Women who Woke Up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women’s Rights in Canada

By Karin Wells

Second Story Press, March 2025/250 pages

Reviewed by Maureen McTeer

April 12, 2026

Real change always takes time. But when it comes to women’s legal equality — substantive as well as procedural, before and under the law — it took more than a century to achieve in Canada.

Between the founding of the country in 1867 to the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the courts and the legal system managed to hold the patriarchy firmly in place.

In her most recent book, Women Who Woke up the Law, lawyer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker Karin Wells tells the story of some of the key cases that slowly — drip by drip, decade after long decade — finally ensured that today almost all women are treated as full citizens in our own country.

One of those cases was very familiar to me. I was at law school the year the Supreme Court of Canada decided the case of Murdoch v. Murdoch, the case of an Alberta ranch wife denied any share in the family’s ranch.

Irene Murdoch’s treatment throughout her judicial journey and finally in the Supreme Court of Canada was a stark reminder of just how much work lay ahead for all of us.

Her story of a life married to a violent and manipulative husband; the years of hard labour she endured running their ranch in southwestern Alberta; the loss of any right to share in the profits gained by her work, seemed outrageous to us as idealistic young law students. As did the expectation by society that she would unquestioningly accept her fate.

But it was the comments and decisions of the all-male judges at trial and on appeal that rankled, almost as much as the court’s finding against her.

We read in disbelief the damning words of Supreme Court Justice Martland when referring to Irene Murdoch’s years of backbreaking work running every aspect of the couple’s ranch as being no more than “the work done by any ranch wife”.

Where was the fairness in this? What kind of law could condone this dismissal of Irene Murdoch’s claim for her share in the ranch?

In returning to this decision so many years later, I remember the discussions of the Supreme Court’s judgment. Ironically, our concern was often focused on the plight of our own mothers. Women of the post- WWII era, they were forced to leave their office or government jobs when they married or became pregnant.

Their lives had centered around their home, their family and volunteer work. They were known collectively as “housewives”, women without income or pension, their work and contributions to the success of the marriage and the family treated as incidental, if they were considered at all.

The result in the Murdoch case could be applied to our own mothers’ lives. From that moment on, we worked to change the property laws in each province that denied women their rightful share of the family home.

Karin Wells has chosen the cases in this book carefully, using them to show us the social and political history of the fight for women’s full legal equality in Canada.

In the hands of Wells, this book becomes a morality play. It is a tale of inequality, of pain, of the exclusion of women from their rightful place in Canadian society, merely because they are women.

In each case, she treats the plaintiff as everywoman, where one woman’s struggle becomes the story of all the women living at that moment in our country’s history. Each one case became a cause, a new starting point for those of us working for legal and political change.

These cases became one more pillar in the effort to ensure fairness and a recognition that women’s lives matter, regardless of what the law dictated at the time. The laws women fought, and which were ultimately changed by Parliament and the legislatures as a result of their advocacy, were framed by the prejudices of their day.

They were made by men and for men. If anyone doubted that fact, they have only to read the reasons and comments of judges and lawyers in the cases Wells writes about in this book.

The cases Wells has chosen to highlight were first and foremost about women. It is their names that still appear on the court documents and in the media, as challenging the laws that denied women their full legal rights.

They were brave women and, as Wells notes, often fighting alone, facing the prejudices of other women and men, former friends, neighbours, even family, who thought they should just be “good girls” and stop rocking the boat.

Yet decades later, it was their actions that cemented the resolve of feminists and their male supporters and ultimately forced Parliament and the legislatures to change the laws under which women and the reality of their lives were treated and judged.

In the hands of Wells, this book becomes a morality play.

It is a tale of inequality, of pain, of the exclusion of women from their rightful place in Canadian society, merely because they are women.

This book is truly important, I believe, not just because of the cases Wells has chosen and the history we learn from them of how our society changed for the better when challenged to do so.

Rather, it is how it is written that makes it compelling. Her choice of plain language, with little legal jargon, makes this book accessible to every reader, whether or not they have a background in law or political history.

Anyone can read this book and be moved by the stories of the women involved. They can see what went before and the years of effort and conviction it took to change laws, and to make all women’s lives better.

More than four decades after the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the guarantee of women’s legal equality is still being defined and debated.

Other groups seek to build on the work achieved so far to ensure their own claims are also recognized and respected. Yet, for many of us, we worry about the pushback by groups and political players who seek to limit these guarantees.

This book tells an important and special story, in a remarkably readable way, of how women’s voices and actions over the decades forced those in power to act to enshrine women’s legal equality and to make it a reality.

It is a book deserving of a wide readership, and of its nomination for the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Maureen A. McTeer is a respected Canadian lawyer, bestselling author and leading advocate for women’s equality issues.