Nellie McClung

Moving to Manitoba as a child, McClung became a bestselling novelist with Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908). A brilliant, witty orator, she staged a famous 'Mock Parliament' in Winnipeg in 1914, inverting gender roles to ridicule anti-suffrage arguments, which led Manitoba to become the first Canadian province to grant women the vote.

Elected to the Alberta legislature in 1921, McClung joined Emily Murphy and three other women in launching the Persons Case (Edwards v. Canada), which reached the British Privy Council in 1929, legally establishing that women were 'persons' eligible to sit in the Canadian Senate.