time in India, invited Irene to stay with her in the Northwest Territories (present-day Alberta). After receiving her parents' consent, Parlby left for Canada in May 1896, at the age of 28. Shortly after arriving in Canada, she met Walter Parlby, an Oxford graduate who had arrived in Canada in 1890. They were engaged by the autumn of 1896, and later built a house near Alix, Alberta. Irene and Walter visited family in England in 1899. In November 1899, while in England, she gave birth to a baby boy, Humphrey Marryat Hall Parlby. Political career Parlby's political life began in 1914 when she, along with other women in the area, created the Alix Country Women's Club (ACWC), and Parlby was chosen as secretary. One of the first accomplishments of the ACWC was to establish a local library, one of the first in the province. When the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), an auxiliary group of the United Farmers of Alberta, was formed in 1915, the ACWC became the first local branch of the UFWA. The next year, she was elected to be the first president of the UFWA. Between 1918 and 1920, the membership grew from 1,450 to 4,000 women. As president, Parlby worked to improve healthcare and helped to establish municipal hospitals. In 1920, she resigned as president, saying: "The organization has reached a stage when its own momentum will help to carry it along, the difficult days of arousing interest and establishing the position of the organization are over, and I feel I can ... leave all active work in it to those who are more capable of carrying on than myself." In the 1921 Alberta general election, Parlby put her name forward as a candidate for the riding of Lacombe, which she won, to her surprise. She called the campaign "nasty", due to the harassment she received for being female. Province-wide, the United Farmers won 38 out of the total of 61 seats, giving it a majority in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. Herbert Greenfield was chosen to be the Premier, and Parlby was selected to be the Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet, making her the second woman in the British Empire to hold a ministerial position, after Mary Ellen Smith of British Columbia. In 1930, she was chosen by Prime Minister R. B. Bennett to be one of three delegates of Canada to the