Local Council of Women of Halifax

The core of the well trained and progressive leadership was five women: Anna Leonowens (famous for The King and I), Edith Archibald (who eventually became the leader of the National Council), Eliza Ritchie, Agnes Dennis (president from 1906–20) and May Sexton.

In 1870, Hannah Norris began to mobilize women into the public sphere through establishing the Woman’s Baptist Missionary Aid Society across the Maritimes.

")[5] Two years later, in 1893, Edith Archibald and others made the first official attempt to have a suffrage bill for women property holders passed in Nova Scotia.

The bill was passed by the legislature but quashed by Attorney General James Wilberforce Longley (who opposed unions and female emancipation for the twenty years he was in office).

[11] In June 1897 the annual meeting of the National Council was convened in Halifax, where presentations were made by Lady Aberdeen and American suffragist May Wright Sewall.

[13] (A month later Nova Scotian and Prime Minister of Canada Robert Borden - whose wife Laura Bond was former president of the LCWH - used his majority to pass women's suffrage for the whole country.