A rchive Date
[ 24-01-2017 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Murphy
Madam Justice Emily Murphy - The Black Candle
Emily Murphy (born Emily Gowan Ferguson; 14 March 1868 - 17 October 1933) was a Canadian women's rights activist, jurist, and author. In 1916, she became the first female magistrate in Canada, and in the British Empire. She is best known for her contributions to Canadian feminism, specifically to the question of whether women were "persons" under Canadian law.
Murphy is known as one of the "The Famous Five" (also called "The Valiant Five")[citation needed] - a group of Canadian women’s rights activists that also included Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby. In 1927, the women launched the "Persons Case," contending that women could be "qualified persons" eligible to sit in the Senate. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that they were not. However, upon appeal to the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council, the court of last resort for Canada at that time, the women won their case.
Early life:
Emily Murphy was born the third of six children in Cookstown, Ontario to wealthy landowner and businessman Isaac Ferguson and his wife - also named Emily. As a child, Murphy frequently joined her two older brothers Thomas and Gowan in their adventures; their father encouraged this behaviour and often had his sons and daughters share responsibilities equally.
Considering her family involvement in the law and politics, it is no surprise that Murphy became one of the most influential suffragists in Canada. Murphy grew up under the influence of her maternal grandfather, Ogle R. Gowan who was a politician that founded a local branch of the Orange Order in 1830 and two uncles who were a Supreme Court justice and a Senator, respectively. Her brother also became a lawyer and another member of the Supreme Court.
Her family were prominent members of society and she benefited from parents who supported their daughter receiving formal academic education. She is as well related to James Robert Gowan, who was a lawyer, judge, and senator. Murphy attended Bishop Strachan School, an exclusive Anglican private school for girls in Toronto and, through a friend, she met her future husband Arthur Murphy who was 11 years her senior. In 1887, they married each other, and had four daughters; Madeleine, Evelyn, Doris and Kathleen. Doris died young of diphtheria.
After Doris’ death, the family decided to try a new setting and moved west to Swan River, Manitoba in 1903 and then to Edmonton, Alberta in 1907.
Drugs and race:
Although Murphy’s views on race changed over the course of her life,[5] the perspective contained in her book, the Black Candle, is considered the most consequential because it played a role in creating a widespread “war on drugs mentality” leading to legislation that “defined addiction as a law enforcement problem.”[6] A series of articles in Maclean's magazine under her pen name, “Janey Canuck,” forms the basis of the Black Candle. Using extensive anecdotes and “expert” opinion, the Black Candle depicts an alarming picture of drug abuse in Canada, detailing Murphy’s understanding of the use and effects of opium, cocaine, and pharmaceuticals, as well as a “new menace,” “marihuana.”[7] Murphy’s concern with drugs began when she started coming into “disproportionate contact with Chinese people” in her courtroom because they were over represented in the criminal justice system.[8] In addition to professional expertise and her own observations, Murphy was also given a tour of opium dens in Vancouver’s Chinatown by local police detectives. Vancouver at the time was in the midst of a moral panic over drugs that was part of the anti - Oriental campaign that precipitated the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923.[9] Canadian drug historian Catherine Carstairs has argued that Murphy’s importance regarding drug policy has been “overstated” because she did not have an impact on the drug panic in Vancouver, but that nevertheless “her articles did mark a turning point and her book … brought the Vancouver drug panic to a larger Canadian audience.”[10]
Race permeates the Black Candle, and is intricately entwined with the drug trade and addiction in Murphy’s analysis. Yet she is ambiguous in her treatment of non - whites.[11] In one passage, for example, she chastises whites who use the Chinese as “scapegoats,”[12] while elsewhere, she refers to the Chinese man as a “visitor” in this country, and that “it might be wise to put him out” if it turns out that this visitor carries “poisoned lollipops in his pocket and feeds them to our children.”[13] Drug addiction, however, not the Chinese immigrant, is “a scourge so dreadful in its effects that it threatens the very foundations of civilization,” and which laws therefore need to target for eradication.[14] Drugs victimize everyone, and members of all races perpetrate the drug trade, according to Murphy.[15] At the same time, she does not depart from the dominant view of middle class whites at the time that “races” were discrete, biologically determined categories, naturally ranked in a hierarchy. In this scheme, the white race was facing degradation through miscegenation, while the more prolific “black and yellow races may yet obtain the ascendancy”[16] and thus threatened to “wrest the leadership of the world from the British.”[17]
Murphy’s ambiguity regarding non - whites is reflected in scholarly debates, but what is not controversial is that the Black Candle was written “for the express purpose of arousing public demands for stricter drug legislation” and that in this she was to some degree successful.[18] This motivation may have influenced her racial analysis by playing to the popular prejudices of her white audiences. On the other hand, she may have deliberately tried to distance herself from those prejudices, especially the ones propagated by the more vulgar and hysterical Asian exclusionists in British Columbia in order to maximize her own credibility and sway her more moderate readers.
The Eugenics Movement:
During the early twentieth century, scientific knowledge emerged in the forefront of social importance. Advances in science and technology were thought to hold answers to current and future social problems. Murphy was among those who thought that the problems that were plaguing their society, such as alcoholism, drug abuse and crime were caused because of mental deficiencies. In a 1932 article titled “ Overpopulation and Birth Control”, she states: "... over - population [is a] basic problem of all…none of our troubles can even be allayed until this is remedied."
As the politics behind the Second World War continued to develop, Murphy, who was a pacifist, theorized that the only reason for war was that nations needed to fight for land to accommodate their growing populations. Her argument was that: if there was population control, people would not need as much land. Without the constant need for more land, war would cease to exist. Her solution to these social issues was eugenics. Selective breeding was considered a progressive scientific and social approach and Murphy supported the compulsory sterilization of those individuals who were considered mentally deficient.
She believed that the mentally and socially inferior reproduced more than the "human thoroughbreds" and appealed to the Alberta Legislative Assembly for eugenic sterilization. In a petition, she wrote that mentally defective children were, "a menace to society and an enormous cost to the state…science is proving that mental defectiveness is a transmittable hereditary condition." She wrote to Minister of Agriculture and Health, George Hoadley that two female "feeble - minded" mental patients already bred several offspring. She called it: "a neglect amounting to a crime to permit these two women to go on bearing children. They are both young women and likely to have numerous offspring before leaving the hospital".
Due in part to her heavy advocacy of compulsory sterilization, thousands of Albertans, who were not considered to possess any intelligence, were sterilized without their knowledge or consent under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta before its repeal in 1972.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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