Camille Lessard Bissonnette
Front page of Le Messager from November 16, 1917. Photo: DigitalMaine.
Prominent figures such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Alice Paul are names we commonly hear when learning about the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States. It can take a bit more effort to find information about other suffragists who are looked over due to race, socioeconomic class, language barriers, and other marginalizing characteristics. Camille Lessard-Bissonnette is one such suffragist.
Born in Québec in 1883, Lessard-Bissonnette was a teacher until her family emigrated to Lewiston in 1904, where she began working at Continental textile mill. In 1908, Lessard-Bissonnette transitioned to working as a columnist for Le Messager, a French-language newspaper on Lisbon Street in Lewiston.
Through her writing, she argued for women's suffrage both in the United States and Québec, which granted voting rights to women in 1940—making it the last Canadian province to do so, nearly twenty years after its neighbors
Lessard-Bissonnette's target audience was the French-speaking immigrant community in Maine and the French-speaking communities in Canada. She wrote for Le Messager until 1938, and for those thirty years, she was the only French-speaking Mainer advocating for suffrage in the press. Given the religious and conservative views held by many French-Canadians and Franco-Americans at the time, stalwartly holding onto her convictions and arguing for this crucial advancement in equality and democracy illustrated her bravery and strength. Lessard-Bissonnette was also the author of Canuk, using her pen name, Liane.
One of her many arguments in favor of suffrage is beautifully stated in one of her columns published on 4 February 1910 in Le Messager: "You say, sirs, that it is the woman who lights up your home. You compare her to a ray of sunshine. You exclaim that women must not be dragged into the mud of politics. But sirs, when a ray of sunshine falls on the mud does it dirty itself, or does it dry up and purify the mud?"
