sites such as the Taj Mahal in Agra. The children’s schooling also continued, and Irene would sometimes study with other girls her age who lived in the area.
In 1884, when Irene was sixteen, her father retired, and the family moved back to England to live on a farm home in Surrey. On the farm Irene’s education continued under a governess, as well as a German master who taught the children music. Her upper-middle class position afforded her the opportunity to engage in various social and sport activities, including tennis, field hockey, and horse riding.3 However, not too long after returning from India, Irene got in a disagreement with her governess, and was sent away at seventeen to live in Germany for six months. While there, she continued to study music, and undertook to learn the German language. After her father fired the governess, Irene returned home to her family.4
After she returned, Irene began experiencing some discomfort in her lungs, for which she was advised to travel to Switzerland for the winter. So, she again left her home, traveling to St. Moritz where she had her first exposure to snow sports like tobogganing and skating. After this trip, Irene found herself restless, bored with the directionless life of an unmarried, upper middle-class twenty-something. While her father was supportive of her seeking an education, his suggestion of medicine as a field was met with a firm no by Irene, who harbored a secret desire to study writing or acting. Then, in 1896, an opportunity to escape her listless life presented itself.5
Travel to Canada
At the age of twenty-eight, Irene was invited to visit her friend Alix Westhead at Buffalo Lake in western Canada, in what would become Alberta. Alix was a woman of similar age to Irene, being one of the girls with whom she had shared a governess while living in India. On what was supposed to be a one-year trip, Irene traveled to the Westhead ranch, where she experienced the pioneering lifestyle, helping around the ranch, riding horses, and meeting the locals, including neighboring brothers Edward and Walter Parlby.6
“I think one of the most exhilarating feelings I experienced in the first weeks in Alberta was that of learning to be really useful!”
Alexis Ann Soltice, “Dried Apples, Victorian Ideals, and Organizational Works: The Private and Public Personae of Mary Irene Parlby,” Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, 2005.
Walter was a British-born, Oxford-educated man who held a Master of Arts in Classics. Irene was attracted to his soft-spoken manner, and his love of both ranching and scholarly pursuits.7 The two were married on March 14, 1897 on the Westhead ranch, and soon after moved to a ranch of their own on what is now Parlby Lake. There they raised cattle and bred horses, and Irene became more acquainted with the settler lifestyle, including such unfamiliar customs as guests dropping by unannounced for supper.8
In 1899, pregnant with her son Humphrey, Irene traveled back to England to give birth. It has been suggested that Irene’s decision to give birth in England, encouraged by her family there, was due to concerns around the quality of rural healthcare in Canada at the time.9 This experience would inform Irene’s future political work, which (among other things) focused on bolstering healthcare for Alberta’s rural women.
Irene’s family in England eventually followed her to Canada. When she returned to her ranch in the spring following the birth of Humphrey, her sister Gladys Marryat accompanied her to help with the raising of her child. A few years later, in 1905, her father moved the rest of the Marryats to Canada after having a very pleasant trip to Canada to visit his eldest daughter. The Marryats and the Parlbys would then go on to become influential and successful ranchers in the area.
