Henrietta Muir Edwards (18 December 184910 November 1931) was a Canadian women's rights activist, author and reformer.
She was the eldest of "The Famous Five", along with Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby, who fought to have women recognized as "persons" under the law, and for the woman's right to vote in elections.
She was born Henrietta Louise Muir in Montreal. She grew up in an upper-middle-class family that valued culture and religion. Edwards became active in many religious organisations, where she grew disenchanted with old traditions where the exclusion of women was acceptable.
Biography
Edwards was born on 18 December 1849.
She married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in 1876 and they had three children: Alice, William, and Margaret. The NCWC was founded in 1893, the same year the Canadian government commissioned Edwards, who was also an artist, to paint a set of dishes for the Canadian exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. honouring Edwards and her colleagues from the Persons Case (1938, Edwards's daughter-in-law at left)]]
Edwards and her family returned to the Northwest Territories around 1903, where her husband was posted to Fort Macleod as a medical officer to the Blood tribe.
During the latter period of the First World War, when supplies and morale were at a low, the Government of Canada selected individuals to assist in an advisory capacity about how to invoke stricter conservation measures. Mrs. Edwards was part of the selected committee, and it was the first time in Canadian history that a woman had been called upon for a review of public policy with the Government. and Legal Status of Women in Alberta (1921). She worked with Louise McKinney, Irene Parlby and Emily Murphy to "lobby the Alberta government for recognition of dower and matrimonial property rights." This friendship and collaboration would be called upon again to fight for the Persons Case in the late 1920s, which established that Canadian women were eligible to be appointed senators and more generally, that Canadian women had the same rights as Canadian men with respect to positions of political power.
Edwards was buried in Mount Pleasant Municipal Cemetery, Edmonton. The memorial erected to her memory reads "Let her own works praise her. Her delight was in the law of the Lord" Her date of death on the memorial is given as 9 November 1931. Her date of death is listed as 10 November 1931 in the Canadian Encyclopedia. The "Persons case" was recognized as an Historic Event in 1997. In addition, in October 2009, the Senate voted to name Edwards and the rest of the Five, Canada's first "honorary senators."