Leadership Quote by Agnes Macphail

Macphail’s line lands like a pin in the balloon of “women candidates are so brave” sentimentality. She isn’t praising fortitude; she’s diagnosing appetite. The scare quotes around “dirt” do double duty: they acknowledge the grubby realities of politics (smears, patronage, backroom bargaining) while quietly mocking the idea that those realities are uniquely humiliating for women. Her provocation is that many women didn’t enter public life as fragile newcomers willing to endure filth for a higher cause, but as actors who understood power as it actually operates - and were drawn to the fight, the mess, the leverage.

Coming from Agnes Macphail, the first woman elected to Canada’s House of Commons, this isn’t armchair contrarianism. She spent decades being treated as an exception, a novelty, a moral mascot. The era’s prevailing script cast women as civic housekeepers: bring cleanliness, calm, and conscience to a corrupt male arena. Macphail flips that script with a politician’s realism and a reformer’s impatience. If you want women to be taken seriously in public office, stop insisting they’re there to sanitize the room.

The subtext cuts sharper: the “dirt” is also the gendered contempt, the personal attacks, the sexualized scrutiny. Macphail suggests that the women who ran anyway weren’t merely stoic victims; they were politically hungry enough to treat misogyny as terrain, not a deterrent. It’s a refusal of martyrdom - and a demand that we read women’s ambition as ambition, not as virtue dressed up for public comfort.