“Your opportunity for beautiful dressing and fine living gives you at once a peculiar power to lead; make the most of it.” With these words, Julia Parker Drummond urged Montreal’s elite women to embrace their power and articulated a distinctive vision of women’s public influence. She and her contemporaries mobilized the privileges and expectations of elite womanhood to build networks and institutions that transformed political life in their city and beyond. Elizabeth Kirkland shows how elite women in Montreal redefined what counted as politics, revealing their exercise of political authority long before they gained the vote.

A Peculiar Power to Lead investigates the relationship between gender, class, and political power in Montreal through the collective biography of eight women. Moving across the city’s linguistic, religious, and ethnic boundaries and participating in networks that extended well beyond Montreal, these women became active in education and public health, secured electoral and legal reform, and mobilized for war. Kirkland argues that they exercised political influence by embracing and leveraging the hierarchies of gender, class, and race that structured their world. Their philanthropic, social, and reform networks provided a parallel structure of authority and access to spheres of power formally closed to them. Focusing on their collaboration, particularly through the Montreal Local Council of Women, Kirkland challenges accounts that marginalize elite women’s public lives and portray Montreal’s social divisions as impermeable.

By tracing the interconnected lives of eight women, this important work illuminates the personal relationships that shaped Montreal and offers a fresh history of women’s political power in turn-of-the-century Canada.