The Mail and Empire newspaper’s Kit Coleman was a pioneering journalist. In an era when women rarely covered politics and public affairs, her beat was none other than Parliament Hill in the 1890s. In one of her articles, published on this date in 1896, she described for her readers the Commons’ chamber. She even tried out Wilfrid Laurier’s place on the floor of the House.
“A moment in Sir Wilfrid's chair,” she wrote. “Peace, serenity, urbanity, will surely descend upon you if you rest awhile in the seat of that ‘charming Sir Wilfrid.’ But you find it hard... As for poor Mr. Speaker's seat - up on the throne - no prisoner in Sing-Sing could have a harder seat than this straight-backed, un-cushioned chair. It can't be very nice to be a member of Parliament. One wonders why they do it.”
Her article continued. “Through the glass roof shone softly ... - a superb light - like sunset - soft, yet glowing.... Not anywhere that l have ever been have l seen anything that can in its line compare with the lighting of the House of Commons.”
Coleman had been hired by the paper in 1889 and wrote a women’s column for more than two decades. For further information about women in the early post-Confederation period in Ottawa, see Vanessa Reid’s 1997 Master’s Thesis, Ladies in the House: Gender, Space and the Parlours of Parliament in Late-Nineteenth-Century Canada, written when she was a Master’s student at McGill. It was in this wonderful thesis that I found mention of Kit Coleman’s 1896 article that Art’s History is referencing today.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.