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The Fighting Days

The struggle within. Instead of focusing on the fight to win the vote, The Fighting Days  concerns the ideological differences inside the women’s suffrage movement in Manitoba.
   
Written by former Winnipegger Wendy Lill, the story follows forgotten feminist Francis Beynon, former women’s editor of the Grain Growers’ Guide, whose politics and personal beliefs clashed with those of fellow suffragists, including Nellie McClung.
   
"I guess you could say Francis Beynon walked out of history, because she’s not part of the historical narrative we like to think of ourselves as having," says Lill, over the phone from her home in Dartmouth, N.S., where she served as an NDP Member of Parliament from 1997 to 2004.
   
"Nellie was a pragmatist, but Francis never compromised," she adds. "It’s interesting to see what happens to those kinds of people. You don’t usually get too far in politics, where it’s all about moving a little bit, taking a bit, moving a little bit more and biding your time. However, the people we hold up and revere are people like Tommy Douglas and Nelson Mandela, people who have reputations for never giving in."
   
First presented at Prairie Theatre Exchange in 1983, The Fighting Days was written at the request of former PTE artistic director Kim McCaw and current Manitoba Theatre for Young People artistic director Leslee Silverman, both of whom were familiar with Lill’s first play, On the Line, which concerned immigrant women in Winnipeg’s garment industry.
   
Given little direction (save for "write a play about women in Manitoba history") Lill, then a journalist with the CBC, went hunting for ideas at the Archives of Manitoba. There, she found an informative journal by Canadian historian George Ramsay Cook. "It was called Francis Beynon and the Rise of Christian Reformism," Lill says. "It was about the fact that Francis split with other feminists of the time over the issue of giving the vote to foreign women and over conscription. There it was. Drama is all about the conflicts, so that’s what I went for.
   
"At the time I was writing it there was an anti-war movement in Winnipeg that was very strong," she adds. "We were all feminists. There were really strong similarities with what was going on in the 1910s. I read what these women were writing about in their columns and the letters to the editor back in those days and thought, ‘Wow, this sounds so modern.’ That’s what really got me going."
 

The Fighting Days
Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre
Feb. 9 – March 3, John Hirsch Mainstage