Annie MacDonald Langstaff

Samuel William Jacobs, in 1918

In 1906, Langstaff moved to Montreal, Quebec, to work for the law firm of Jacobs, Hall and Garneau,[5][14] as a stenographer for the head partner Samuel William Jacobs, KC.[6] Her family also moved to Quebec, where her father worked as a customs collector in Saint-Hyacinthe.[8][15] Langstaff had an affinity for the law and within a few years was performing much of the company incorporation work for Jacobs.[5] With his encouragement, she wrote to McGill University's faculty of law, in 1911, inquiring if she could be admitted. Frederick P. Walton, dean of the faculty, responded that no woman had ever asked for admission before, and while he was unsure of whether his colleagues would approve, she ought to begin attending lectures.[14] Langstaff graduated in 1914 with a Bachelor of Civil Law,[5][16] first in her class in criminal and company law,[5] and fourth overall with first-class honours.[14] That year, she became the first woman to serve as a court stenographer in the June Special Session of the Montreal Criminal Court.[6]

Langstaff applied to sit for the preliminary bar examination but was refused by the Bar of Montreal despite her law degree.[17] The preliminary examination was open to male students before they began their studies, but anticipating that she might encounter difficulty, Langstaff had not applied until after she had already received her degree.[6] In January 1915, she petitioned the Superior Court for a Writ Of Mandamus.[10] With Jacobs acting as her counsellor, she asked the court to grant her the right to take the examination, as she met all the statutory qualifications.[6][17] At issue were two questions: whether a woman was admissible at all, and whether as a married woman, Langstaff was admissible as either a law student or lawyer, since her husband had not given his consent.[5] A good deal of the court proceedings focused on the fact that Langstaff was raising her daughter as a single mother and did not know the whereabouts of her husband. In his ruling, Justice Henri-Césaire Saint-Pierre denied her request, stating that to allow her to practice law without her husband's consent would be a "direct infringement upon public order and a manifest violation of the law of good morals and public decency".[17]

Justice Henri-Césaire Saint-Pierre

After Saint-Pierre's comments had been widely publicized in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada, the issue became a cause célèbre for those involved in the struggle for women's suffrage. Professor Carrie Derick and the Montreal Local Council of Women (French: Conseil local des femmes de Montréal) staged demonstrations protesting the decision.[6][17] Langstaff was invited regularly to speak at suffragist rallies, where she stressed that equal opportunity was her goal[17] and filed an appeal with the Court of King's Bench.[6][18] At the September 1915 hearing, the court's focus was again turned to the facts that she was not living with her husband, that he had not agreed to her attending law school, and that she was raising her daughter without his support.[17] In a 4 to 1 decision, issued on 2 November with Justice Joseph Lavergne as Langstaff's sole supporter, her appeal was denied.[6][19][20] The basis of the ruling was that the intent of the law in Quebec was to exclude women from the legal profession because hearing cases which involved crimes of a sexual nature or obscenities "would bring into contempt her honor as a spouse or as a mother and to revile herself in the eyes of her husband, her children, and the male sex generally".[10] The judge also noted that the courts were not the appropriate venue for such a decision and that it should be reviewed by the legislature[21] since the law forbade women practicing.[22] On 31 December 1915, her only brother was killed in action while fighting on the front lines in World War I.[15]

Langstaff began to plan for introducing an amendment to the Bar Act at the next legislative session of the National Assembly of Quebec,[23] which would convene on 12 January 1916.[24] Langstaff's supporters, including Jacobs, prepared a bill[17] and Lucien Cannon sponsored it.[25] Jacobs, using arguments supporting Langstaff's application written by Justice Lavergne, spoke to the committee along with feminists Grace Ritchie England and Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie.[26] The bill did not make it out of committee,[17] nor did a similar attempt made after the 1916 General Election of Quebec.[26] Langstaff continued to work as a legal assistant at Jacobs, Hall, Couture and Fitch,[6] (later Jacobs & Phillips (1920)[25][27] and still later Phillips & Vineberg (1945)).[6][27] During World War I, further action on admitting women to the bar in Quebec was suspended, but in 1920 another unsuccessful attempt at legislation was made.[26] Becoming the assistant to the other senior partner, Senator Lazarus Phillips,[25] Langstaff served as his secretary, a bookkeeper for the firm, and as a paralegal.[17][28]

In 1921, Langstaff took up flying.[29] An article published on 1 July 1922 in Maclean's Magazine called her the "first Canadian woman to fly" and featured her photograph.[30] That year, when French general Ferdinand Foch toured Montreal, she circled the city in a plane as part of the festivities.[6] She continued to attend and speak at suffragist meetings and rallies. In 1929, she proposed that single women refuse to marry until the civil code which treated wives as chattel was revised.[31] In 1930, the legislature was again pressed to admit women to the bar. The debate clarified that the bar no longer objected to the admission of women and would allow a judge to grant her permission in the absence of a spouse.[32] After two days of arguments, once again, the proposed bill was defeated by a vote of 37 to 29, largely because Antonin Galipeault, the Minister of Public Works and Labour, tied it to a pending suffrage bill and the possibility that feminists would next be asking for the possibility of divorce.[33] The following year, another bill was submitted but was defeated by two votes.[34][35]

In 1935, when Joseph-Napoléon Francoeur introduced legislation for women to prove their need for employment before they could work,[36] Langstaff became a vocal opponent. She argued that employment was a human right and if men could work in women's occupations, like fashion or cooking, then women should be allowed to work in whatever field they wanted. She suggested that if professional men had sufficient income without employment, perhaps they should give up their careers to unemployed men.[37] The bill did not pass, as most Members of Parliament felt that it violated the right to work.[36][38] In 1937, Langstaff published the French-English, English-French Law Dictionary, the first Canadian legal dictionary to provide terms found in the Civil, Criminal and Municipal Codes in English and French languages.[16][39] She authored several articles on family law[6] and continued her work in business law, drafting bylaws and incorporation papers for groups like the Montreal branch of the National Council of Jewish Women of Canada.[40] In 1939, she was one of the featured aviators in an air show held in Montreal in honor of King George VI and heir presumptive, Elizabeth.[11]

After having 13 suffrage bills defeated between 1922 and 1939, Quebec's feminists worked that year to convince Premier Adélard Godbout to keep his campaign promise to reintroduce the measure.[41] On 9 April 1940, he personally introduced "Bill No. 18" proposing women's suffrage at the provincial level.[42] The bill passed with a vote of 67 in favour and 9 against on the third reading on 18 April. Gaining approval on 25 April from the Legislative Council,[43] feminists saw the vote as leverage to gain other reforms.[44] The following year, Langstaff, Leona Bell (wife of Leslie Bell) and Elizabeth C. Monk submitted a plea asking support for women's right to practice law to the Quebec Bar Association. In a vote of 12 in favour and 11 against, the bar[34] agreed to allow it as long as the legislature approved a bill in the sitting session.[21] On 29 April 1941, the legislature passed the bill[34] and in early 1942, Monk, Constance G. Short, and Marcelle Hemond were the first women admitted to the bar.[22] Impacting Langstaff, the new law required that candidates have a Bachelor of Arts degree for admission to the bar and she was not prepared to study for another degree.[6] Langstaff retired in 1965, having spent six decades at Phillips & Vineberg.[6][17]