It may have passed quietly, but Wednesday marked a significant anniversary, the day women in Ontario won the right to vote and hold public office.
It was 100 years ago that the Ontario Legislature granted white women the right to vote. The same year, the federal government allowed it.
"Black women were allowed to vote in 1940," says Donna Sears Howard with Unifor Local 200's Women's Committee. "And Indigenous women were allowed to vote in 1960."
Ontario was not the first province to open democracy up to women. That honour falls to the western provinces. The Women's Suffrage movement earned the vote for women in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia the year before.
Nova Scotia followed suit in 1918, New Brunswick in 1919 and Prince Edward Island in 1922.
Quebec finally gave women the right to cast a ballot in a general election in 1940.
Sears Howard and other women marked the provincial anniversary with a rally at Charles Clark Square in Windsor Wednesday.
"One hundred years ago these women fought for birth control and better property rights for women," she says. "It seems that today we're still fighting for equal pay and childcare."
Sears Howard points to the decision to close two daycares in Belle River and the outsourcing of the child care centre at the John McGivney Centre as local examples of the struggles women continue to face.
The overall pay gap for women in Canada is 30%, but immigrant women make even less compared to men. Indigenous women make just 43 cents for every dollar a man makes.
The Ontario Equal Pay Coalition is working to close the gap for all women and says it can be done by 2025 with 12 steps including preventing violence against women, boosting the minimum wage, improving access to childcare and enforcing pay equity laws.
