Flora MacDonald Denison
Suffragist, columnist, spiritualist, and Walt Whitman devotee
Flora MacDonald Denison (1867-1921) was an original: suffragist, journalist, radical believer in free love and birth control, and fan of spiritualism and Walt Whitman.
Flora, the Suffragist
In the late 19th century, Flora MacDonald Merrill was a young woman working as a costumer for the Robert Simpson company in Toronto. She witnessed first hand the horrible conditions of the city’s sweat shops, and vowed to do what she could to change the lives of the women who worked in them.
Her commitment to that end began in 1903 when she was introduced to the suffragist movement by Dr. Elizabeth Stowe, the the first woman to practice medicine in Canada. In 1906, Flora attended the Copenhagen Conference as a delegate of the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association, and in 1911, became the president of the Canadian Suffragist Association. She worked tirelessly with others to organize “monster rallies” and send dozens of petitions to members of the legislature to improve the plight of women and get them the vote.
Mrs. Denison, the Writer
Flora also ran a dressmaking business, and augmented her living by writing a regular column in the Toronto Sunday World from 1909-13. With the approval of a supportive editor, she expressed radical views on marriage, birth control and social issues. Her turbulent and short-lived marriage to Howard Denison, a commercial travelling salesman, strengthened her belief in divorce and free love. She was blessed with a son, whom she named Merrill, but was a strong supporter of birth control, as espoused by Canadian A.R. Kaufman of the Parents Information Bureau, Britain’s Marie Stopes, and American Margaret Sanger. Although she was also a suffragist, she called herself a feminist because she wanted more than the vote for women; she wanted women to be on an equal footing with men in all things.
Flora, the Spiritualist
With an aversion to organized religion, Flora did not attend church. She preferred to explore spiritualism. She was enthralled with psychic phenomena, and wrote a book called Mary Melville: The Psychic, which she said was based on the life of her sister who was gifted with extra sensory perception. Spiritualism was not uncommon in this era. People such as Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Guglielmo Marconi and Alexander Graham Bell all held séances in the hope of making contact with the “other world.” Another kind of spiritual movement that Flora supported was inspired by the American poet Walt Whitman. She was a member of the Whitman Club which explored his notions of love, God and nature.
Mistress of Bon Echo
Flora had purchased the Bon Echo Inn on the shores of Eastern Ontario’s Mazinaw Lake, and opened it up to artists, poets, and writers. Across the lake was the majestic 100 metre high rock wall which gave off fanstastic echoes (hence the name, Bon Echo), and which had an ancient collection of pictographs painted at the water’s edge. She held gatherings of the Whitman Club, and published The Sunset of Bon Echo (1916-1920), a literary magazine dedicated to Whitman ideals. In 1919, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Whitman, Flora commissioned stonemasons from Aberdeen, Scotland to carve into a piece of the great granite wall she called Old Walt. In an area twenty feet by forty feet, they chiselled an inscription from Whitman's Song of Myself: "My foothold is tenon’d and mortised in granite / I laugh at what you call dissolution / And I know the amplitude of time."
Flora lived her short life to the fullest, a free spirit to the end.
