Camille Lessard-Bissonnette

Camille Lessard-Bissonette, 1883-1970, pen name Liane, was a Canadian-American suffragist and writer, who contributed to Le Messager from 1906-1938.

Lessard-Bissonette immigrated with her family from Quebec where she was a teacher, and then became a mill worker in Lewiston Maine at the Continental Mill, she then became a columnist for Le Messager, Lewiston. She wrote pro-the-vote for women in 1910-11[1] —two years before the conversation even began in Canada. The Le Messager moved to 223 Lisbon St., Lewiston [2] and where she wrote her articles about suffrage as well as many other issues concerning women’s lives.

The Franco-American culture was closed off to the conversation of suffrage both in the Franco-American immigrant group and in the mainstream, and plus, for Camille, due to language barrier, she was not recognized in the early Maine women’s suffrage movement.

Lessard-Bissonette is one of 2,200 women listed in The National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites. The National Votes for Women Trail[3]

Lessard-Bissonette is the only Franco-American woman in the Online Biographical Dictionary of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States, Edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar: Part III: Mainstream Suffragists—National American Woman Suffrage Association Biographical Sketch of Camille Lessard Bissonnette, see link below.[4]

Camille wrote, in French, the French-Canadian woman’s immigrant experience, Canuck,[5] which was published by Le Messager, as a series, feuilleton, after she had left the U.S., in the 1930s. Janet Shideler, Ph.D., her biographer, wrote Camille Lessard-Bissonnette: The Quiet Evolution of French-Canadian Immigrants in New England.

Lessard-Bissonette's book, Canuck,[6] has been translated into English by Sylvie Charron, Ph.D. and Sue Huseman, Ph.D.