Edith Jessie Archibald

Archibald, Edith Jessie

Edith Jessie Archibald, née Archibald, socialite, feminist, author (b in Newfoundland 1854; d at Halifax 1936). Educated in New York and London, England, Archibald married in 1874 Charles Archibald, mining engineer and later president of the Bank of Nova Scotia. She was president of the Maritime WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION from 1892 to 1896, president of the Halifax Local Council of Women from 1896 to 1906, president of the Halifax Victorian Order of Nurses from 1897 to 1901, and, as vice-president of the NS Red Cross in 1914, chaired the department responsible for Canadian prisoners of war overseas.

An ardent suffragist, Archibald advised a shift from confrontation to more subtle maternal feminist tactics after the defeat of the suffragist campaign in the early 1890s. She led the suffrage delegation to the legislature in 1917 and later chaired the Halifax Conservative Women's Auxiliary. An eloquent speaker with a fine writing style, she published articles, pamphlets, songs, plays and several books, including one about her father, Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald (1924), and The Token (1930).