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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Roberta Hamilton, Setting the Agenda: Jean Royce and the Shaping of Queen's University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002).

THIS EXCELLENT book fulfils the test of a good historical biography. It reveals important aspects of the subject's world; and it is constructed and written faithfully according to an archival base.

Roberta Hamilton inherited a rich and plentiful hoard of archives, both the written and spoken word, and as well, generated many more by her own search for the significance of her subject. Jean Royce in times gone by may have been considered an unlikely protagonist but Hamilton recognized in her life an opportunity to display important and novel insights about women, universities, Canadian society, and gender. Her introduction sets a scene which is both analytical and dramatic. The biography subsequently flows in a more or less chronological narrative.

The drama arises from the ending of Jean Royce's career as Registrar at Queen's University after over 30 years. In the early 1960s Jean Royce virtually embodied the university. Powerful and influential, she was almost universally admired. When in 1968 after her retirement she was awarded an honorary degree, in the company of other recipients including Pierre Elliott Trudeau, it was she who received the only standing ovation. The ceremony was a generous and apparently fitting tribute to a woman who had come to symbolize one of Canada's great educational institutions. Yet in fact Royce had not retired voluntarily. She had been dismissed. Her friends discreetly kept this knowledge secret until 1992, ten years after her death. Roberta Hamilton delves behind the mystery. Why was Royce so important? Why was she fired? Why did she keep quiet about the circumstances of her departure from office?

While the author generates curiosity and tension from these rhetorical questions, she sets out other issues which enlighten readers about important social trends of 20th-century Canadian society: lifestyles of single women, changing patterns of academic life, women and the professions, social mobility, feminism between the times of suffrage and the women's liberation movement, and a close look at the development of a good, "sometimes very good," Canadian university. The biography bears out the author's confidence that Jean Royce's life reveals important and tantalizing glimpses of areas which have only recently become part of historical enquiry.

Jean Royce spent her youth in St. Thomas, Ontario, born in 1904 to David Royce, a cooper at the local flour mill, and his wife Katherine, a housewife. Jean's sister Marion was the "star sibling," good at exams and editor of the high school magazine, who won a scholarship to McMaster University. Jean's grades were not good enough for a university scholarship so she trained to be a librarian and worked for a while before registering as a full-time student at Queen's, supporting herself financially, at the age of 23. During summers she worked in the university library and then got a job in the Registrar's Office. After graduation Royce eventually worked as an assistant to Registrar Alice King and after her death was appointed to the position.

The position was pivotal for both students and administrators. Royce was responsible for admissions and student awards and generally oversaw the progress of students through their academic careers, counselling thousands of students in personal meetings. At the same time her office was "the centre of academic housekeeping" and smoothed the way for countless academic committees and administrators. In the words of Hamilton's title, Royce "set the agenda" and seems to have been quite omnipotent in the Queen's administration until the appointment in 1961 of Dr. J.A. Corry as Principal. This was a time of huge expansion and restructuring in universities across North America, and the new principal wanted fresh staff to direct these new developments. In 1964 he tried to get Royce to leave but she soldiered on. Eventually in 1968 the Principal dismissed the Registrar. The pill was sweetened by discretion, the awarding of an honorary degree, and Royce's appointment to the Board of Trustees.

Nevertheless the experience was personally devastating for Royce who suffered illness and depression. Eventually she bounced back: her identity was not completely dependent on paid work. Throughout her life she had a full life away from the office, and her resources of character enabled her to overcome the shock and disappointment of her final days on the job.

Travel was a regular enjoyment. She first applied for a passport in 1933 and practically every summer after World War II travelled to Europe, both alone and with friends. She went to cities in the United States and liked to visit art galleries and the theatre, often writing accounts of her experiences for her book club back in Kingston. She was a staunch member of the International Federation of University Women and would organize trips to coincide with their triennial meetings.

Remaining single, she did not lack friends, both male and female. One of the most interesting domestic details documented by Hamilton is Royce's regular dining arrangements. For many years she lived in an apartment in a house on the Queen's campus and every evening she dined with a couple of friends, the meal cooked by May Macdonnell, Professor of Classics. Setting the Agenda provides a fascinating insight into the way a single woman could forge convenient and satisfying support systems.

This is an important and appealing study and my only regret is that Hamilton was reticent about how she became involved. A biographical project began in 1991 when five women decided to record Royce's achievements at Queen's. Hamilton later inherited this incipient record, which was augmented by responses to appeals for information, interviews and conversations, and intensive archival research. Hamilton also mined an oral history project undertaken by the Dean of Women in the 1970s, "Hidden Voices: The Life Experiences of Women Who Have Worked and Studied at Queen's University," which included half a dozen interviews with Royce herself. Hamilton duly acknowledges the help from hundreds of people but does not explain what it was that drew a professional sociologist to this lifestory. "Engaged, sometimes obsessed, for several years," Hamilton in her book now allows a multitude of readers to become acquainted with Jean Royce's achievements and her deep and rewarding personality.


Mary Kinnear St John's College, University of Manitoba

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