United Farm Women of Alberta
In 1909, the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) was formed as a lobby and advocacy group for the rural communities of the newly-formed province. Walter was involved with the organization from the jump, being elected as the first president of the local Alix branch in 1909. Irene soon also became involved in community affairs. When, in 1913, Irene’s parents’ housekeeper Jean Reed first organized the Alix Country Women’s Club (CWC), Irene lent her assistance with the founding and took on the position of secretary in 1914. The CWC worked to further rural women’s issues, particularly education, pushing for the creation of a library. Irene helped to advance the library by soliciting books from readers of The Spectator, a weekly British magazine from London with a global reach. Her solicitations were successful, and the CWC library received donations of books from all over the world, including England, South Africa, America, and Japan.10
The CWC continued its work until 1915, when a Women’s Auxiliary to UFA (WAUFA) was formed, with the Alix CWC becoming a local of the new organization. In the following year, at a convention in January, the members of the auxiliary voted to change their organization to the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), rejecting the status as auxiliary to UFA in favour of becoming an independent provincial organization. Irene, who was chosen as the first president of UFWA, said of the decision “I knew we had many fine women with good brains amongst our farm women and felt they should have a more independent and bigger part to play than as a mere appendage of the men’s organization which to me is what the word auxiliary would come to mean.”11
With the UFWA, Irene traveled across Alberta, advocating for issues affecting Alberta’s rural women, particularly health care and education. The UFWA lobbied the provincial government for support for municipal hospitals, as well as mobile health and dental clinics to increase health care access for more isolated Albertans and their children. This was driven in particular by lacking medical services for pregnant rural women, for whom the limited services could mean a risk to their lives, and the lives of their children.
Suppose the women of the Nation could be educated to see, that here lies their strength, that with them alone is the responsibility for the future of the nations – theirs alone to say if that nation shall rise to the greatest heights of which it is capable, or sink to lower and lower depths of decadence, moral and physical. For the Nation is only the sum of its unity, the men are only the sons of their mothers, and as the Mother, and the Home, so is the son and the daughter.
Alexis Ann Soltice, “Dried Apples, Victorian Ideals, and Organizational Works: The Private and Public Personae of Mary Irene Parlby,” Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, 2005.
As president, Irene sought to accomplish UFWA’s goals through collaboration with other influential provincial organizations. She proposed to the UFA President Henry Wise Wood that two UFWA representatives should sit on UFA Board meetings, hoping to encourage communication between the two organizations.12 She was also involved in collaboration between UFWA and the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension, which supported rural women’s education through traveling lectures and dissemination of learning materials to rural areas. She was supported in this by Henry Marshal Tory, the first president of the University of Alberta, who was acquainted with Irene and shared her concerns about the education of Alberta’s rural population. It was also during this time that Irene was appointed to the University of Alberta Board of Governors, a position she held from 1919 to 1921 and through which she helped to form policies for services offered to rural communities by the Faculty of Extension.
In addition to traveling around Alberta, Irene made appearances at conferences and gatherings in her capacity as UFWA president. In 1918 she attended the Dominion Conference of Women in Ottawa, organized by the Canadian government to explore questions surrounding the war effort. Irene was invited to the conference to speak on issues including women’s roles in the war, and the question of women’s immigration to Canada.13 The following year, she spoke at the joint UFA-UFWA convention, for which she wrote Women’s Place in the Nation, a paper that argued for women being involved in all areas of society.14
In 1918 Irene planned to resign as the UFWA president, due in part to fatigue from medical issues; she had, in 1916, underwent an operation on her appendix, followed by a hysterectomy in April of 1918 and recurring tonsillitis subsequent to that. However, after pleas from the UFWA executive and consultation with her doctor, Irene decided to stay on until the end of 1919, but did not run for the position at the annual convention in January of 1920. Her decision was primarily due to a workload that she felt was extreme, made worse by continuing health issues.15
Political career
In 1921 the UFA underwent structural changes to transform from a lobby group to a political party, merging with the Non-Partisan League of Alberta. That year, UFA stepped into the provincial election and emerged victorious, forming a government in Alberta that would hold power for the next fourteen years. Irene was asked to run for the district of Lacombe by the UFA local. Although she had just left the presidency of UFWA, Irene accepted the opportunity. Her decision to accept can be attributed to both her keen awareness that such opportunities for women were rare, and an assumption by her that she would not secure the seat, assuming that her role would end after the election.16
During the election, she faced criticisms both for being English and for being a woman. Her opponents suggested that, being a foreigner, she could not know enough about western Canada to hold a position in the Legislature. The fact that she had traveled back to England to give birth to her son was also used against her, in an attempt to distance her from her fellow Albertans. Furthermore, her womanhood was a perceived weakness that disqualified her in some eyes. This opinion was expressed to her frequently. In one instance during the campaign she heard someone yell “We don’t want a petticoat government.”17 Despite this, Irene ran a rigorous campaign, traveling across Alberta for speeches, picnics, meetings, and other events and gatherings for the UFA.
