For the week of January 12, 2026.
On January 12, 2010, the Government of Canada designated Helena Gutteridge a national historic person. She was a suffragist, trade unionist, and municipal politician who played a significant role in the early-20th-century feminist and labour movements in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Helena Rose Gutteridge was born on April 8, 1879, in London, England, to a working-class family. She left home at age 14 and began working in the tailoring trade. Over the next ten years, she rose to the position of cutter—a respected job, typically held by men. She joined the militant feminist cause in 1906, as a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union led by the Pankhursts, where she was trained in public speaking. While she shared a common Western European heritage with most other suffragists, she stood out in Britain and Canada as a member of the working class within a movement dominated by middle-class women.
In 1911 Gutteridge left England for Canada with a group of suffragists, arriving in Vancouver on September 21. As the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway completed in 1885, the city had grown from roughly 13,000 residents in 1891 to more than 100,000 by 1911. The Canadian census of 1911 reported 6,452 wage-earning women in Vancouver (12.7 percent of the total workforce). Gutteridge quickly established herself in the tailoring trade and joined the Journeymen Tailors’ Union of America in 1913 and the Vancouver Trades and Labour Union, becoming the first woman to serve on the latter’s executive in 1914.
Gutteridge was a leading voice for women within the largely male-dominated union movement. She fought for minimum wage laws, better working conditions, and unemployment assistance for women. Soon after arriving in Canada, she joined the British Columbia Political Equality League and the Vancouver Local Council of Women. She established the Evening Work Committee and the Women’s Employment League, which served working-class and unemployed women, respectively. She also helped unify feminist organizations under the United Suffrage Societies of Vancouver to campaign for women’s voting rights. The campaign succeeded, in April 1917, in gaining British Columbian women of European descent the right to vote, but exclusions remained for Indigenous Peoples and Asian Canadians.
In October 1919 Gutteridge married James Purvis Oliver (Ollie) Fearn. Two years later, the couple moved to a poultry farm in Mount Lehman, in the Fraser Valley. However, the marriage was annulled in 1928 and she moved back to Vancouver in 1932 to resume her work in labour and feminist circles. After 1935 she worked as a party organizer in various roles for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a coalition of labour, agrarian, and socialist groups. She served, for example, as secretary-treasurer of its Unemployment Conference, established in response to the Great Depression. In 1937, as a CCF representative, Gutteridge became the first woman elected to the Vancouver City Council. In this role, she advocated for low-income housing until her electoral defeat in 1940.
After losing another election in 1941, Gutteridge worked as a welfare manager at an internment camp for Japanese Canadians near Slocan, British Columbia. She hoped to help people of Japanese descent, forcibly removed by the government from the Pacific Coast amidst heightened anti-Asian racism during the Second World War (1939–1945). Afterwards, she returned to Vancouver and her work for the CCF, joining its Provincial Council of Women, where she continued to advocate for women workers until her death on October 3, 1960.
Helena Gutteridge was designated a national historic person in 2010. The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada advises the Government of Canada on the commemoration of national historic persons—individuals who have made unique and enduring contributions to the history of Canada. The National Program of Historical Commemoration relies on the participation of Canadians in the identification of places, persons, and events of national historic significance. Any member of the public can submit a subject to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. Learn how to participate in this process.