The nineteen-year-old bride threw herself into the role of minister’s wife: Bible classes, the presidency of the missionary society, playing the organ and organizing bazaars. She was, as she later noted, "acquiring a stability that fitted me for half a dozen other duties." Over the next decade, there were other moves for the family in south-western Ontario. At a church in Chatham, which had earlier been a refuge for blacks fleeing American slavery, she spoke out for understanding. Three daughters had arrived by the time they left Chatham, Kathleen, Evelyn and Madeleine, but Madeleine, who had been born prematurely when her mother walking down the stairs tripped over her nightgown, left heartbroken parents when she died at nine months.
The next move was to a church at Ingersoll, where the Murphys’ fourth daughter, Doris, was born. Emily, now 25 years old, was becoming more independent. She joined firmly on the affirmative side in a raging controversy on the issue of women serving on church vestries, arguing that "women could contribute much to the administrative body of the church." Also at about this time she entered what she herself termed "the loneliest place on the curve of her religious life," when she found herself deeply involved in a skeptical phase of her intellectual development. Her honesty, which was characteristic of her entire approach to life, continued both to bind people to her with hoops of iron and to vex her opponents.
She began to use her gifts with words and prodigious memory to help Arthur with his sermons. Life for the family was full and good until the day Arthur’s bishop asked him to become a missionary in Ontario without either a set salary or a home. For the next two years, the entire family moved about from parish to parish. With time on her hands, Emily began to nibble on sweets, little knowing that diabetes would later strike her and probably contribute to her death. The missionary years opened her eyes to the very bad social conditions of the Ontario poor. She began to write about what she saw in her diaries; these entries would later became the basis for numerous articles
The years 1907-1916 in Edmonton were golden ones for the entire Murphy family, and Emily became a convinced Westerner. As the new capital of a new province, Edmonton’s population was diverse and growing rapidly from the eighteen thousand there when the Murphys arrived.
Arthur engaged in coal mining and later speculated in city real estate. Kathleen and Evelyn were rapidly growing up when their mother first took aim at the dower issue. Under the Alberta law of the time, a husband could legally sell his land and pocket the proceeds without sharing a dime with his wife and children. Emily quickly marshalled the facts of the issue, wrote articles and otherwise started the campaign rolling across the province. Several times, the provincial legislature turned down a Dower Bill to award a third of common property in a marriage to wives, but finally passed it in 1911. Many Albertans were delighted with the success of Emily’s campaign.
During this time and until 1912, she was literary editor of The Winnipeg Telegram. She also completed in 1910 her next book, Janey Canuck in the West, which was such a success that it remains in print today. Becoming the first woman member of the Edmonton hospital board, she filed a devastating report on the conditions of a local hospital. She became president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. She published two more books, Open Trails in 1912, and Seeds of Pine in 1914, both of which sold well. She later reported for Collier’s Magazine on a five-day steamer trip up the Athabasca river to Lesser Slave Lake. In 1911, she became a good friend of Emmeline Pankhurst, the English suffragette, during her second North American speaking tour. When Nellie McClung, founder of the Political Equality League in Winnipeg, moved to the Alberta capital in 1914, she and Emily became friends and allies in the cause. They had the satisfaction in 1916 of seeing Alberta become the third province in the nation to provide the franchise to women. The Canadian frontier was establishing itself as fertile soil for democratic reforms.
In 1916, urged by the local Council of Women, Emily went to the office of the Alberta Attorney General, C.W. Cross, to request him to establish a women’s criminal court presided over by a woman. Soon afterwards, she was appointed by the provincial Liberal government of Arthur Sifton to be the first female judge in what is now the Commonwealth. Congratulations flowed into an ecstatic Murphy home from seemingly everywhere. The new police magistrate was soon studying books of court procedure and law. Her first anxious day in court, which she later said with her characteristic good humour, was "as pleasant an experience as running rapids without a guide," was a unique experience. The police and lawyers, being unsure what to call her, mostly called her ‘‘Sir.’’
