Charlotte Elizabeth Whitton OC CBE (March 8, 1896 – January 25, 1975) was a Canadian feminist and mayor of Ottawa.

She attended Queen's University where she was the star of the women's hockey team and was known as the fastest skater in the league.

[4] When Low lost his parliamentary seat, Whitton then focused on her role as founding director (1922) of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare, and worked there until 1941.

[7] Whitton was elected to Ottawa's Board of Control in 1950, leading the city-wide polls, and started her term on January 1, 1951.

Whitton dismissed Pearson's design as a 'white badge of surrender, waving three dying maple leaves' which might as well be 'three white feathers on a red background,' a symbol of cowardice.

'It is a poor observance of our first century as a nation if we run up a flag of surrender with three dying maple leaves on it,' she said.

She became well-known for her assertiveness, and for her vicious wit with which many male colleagues, and once the Lord Mayor of London, were attacked.

[12] In the 1958 federal election, Whitton made her only attempt to run for Parliament, in the riding of Ottawa West, as the Progressive Conservative nominee.

(Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada by Fraidie Martz)[15] In 1938, she attended a conference in Ottawa to launch the Canadian National Committee on Refugees (CNCR).

[17] The sentiment exists that she "simply didn't want the name of a Jewish family on an Ottawa hospital building.".

"[18] In opposition to the anti-Semite argument, Whitton was well received by various Jewish organizations in her lifetime, including B'nai B'rith and various Jewish-centred publications.

[20] The release of these papers sparked much debate in the Canadian media about whether the relationship between Whitton and Grier could be characterized as lesbian, or merely as an emotionally intimate friendship between two unmarried women, with the debate hinging in part on the question of whether or not it was necessary to prove that Whitton and Grier had ever had sexual intercourse with each other.

Whitton's relationship with Grier was dramatized in a 2008 play called Molly's Veil written by Canadian playwright and actor Sharon Bajer.

Author David Mullington's 2010 work Charlotte: The Last Suffragette won the 2011 Donald Grant Creighton Award for biography from the Ontario Historical Society.