Laura Elizabeth McCully

Laura Elizabeth McCully (17 March 1886 – 7 July 1924) was a first-wave Canadian feminist and a poet, living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Early life McCully was one of Dr. Samuel Edward McCully and Helen Fitzgibbon's three surviving children, and a great-niece of Jonathan McCully, a Father of Confederation.

As a child, she was a regular poetry and correspondence contributor to the Toronto Daily Mail and Empire section "Children's corner", and in 1899, she was profiled in Harper's Bazaar. and Bird of dawn, and other lyrics (1919).

Education An early female university student, McCully received a BA in 1907 from the University of Toronto, and an MA in 1908. The master's looked at the impact of divorce on women and children, and how existing laws favoured men. She received a fellowship from Yale University in 1909 for her thesis on "the ancient Anglo-Saxon language," which the Toronto newspaper World noted was "rarely accorded a woman". She returned home in 1910, without completing the studies.

During the First World War, while many advocated for women to have a role in the war, she looked further, wanting to give women the right to bear arms or at least serve in an auxiliary force. As such, she joined the widely derided Women's Home Guard in 1915, defending the movement in Maclean's the next year. On their first day at Toronto City Hall, McCully said that the club had around 700 recruits. That, despite resigning as the organization's treasurer a year prior, suggesting "Kaiserlike methods" of Miss McNab, the group's president, and in turn being accused of herself wanting "to be like the Kaiser." McNab claimed herself the organization's chief funder to that point, and given the group's infancy, didn't want to "submit to the dictates of the Treasurer." She was employed in munitions work. and eventual poverty. Another article in the publication noted that unnamed critics "have declared that Miss McCully's work rivalled that of Pauline Johnson."