Armine Nutting Gosling (1861 – 1942)

Armine Nutting Gosling was a women's rights advocate and founder of the St. John's Ladies Reading Room and Current Events Club. Born in Waterloo, Quebec, she moved to St. John's in 1882 to become principal of the Church of England Girls' School. She met her husband, William Gosling, a future mayor of St. John's, soon after her arrival. While living in London from 1904 to 1905, she became involved in the suffrage movement. Back in Newfoundland, she applied herself wholeheartedly to the struggle for women's voting rights, holding meetings of the Ladies Reading Room in her own home. She later became president of the Women's Party, which ran two candidates in the 1925 St. John's municipal election, the first in which Newfoundland women could vote.  Gosling played a central role in winning women's right to vote in the Newfoundland general election of 1928.

“The laws that so materially affect [our] lives are bound to be haphazard and one-sided without the aid of the counsel of responsible women.”