Women Who Woke Up The Law

The story behind Campbell’s case highlighted the woeful unfairness of late 19th-century marriage laws, when wives were essentially chattel. Campbell’s abusive husband falsely accused her of adultery, beat her up, took custody of her children and turned her out without a penny. And all of that was okay under the law. While she successfully proved to Canadian Parliament in 1877 that she hadn’t been unfaithful, the only real grounds for divorce back then (and which had to be approved by Parliament), and received alimony, the law didn’t change. She never saw three of her four children again, as husbands were almost always granted custody at that time. Because she was pregnant with her fourth, the court allowed her to keep that child. 

The book also covers several cases involving property rights — of which married women had none, really, until 1978. Florence Murdoch, an Alberta woman who was badly beaten in 1968, then locked out of the ranch property she had worked and helped her husband to purchase, “was the touch paper for the #MeToo movement of her time and place,” writes Wells. 

Other cases involve sexual assault, fair treatment in the workplace, abortion rights, self-defence and racism. The shocking, often tragic stories of the women behind these cases aren’t so much images in the rear-view mirror as signposts for understanding the present and navigating the road ahead. 

Recent years, for instance, have seen the pernicious use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). As the author explains, NDAs originally came out of Silicon Valley in the 1980s to protect valuable trade secrets. “Over time, non-disclosure agreements became the invasive species of contract law” and spread to cover sexual and racial misconduct by the rich and powerful. 

As Wells, an accomplished journalist and lawyer, acknowledges, “the law is far from perfect.