Flora MacDonald Denison

Suffrage

Flora MacDonald Denison, who combined running a successful Toronto dressmaking business with a writing career, was active in the suffrage movement in Toronto from 1906. Her views on religion, marriage, birth control and social class, expressed through her regular 1909-13 column in the Toronto Sunday World, were more radical than those of most Canadian suffragists. (See also Twenty Pioneering Newspaper Women in Canada.) President of the Canadian Suffrage Association from 1911 to 1914, she was forced to resign because of her support for the English militant suffragettes.

Social and Spiritual Ideals

At the outbreak of the First World War, Flora MacDonald Denison initially opposed the conflict, and while she did not sustain an unequivocal antiwar position throughout the war years, the First World War deepened her commitment to thoroughgoing social and spiritual reformation. She expressed this commitment first through the Canadian Whitmanite movement, a social and spiritual movement that owed its inspiration to the American poet Walt Whitman. At her country property, Bon Echo Inn in Ontario, she created a retreat dedicated to Whitmanite ideals, and beginning in 1916 she published the Whitmanite magazine the Sunset of Bon Echo. Later she became a theosophist, and in the years just before her death she participated in the Theosophist Social Reconstruction League. (See also Theosophy.)

Legacy

Records related to Flora MacDonald Denison, including draft manuscripts of writing and speeches, are available in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library of the University of Toronto.