Caroline Dessaulles-Béique was a Canadiansocial activist and feminist. She was one of the founders of the Provincial Housewife's School, which later became the home economics department of the Université de Montréal, and an advocate who pressed for the founding of juvenile courts. She was a co-founder of the first national feminist organization, the for French-speaking Canadian women.
Dessaulles-Béique began working as a social activist in 1893, when she became involved in founding the Montreal Local Council of Women, a subsidiary organization of the National Council of Women of Canada. In 1899, Frédéric became president of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste and four years later, Dessaulles-Béique established the first women's organization that catered to preserving the culture of the French-speaking women of Canada. Des dames patronesses de l'Association Saint-Jean-Baptiste provided women a way to become involved in the promotion of French-Canadian interests, including preservation of the French language and Catholicism. The committee, with Dessaulles-Béique as its president, was responsible for the founding of the Provincial Housewife's School in 1906. The school served as a normal school, but also included courses to teach students how to cook, sew, manage a household, and offered classes on hygiene. Joining forces with Marie Gérin-Lajoie In 1907, Dessaulles-Béique and Marie Gérin-Lajoie expanded the Patronage Committee to the national level, founding the , for which Dessaulles-Béique served as president until 1913. The FNSJB served as an umbrella organization, uniting twenty-two women's social activist organizations. Their interests included access to education for women, aid to the poor and unemployed, Civil Code reforms, temperance, worker housing and other issues. Some of the projects that Dessaulles-Béique and the FNSJB were involved in were pressing for creation of the juvenile court system, working with the Sainte-Justine Hospital, and the distribution of milk and maternal assistance programs like Drops of Milk. From 1909 to 1910, Dessaulles-Béique simultaneously served on the executive board of the Montreal Local Council of Women. In 1913, she resigned as president of FNSJB to turn her attention to war work, becoming involved in both the Canadian Red Cross and the Khaki League, an assistance organization for returning veterans. When World War I ended, she returned to women's programs, and was among the founders of the Provincial Committee for Women's Suffrage in 1922. The women who joined the CPSF were primarily members of two older feminist groups, the Montreal Suffrage Association and the FNSJB. Besides Dessaulles-Béique and Gérin-Lajoie, among the founding members of CPSF were Thérèse Casgrain, Carrie Derick, Grace Ritchie-England, Idola Saint-Jean, and Isabella Scott. For the women of the FNSJB, this was a significant change in stance, as the organization had been formed with approval by the pope to train women in their moral and civic responsibilities as wives, rather than as individual citizens. The struggle for the right to vote in Quebec continued to 1940, when women won full suffrage.
Death and legacy
Dessaulles-Béique died on 8 August 1946 in Montreal. The Housewife's School which she founded became affiliated with the Université de Montréal in 1937 and in 1953 became the School of Household Science. In 1959, it merged with the University when the school decided to offer a degree in home economics. In 1988, a street in the city was renamed in her honour.
