of the seats in federal, provincial and territorial legislatures. At the federal level, Canada was tied with Mauritania for 49th place. Federal politics At the federal level, women first earned the right to vote in 1917, albeit in a limited capacity: the franchise was only extended to those who were in active military service or related to a man who was. This was followed by full suffrage in 1918, and the right to stand for election to the House of Commons in 1919. In the 1921 election, the first general election where women had full participation, five women stood as candidates: Harriet Dick, Rose Mary Henderson, Elizabeth Bethune Kiely, Agnes Macphail and Harriet Dunlop Prenter. Macphail was the only one successful in winning a seat, and she became the first woman to be elected into the House of Commons. Macphail was re-elected in the next four elections, and was the only woman in the House of Commons until the 1935 election, when she was joined by Martha Black. In the 1940 election, Macphail was defeated and Black did not stand as a candidate, but Dorise Nielsen was elected, and Cora Taylor Casselman was elected in a 1941 Edmonton by-election to succeed her late husband. On March 13, 1944, Casselman became the first woman ever to preside over the House of Commons as acting Speaker, on an occasion when speaker James Allison Glen had to briefly step away from the chair and deputy speaker Joseph-Arthur Bradette was unavailable. Nielsen and Casselman were both defeated in 1945, but Gladys Strum was elected that year. Strum, in turn, was defeated in 1949, the only election after 1921 in which no female candidates were elected to Parliament at all. However, Ellen Fairclough was elected to the House in a by-election the following year. In the subsequent 1953 election, four women – Fairclough, Margaret Aitken, Sybil Bennett and Ann Shipley – were elected to Parliament. Every subsequent election has had at least two women elected to Parliament, except 1968 when Grace MacInnis was the only woman elected. Shipley became, in 1955, the first woman in Canadian history to introduce the formal motion to accept a Speech from the Throne. Fairclough became, in 1957, the first woman appointed to the Cabinet of Canada; she was also named as Acting Prime Minister for two days in 1958 while John Diefenbaker was out of the country on a