Henrietta Muir Edwards (18 December 184910 November 1931) was a Canadian women's rights activist and reformer. She was the eldest of "The Famous Five", along with Emily Murphy, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney and Irene Parlby, who fought to have women recognized as "persons" under the law, and for the woman's right to vote in elections. She was born Henrietta Louise Muir in Montreal as well as lived in Montreal. She grew up in an upper-middle-class family that valued culture and religion. Edwards became active in many religious organisations, where she grew disenchanted with old traditions where the exclusion of women was acceptable. Biography Edwards was born on 18 December 1849. As a young woman, Edwards and her sister Amélia founded a Working Girls’ Association in Montreal in 1875 to provide meals, reading rooms and study classes. This would become one of Canada's first YWCAs. They also published a periodical, The Working Women of Canada, which helped to bring working conditions into the public eye. This project was undertaken at their own expense, and was funded from their earnings as artists. She married Dr. Oliver C. Edwards in 1876 and they had three children. They moved to Indian Head, Northwest Territories (now Saskatchewan) in 1883. Oliver was the government doctor for the Indigenous reserves there, and she continued to pursue women’s rights and feminist organizations on the prairies. In 1890, Edwards’s husband fell ill, so the family moved to the nation's capital, Ottawa. There, Edwards "took up the cause of female prisoners", while also working with Lady Aberdeen, wife of the then Governor General of Canada, to create the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC). The NCWC was founded in 1893, the same year the Canadian government commissioned Edwards, who was also an artist, to paint a set of dishes for the Canadian exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Edwards served for 35 years as their chair for Laws Governing Women and Children, and because of her expertise in this area of the law was appointed chair of the organization's Provincial Council of Alberta. With Lady Aberdeen she also helped establish the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897. Edwards and her family returned to the Northwest Territories in 1904, where her husband was posted to Fort Macleod as a medical officer to the Blood tribe. During the latter period of the First World War, when supplies and morale