Dr. Lara Campbell wins the 2021 Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for her examination of the complex history of suffrage in British Columbia.

Dr. Lara Campbell has won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia for her book A Great Revolutionary Wave: Women and the Vote in British Columbia. The $2,500 prize, given by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society, will be awarded later this year.

Published by UBC Press as part of the Women’s Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy series, Dr. Campbell’s book examines how the case for female enfranchisement in British Columbia grew and gained support, while negotiating the ambiguities and features that distinguished the movement in British Columbia.

“Writing A Great Revolutionary Wave has been a wonderful opportunity to bring together my long-standing interest in gender and women’s history and my appreciation for the history of British Columbia. I moved to Vancouver 16 years ago, and learning about the history of this province has been an ongoing project and a great joy,” says Dr. Campbell. “British Columbia has been continually overlooked in histories about women’s struggle for political equality. Archival research revealed that suffragists in the province were more diverse in terms of class background, and more open to debate and public confrontation, than previous historians have imagined. But while suffrage claims to equality challenged male authority in often inspiring ways, I hope readers get a strong sense of how they were also built on racial exclusion and Indigenous dispossession. I took the suffrage story into the late 1940s to try to capture the desire for political equality expressed by racialized men and women in the province, and to honour the rich histories of community organizing for political and racial equality.”

“Dr. Campbell’s book skilfully provides sensitive source-reading and disciplined exposition on the suffrage movement in British Columbia,” says Dr. Susan E. Parker, UBC’s University Librarian. “We are pleased to recognize a book published by UBC Press and by an academic who has made her home in British Columbia.” 

Dr. Campbell is a professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University where she currently serves as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programming, Teaching and Learning, and Student Experience. Her first book, Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario’s Great Depression, 1929-1939, was recognized with Honorable Mentions from the Canadian Women’s Studies Association and the Canadian Historical Association.

The book is available at the UBC Bookstore for purchase.

Shortlisted titles for the prize are:

Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, frontier physician, Geoff Mynett (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press).

Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians, Jordan Stanger-Ross (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queens Press).

About the Prize

The Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Book on British Columbia, sponsored by UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society, recognizes the best scholarly book published by a Canadian author on a B.C. subject. The book prize was established in memory of Basil Stuart-Stubbs, a bibliophile, scholar and librarian who passed away in 2012. Stuart-Stubbs’s many accomplishments included serving as the University Librarian at UBC Library and as the Director of UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. Stuart-Stubbs had a leadership role in many national and regional library and publishing activities. During his exceptional career, he took particular interest in the production and distribution of Canadian books and was associated with several initiatives beneficial to authors and their readers, and to Canadian publishing.