From Silence to Suffrage reveals the remarkable history of how Newfoundland women won the right to vote, despite fierce opposition.
Duley documents the long struggle of Newfoundland women to organize on their own behalf, starting in the early nineteenth century. She follows the women’s temperance movement, along with public debates about poverty, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, prison reform, and other issues considered too delicate for “respectable” women to discuss.
She reveals the lives of women leaders—mostly long-forgotten—who fought for change in the face of fierce resistance. They include Armine Gosling, a remarkably advanced thinker for her time, among other inspiring suffragists who took up the cause.
Through persistence, the Newfoundland Women’s Franchise League overcame determined political opposition and popularized the once radical idea of women voting and running for office.
