| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Margaret C. Kechnie, Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2003).

MARGARET KECHNIE provides an historical account of the early years of the Ontario Women's Institutes (WI), during which WI grew from a single autonomous local women's organization in Stoney Creek, to a province-wide network sponsored by the provincial government. In contrast to previous accounts of the WI from "the bottom up" — i.e. from the perspective of its grassroots membership - Kechnie recounts the WI's early years from "the top down" — from the perspective of the men who were provincial government officials in charge of the new organization and the female cadre of instructors who were hired to disseminate the latest research in domestic science. The book ends in 1919 when the 900 separate branches with 30,000 members were consolidated into the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, a province-wide organization which henceforth elected its own officers, albeit under the supervision of a male superintendent employed by the Ontario Department of Agriculture.

As a state-sponsored, non-government organization, the WI is a quintessentially Canadian institution: one of those odd beasts that are neither state fish nor civil-society fowl, but somehow seem to thrive in our particular climate. The Ontario story brought to life by Kechnie was to a large extent mirrored throughout Canada as each province adopted the same basic model and joined a national federation. From Canada, the WI spread throughout the English-speaking world as the Associated Country Women of the World, an organization whose global reach and influence earned it observer status at the League of Nations and thence the United Nations. Throughout this past century, the WI has been an important fixture of rural communities in Canada and beyond. The formative events in Ontario provide a basis for understanding the organization's proliferation.

The WI had its origins in the agrarian-reform, country-life movement based at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. As a product of the late 19th century Progressive era, its goals were to modernize agricultural production, to encourage young people to stay on the farm, and thus to revitalize the countryside as the repository of democratic values. The Department of Agriculture established the Farmers' Institutes in 1885 as the official vehicle for agrarian reform, but farmers were suspicious of the agricultural experts from Guelph. In an effort to bolster the Farmers' Institutes, the Department of Agriculture established a separate, parallel women's organization. While the men were instructed in agricultural techniques, the women would receive instruction in the new domestic science.

Kechnie debunks once and for all the WI's own account of its origins, according to which Adelaide Hoodless, the wife of a wealthy Hamilton industrialist, established the WI after her infant son died from drinking unpasteurized milk, and made domestic science her life's work. With what appears to be a touch of personal animus, Kechnie argues that Hoodless was marginal to the WI, and a figure of ridicule among professional domestic scientists employed at the Ontario Agricultural College who designed the WI curriculum. More significantly, Kechnie demonstrates that the problem of contaminated milk was in fact largely neglected by the WI, as women were rarely instructed in basic home-pasteurization techniques. In part due to this neglect, farm children continued to suffer from high rates of tuberculosis long after urban children began drinking pasteurized milk from commercial creameries. While the creameries worked with government to solve the contamination problem quietly, they were anxious that lingering problems not be publicized. Kechnie argues that government sponsorship prevented the WI from tackling this and other controversial issues of agricultural industrialization. More typically, its version of domestic science consisted of instructions for a layette of Egyptian cotton (from Mrs. Adam Beck of Ontario Hydro fame) or for "spotless napery" in the care of invalids, with virtually no recognition of the fact that few rural households had running water, electricity, or cash for household amenities.

The WI's original domestic-science mission failed to elicit much enthusiasm among farm women, who, for the most part, were more engaged in the fundamental business of generating income to underwrite the farm operation. Yet the organization expanded, for a variety of reasons examined by Kechnie. State sponsorship played an important role. Compared to other women's organizations, the WI was exceptionally privileged in having patrons at the center of provincial and national politics, access to touring professionals from Guelph, and direct subsidies. Stable operational funding allowed the WI to be exceptionally accessible; for example, the annual membership fee in 1911 was twenty-five cents, compared to one dollar for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. But state sponsorship alone cannot explain the WI's expansion; after all, the Farmers' Institutes failed to proliferate despite receiving a larger subsidy ($25 per branch in 1904, compared to $10 for the WI). Another factor was the organization's official non-partisan and non-sectarian mandate. While limited in practice by the Orange-tinted universe in which the WI operated at that time, this mandate at least enabled women of different Protestant denominations to associate with each other.

While the above factors aided the WI's proliferation, they were probably not sufficient. One of the more interesting contributions of the book is Kechnie's finding that the organization took off when it spread beyond the farm, and small-town women became active in the organization and gravitated to administrative and executive positions. Under the influence of wives of small-town merchants and other notables, the WI moved beyond its original narrow and uninspiring focus, and took on broader issues relating to the overall quality of rural life, such as raising funds for hospitals and libraries, and campaigning for immunization. Thus the WI became a fixture of small-town life, more along the lines of the Masons or the Elks than an agricultural-producers organization, in spite of the intentions of the Department of Agriculture. Kechnie concludes that "for women in rural communities ... to have been empowered and politicized by the process was something no one expected.... If anyone "stole" the WI from the Department of Agriculture, it was the women of rural Ontario." (139–40) Such are the paradoxes of a government-sponsored, non-government organization.

This book fills an important gap in the small, steadily-growing literature on the Women's Institutes. Kechnie has constructed an engaged narrative based on the abundant archives of the Ontario Agricultural College, the Ontario Department of Agriculture, the Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, and personal papers. Since she is the only scholar to have examined many of these archives in such exhaustive detail (and may be the only person ever to do so) it seems a shame that the book does not include tables and charts to flesh out some of the quantitatively based generalizations. Nevertheless, she brings an appropriate sense of balance to the analysis. The impact of Kechnie's findings goes beyond the period covered, and beyond the WI itself. The organization's early transformation described in her book clearly helped to reinforce a growing culture of community service that subsequently contributed so much social capital to rural Ontario over the past century.


Louise Carbert Dalhousie University

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