(1887-29 June 1975), law firm secretary. (Annie M. Langstaff, A.M. Langstaff) Born on Lot 27, in the 3rd Concession of Kenyon Township, GC. Parents: Mr and Mrs Archie B. MacDonald. Education included attendance at Prescott High School. She was married at an early age to Sarmet or Samuel Gilbert Langstaff. The marriage quickly broke up, leaving Mrs Langstaff with one child, whom she raised by herself. Mrs Langstaff said in a speech of 1915, “many women have to earn their living outside the home, if they are to have homes at all.” (Gillett, 306) She worked for S. W. Jacobs in the Montreal law firm in which he was the senior partner.

     With his approval, she entered the study of law at McGill University in 1911. In May 1914, she graduated, ranking fourth among the 18 members of the class. She was the first woman graduate of the McGill Faculty of Law. At this time, women were accepted as lawyers in many jurisdictions, but no women lawyers had yet been admitted in Quebec Province. In the first instance, the Board of Examiners of the Bar of the Province of Quebec had to decide whether Mrs Langstaff could be admitted to the examination for admission to the study of the law. (Mrs Langstaff had already been studying the law, but normally this examination, which was an important entrance procedure, took place before university law study began.) In the summer of 1914, the Board decided that she could not be admitted, on the grounds that she was a woman. S.W. Jacobs then applied to the Quebec Superior Court for a Writ of Mandamus to compel the Board to admit her to the examination. When the Quebec Superior Court rejected his petition in 1915, he appealed to the Court of King’s Bench, where again he and Mrs Langstaff were unsuccessful, once more in the year 1915.

     In the end, Mrs Langstaff never became a lawyer. When women finally won admission to the legal profession in Quebec in 1941, a B.A. degree was a requirement, and at that stage she did not want to do undergraduate work. She remained S.W. Jacobs’ secretary till he died. Afterwards, she was the secretary of Lazarus Phillip in the same firm. Mrs Langstaff was the author of French-English, English-French Law Dictionary (Montreal, Wilson & Lafleur, 1937). Also, she wrote several articles on the law for women’s journals. She is said to have been, in 1914, the first woman stenographer to work in a Montreal criminal court. And surprisingly, she became an early woman aviator. When the First World War commander Marshall Foch visited Montreal in 1922, Mrs Langstaff is said to have attracted much public attention by circling overhead for an hour. In recent years, Mrs Langstaff, once relatively little known, has become a recognized Canadian historic figure. There is a biographical entry for her under the heading “Langstaff, Annie,” in the Canadian Encyclopedia. Her daughter Sister Mary of St. Andrea, a sister of Holy Cross, was well known in the area of St. Raphael’s and Alexandria.

J. Vance and K. Fisher, “Annie M. Langstaff: the Lawyer Who Never Was,” Quid Novi [McGill University Faculty of Law student publication], 9 Nov. 1983, repr. with added biog. note in Glengarry News 21 Dec. 1983 (article includes the full legal citations for the two court cases of 1915) * Bernard Figler, Sam Jacobs: Member of Parliament (1959 & 1970?): index * Margaret Gillett, We Walked Very Warily: a History of Women at McGill (1981): index (portraits) * Jean Bannerman, Leading Ladies Canada (1977) 165 * Dictionary of Canadian Biography XIV, 21 (mentioned) * graduates from Faculty of Law, McGill, GN 15 May 1914 * visits GC, GN 2 Dec. 1927