Born: 6 June 1887, Canada
Died: 29 June 1975
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: Annie MacDonald
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Annie MacDonald Langstaff won for others, but not for herself. She earned her Bachelor of Civil Law in 1914, but the Bar of Montreal refused to allow her to take the bar exam to become a practising lawyer. When she petitioned the Superior Court on the matter, they ruled against her because she did not have her husband’s permission to attend law school or become a lawyer. The fact that her husband had abandoned her and her child and she had no idea where he was did not, apparently, matter. She continued to fight to become a barrister, as well as for women’s suffrage. When she appealed to the Court of King’s Bench, they punted to the legislature, saying it was their problem because they had passed the statute defining who could be a lawyer in the first place, so she’d have to take it up with them—as though courts never overturn laws that legislatures pass. After women won the vote in Quebec in 1940, Langstaff, along with Leona Bell and Elizabeth C. Monk, once again appealed to the Quebec Bar Association. They relented, but a prerequisite had been introduced in the decades Langstaff spent fighting—lawyers had to have a Bachelor of Arts. After more than twenty-five years, she had the wrong type of degree. She was posthumously admitted in 2006, more than thirty years after she died.