Enrollment card

In 1933, 23-year-old Margaret Crang was elected Alderman for Edmonton, Alberta. Dubbed the “girl Alderman” by the press, she also highlighted her own gender during her campaign, arguing that women’s interests needed representation. She later won re-election in 1935. By 1937, however, she had lost her next re-election campaign. While there were many factors to her loss, one involved a national controversy sparked by her actions on a visit to the Spanish Civil War front in 1936.  

           There are records of nine Canadian women volunteering to go to Spain. Among them are women who served in a variety of non-combatant positions like nurses and Myrtle Eugenia “Jim” Watts, the only female member of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. Not included in those numbers were the women involved in organizations like the Friends of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, which supported Canadian volunteers from the home front. Crang is also not included because she visited Spain in September 1936 with a group she met in Brussels representing Alberta at the League Against War and Fascism at the Universal Peace Conference. In her reports to the Edmonton Journal from the front, Crang noted the large numbers of Spanish female fighters. The months before Crang’s arrival saw an explosion of Republican women combatants. They were steadily becoming symbolic of the Republican cause and challenging traditional patriarchal systems. These female combatants and their challenge to traditional gendered ideas around war and combat were also being debated internationally, including in Canada. It was amidst this social and political climate that Crang, while at a barricade in the Guadarrama Mountains, took notice of two armed young women. Amidst the general excitement, she then borrowed a rifle and fired two shots for the Republican cause.  

           Local Edmonton papers carried the story back to Canada, and newspapers like the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, and the Ottawa Citizen then quickly began writing about it in October 1936. The Ottawa Citizen published a facsimile of her honorary enrollment card. Much of the coverage was very critical of Crang’s actions. Some called into question her status as a peace activist, others called her actions disloyal to Canada because it was neutral in the war, and some explicitly discussed her gender, calling her actions “unwomanly.” This coverage is not surprising. Gender politics during this period saw a continuous debate surrounding women like Crang entering the public sphere and the larger impacts of suffrage activism and the feminist movement more generally.  

Throughout her political career, Crang managed gendered assumptions about politics. After her time in Spain, she had to deal with gendered expectations around war. Crang’s story highlights not just one woman’s navigation of the gendered landscape of 1930s Canada but also the larger debate surrounding women and their role in war that would continue long after people stopped discussing Crang’s two shots from the barricade.