On election day, July 18, 1921, Irene was elected as the member of the legislative assembly (MLA) for the district of Lacombe, taking 57% of the vote. The UFA swept the province, winning a majority government with Herbert Greenfield as Alberta’s new premier. After the election, Greenfield offered Irene a position in his cabinet, and Irene became a minister without portfolio, the second woman in the British Empire to ever hold a cabinet position. While she did not have a portfolio, Irene’s position on the cabinet was in large part as a representative for women and children, with the duty of advising on these issues as they pertained to other portfolios. In this capacity she was popularly known as the ‘Women’s Minister.’18
Irene would hold her position for the next fourteen years, winning again in both the 1926 and 1930 provincial elections. Throughout her tenure, nearly twenty laws relating to women and children’s welfare were passed, many of which Irene contributed to in her ministerial capacity. These include the 1923 Act for the Protection of Children of Unmarried Parents, which ensured that fathers of illegitimate children were responsible for financial support, the 1925 Minimum Wage for Women Act, and a proposed 1925 amendment to the Dower Act that would have ensured all property owned by a woman prior to marriage, or obtained through gift or inheritance, would remain her sole property. While this amendment was not passed, it brought the question women’s property rights to the fore and encouraged discussion of the issue.19
Much of Irene’s activity as an MLA was informed by extensive research she conducted on various issues. For the amendment to the Dower Act, she undertook extensive research into women’s property rights in other countries, including Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and published an article titled ‘The Economic Status of the Married Woman’ in Labour Annual to share her research and stimulate discussion of the issue in Alberta. In 1928 she accompanied Greenfield on a trip to Denmark and Sweden where she visited a variety of schools to gather information about alternative and experimental school structures. Her role involved studying the educational systems to investigate whether their models could be applied to the unique context of rural education in Alberta.
In addition to women, children, and education, another subject of interest for Irene was eugenics. Sharing a common view at the time, Irene supported eugenic practices including regulation of marriage, segregation, and voluntary sterilization of individuals deemed ‘deficient’ or unfit for reproduction. In Irene’s view, eugenics in this form was a tool to protect women and families, and to combat disease, poverty, or delinquency.20 It is important to note that the sterilization that Irene and farm women advocated for was voluntary, not state imposed. A motivating factor for this view was the desire to give married women the right to be sterilized rather than risk their health in unwanted pregnancies. In Irene’s mind, the ‘bearing’ and ‘care’ of the human race was women’s responsibility, and thus women needed to be at the front of any eugenics project.21
Persons Case
It was while serving as an MLA that Irene participated in a petitioning of the Canadian government as a member of what has become known as the Famous Five, a group of five Alberta women including Emily Murphy, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, and Irene. In 1927 the five women met in the home of Emily Murphy in Edmonton and drafted a petition for the Canadian government to direct the Supreme Court to address the issue of whether or not women could be appointed to the Senate of Canada. While some Canadian women could by that time vote and hold office, they were not permitted to sit on the Senate due to the narrow interpretation of the phrase ‘qualified persons’ in the British North America (BNA) Act, the law that (among other things) determined who could sit on the Senate. In 1867 when the BNA Act was written, ‘persons’ was interpreted as only referring to men. As the BNA Act did not explicitly state whether or not women should be included, the narrow interpretation of persons stood, and women were not allowed to be appointed to the Senate through to the early 20th century.
