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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mary Kinnear, Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004)

FROM THE AGE of 27, Ontario-born Mary McGeachy was based in Geneva, as an officer of the Information Section of the League of Nations. One of the largest bodies of the League's Secretariat, it gathered information from member states, and disseminated the League's ideals of inter-state cooperation and making international relations more democratic. Single, she had broad friendships. These included compatible Christian acquaintances from her days of learning English and History at the University of Toronto, to teaching high school students and mill girls in Hamilton and later to becoming a participant in international conferences and newspapers that eventually brought her to her career in Switzerland. She also shared the life and ideas of women internationalists, such as Natalie and Laura Dreyfus Barney, of Canadian reformist intellectuals, like J.W. Dafoe of the Winnipeg Free Press, with whom she corresponded for ten years, and cosmopolitan bureaucrats, such as the colleague Konni Zilliacus, rumoured to be her lover.

Hired directly by the Secretariat, and thus free from the direction of her country, she collated national data for journalists and League staff. She also ensured relations between the League and international women's organizations. Comprehensive inventories represent the main legacy of the League in many domains, from statistics on armaments to public accounts, as Martin Dubin and Yves Ghebali have long shown. More recently, Patricia Clavin and her colleagues, in a special issue of Contemporary European History, have shown to what extent, beyond the collection of data, the Secretariat could offer spaces for genuine exchange and innovation, away from state jealousies, which can be best analysed with the concept of "trans-nationalism." As an unattached bureaucrat, McGeachy contributed to such phenomena, by suggesting accommodations and common standards, on topics as varied as nutrition and disarmament.

European influences had honed her practical skills and nurtured ideals of equality through education and international cooperation. As a student activist, she had worked for the relief of European students, and had come across the study of international trends under the guidance of historian George Wrong, himself inspired by the Round Table. An evangelical upbringing in a community of Scottish descent in the Sarnia area, often visited by British preachers and peopled by recent immigrants, and which was home to the future economist John Kenneth Galbraith, prepared her for decades of public speech and faith in work amongst the dispossessed. In return, McGeachy preached to her compatriots about the methods of the "new political world order" in four 'mission' visits to Canada she made from Geneva. She reported that "international indifference" prevailed in her country of birth, in detailed accounts of the Canadian public opinion she set out to change by education and persuasion. (44, 49, 33)

McGeachy also oversaw the logistics of key meetings and the implementation of League resolutions, while also lecturing abroad on the goals and possibilities of the "Great Experiment." Her remarkable life has inspired the main work of fiction on the League, written by the Australian Frank Moorehouse, Grand Days and Dark Palace. Her practical skills found plenty of uses through the last days of the League, when she personally helped hundreds of League staff and their families escape Geneva, an epic of bureaucratic heroism with which Kinnear aptly chooses to open her book. Such thorough clerical work relied on sophisticated archival techniques, modelled after the British Public Records Office — as much of the Secretariat followed the lead of its first Secretary General, Eric Drummond of Britain. The historians of the League now meet in the very rooms the people they research inhabited. Kinnear also counts on public archives located on four continents, interviews, and private papers.

More than two decades ago, Donald Page, who interviewed McGeachy, and Richard Veatch gave a portrait of Canada in the League. But most of the story of the Canadians who participated in the history of the Secretariat remains to be told: from Larry Mackenzie, the member of the International Labour Organization, to the lawyer Walter Riddell, head of the Canadian delegation, to progressive businessman Herbert Ames, the first financial director, to social worker Charlotte Whitton, the Canadian member of the Child Welfare Committee (though Rooke and Schell's work does deal with Whitton's contribution to the League).

In 1940, at 39, McGeachy was invited to Washington by the British Department of Economic Warfare. Never a pacifist, she was to use her expertise in public relations to steer the neutral Americans away from their enthusiasm for humanitarian aid to civilians in enemy territories, in favour of giving relief only after a territory's liberation, a crucial aspect of Churchill's "total war." After the United States' entry in the conflict, at the end of 1941, she often travelled to the United Kingdom, where she helped voluntary societies plan for post-war 'social recovery' in all parts of the world. (112) This work in the management of relief brought her close to Erwin Schuller, in the summer of 1942. A young Austrian banker of Jewish descent working in London, and an attractive bachelor, her future husband was eager to promote intellectual and social exchanges between Britain and central Europe. He was contributing to the war effort by lending his administrative abilities to the National Council of Social Services.

McGeachy's proximity to such popular British endeavours went a long way to endear American audiences to the British war effort, her Canadian and Scottish identities helping to enhance her credibility. The British government acknowledged her contribution by promoting her to the rank of first secretary at the embassy in Washington, a diplomatic precedent for British women who had long campaigned to increase their power in international affairs. This made her the first woman British diplomat. It is in this context of renewed interest for historians, the changing status of the international work of women, that Kinnear mostly places McGeachy. Though willing to use her charm and the protection of powerful men, she fought many sexual barriers for the recognition of her work. At the League, she benefited from a regime marked by equality of pay which had been hard fought from the start by women internationalists. The ceiling in promotions she had nevertheless met in Geneva was temporarily broken by the emergency of the war.

Two years later, at 43, McGeachy was in New York City, as one of the six deputy directors of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency [UNRRA]. In charge of welfare for the millions of persons displaced by the war, she spent her time between the direction of a staff of hundreds, travelling to gather information and do public relations, and the writing of recommendations to solve problems of an unprecedented scale. In the midst of national suspicions, of controversies about the role of experts and the accountability of UNRRA's spending, she insisted on ideas that have a profound resonance to this day: treating stateless people as citizens, helping resistance movements in enemy-occupied areas, and showing how countries that provided help gained as much from these humanitarian relations as the communities who received it. This position was consistent with her criticism of the patronizing methods of the Student Christian Movement of the early 1920s. (49) In the eyes of this well-remunerated woman, the voluntary work of local communities was essential to international cooperation, a belief she had brought to the fields of central Europe from her work with the workers' education movement in Ontario, and which had been reinforced by her witnessing the exceptional success of the voluntary movement on the British home front. (42)

The last 45 years of her life were spent in Johannesburg, New York City, the Adirondacks, and Princeton, as the wife of a wealthy international banker who remained committed to community work. When she was 50, the Schullers adopted two children, who have kept mainly unhappy memories of an uprooted childhood, and of a forceful mother, at times conceited, and often distant. Erwin died in 1967, from a suicide induced by chronic depression, and she survived him by 24 years. It is with his loving letters, which have survived, but in the absence of hers, and with testimonies from her children, that Kinnear attempts carefully to relate these difficult private stories.

McGeachy served National Councils of Women wherever she resided, and became President of the International Council of Women, from 1963 to 1973. Paradoxically, the intense international activity of a woman of relatively modest origins was largely financed by her husband's estate, and the rich friends she had kept from her days in Geneva and London helped to keep the ICW afloat. She attracted the criticism of the proponents of a more democratic and balanced budget, as well as the more aggressive advocates of women's rights of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, through the heyday of decolonization, she was putting her voluntary ideals and her criticism of the sentimentalism of old-style charities into practice, an approach that places her among the early authors on the role of women in the development of communities.

This study of a life spent in the struggle to achieve international cooperation depicts shifting national, class, and sexual identities that trace unexpected lines between the hopes and failures of 1919 and the experiments of today.


Dominique Marshall Carleton University

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