After the initial petition from the Famous Five, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the question, but ultimately unanimously decided that women were not persons under the BNA Act, and could not sit in the Senate. The Five appealed the decision, and the case went to the Judicial Committee of the Imperial Privy Council in London, England, which overturned the Supreme Court’s decision in October 1929. The case, which became known as the Persons Case, stands as a pivotal moment in the history of women’s rights and constitutional interpretation in Canada.
Later life
In 1930, the same year she was again re-elected in her riding in Lacombe, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett selected Irene to serve as one of three Canadian delegates to travel to Geneva, Switzerland for the League of Nations meeting that year. Traveling by train and boat, Irene traversed first Canada then the Atlantic Ocean, making multiple stops in eastern Canada along the way. She took the travel as an opportunity to deliver pro-western and pro-national unity messages to organizations including the Ottawa Women’s Canadian Club, where she delivered the address ‘When East and West Meet.’
Her time in Geneva was occupied with many receptions, banquets, speeches, and social events with delegations from various countries. It was both an interesting and an exhausting time for Irene, and a somewhat lonely experience, as she rarely saw the other two Canadian representatives. On her way back home from Geneva, Irene fell ill, spending some time in a hospital in Montreal before making it back to Alberta. After consultation with her doctor, Irene decided to end her career in public service, and did not stand for re-election in the 1935 provincial election.
After retiring from politics, Irene returned to her home, shifting attention to her family and to her garden. She continued to be engaged in the public sphere, keeping informed and occasionally writing on subjects including cooperation, gardening, and current affairs. Her works were published in various magazines, including The Grain Growers' Guide, The Canadian Magazine, and The Country Guide. Additionally in the 1940s she participated in a radio broadcast series with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). On July 12, 1965 Irene died at the age of 97. She passed in her sleep, still on the ranch that she and Walter had built together.
In her adopted home of Alberta, Irene Parlby worked for the benefit of her fellow women through her volunteerism, activism, and political career. The UFWA, which she helped to create and run, continued in various forms until 2000, becoming the Farm Women’s Union of Alberta (FWUA) in 1949 and then the Women of Unifarm in 1970. Legislation like the Official Guardian Act and amendments to the Minimum Wage for Women Act that she championed empowered Albertan women, and in her capacity as cabinet minister Irene brought discussion of women’s issues into the political arena and consciousness of the province. While she is most known and recognized as a member of the Famous Five, involvement in the Persons Case is only a fraction of the legacy she left to the province.
Footnotes
1 Alexis Ann Soltice, “Dried Apples, Victorian Ideals, and Organizational Works: The Private and Public Personae of Mary Irene Parlby” (doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, 2005), 8.
2 Encyclopedia, s.v. “Parlby, Irene (1868-1965),” last modified 2019, https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/parlby-irene-1868-1965.
3 Ibid.
4 Soltice, “Dried Apples,” 10.
5 Ibid., 12-13.
6 Encyclopedia, “Parlby, Irene (1868-1965).”
7 Ibid.
8 Soltice, “Dried Apples,” 157.
9 Ibid., 261.
10 Ibid., 16.
11 Ibid., 187.
12 Ibid., 211.
13 Encyclopedia, “Parlby, Irene (1868-1965).”
14 Famous 5 Foundation, “Irene Parlby,” last modified 2016, http://www.famou5.ca/irene-parlby.
15 Soltice, “Dried Apples,” 225-226.
16 Ibid., 235-6.
17 Ibid., 239.
18 Catherine Cavanaugh and Susanna McLeod, “Irene Parlby,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified 2021, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/mary-irene-parlby.
19 Soltice, “Dried Apples,” 296-297.
20 Sheila Gibbons and Colette Leung, “Irene Parlby,” Eugenics Archives, accessed on April 14, 2022, http://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/512fa63234c5399e2c00000e.
21 A. Naomi Nind, “Solving an ‘Appalling’ Problem: Social Reformers and the Campaign for the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act, 1928,” Alberta Law Review 38, no. 2 (2000): 536-562.
22 Soltice, “Dried Apples,” 315-6.
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