Organizing Rural Women: The Federating Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal, Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College o

A minor eruption of interest in Ontario’s and Canada’s Women’s
Institutes in the past decade reveals how women historians are
re-examining gendered associations that serve their numbers. The
Women’s Institutes are particularly attractive as a subject because
they have combined voluntaryist elements with government support to
further rural adult education. They spread around the globe in the form
of the Associated Countrywomen of the World. In Quebec and Western
Europe, the Institutes are called Cercles des Fermiиres; in Western
Canada, they are known as Homemakers Clubs. They remain of interest not
only as a disappearing facet of the past but also as objects for
understanding the institutions of lifelong learning in rural settings.

Margaret Kechnie is a professor of women’s studies at Laurentian
University. In the expanding literature on rural feminism and the
Women’s Institutes that has appeared during the past decade, her
revisionist account is the most narrow in time frame and among the most
significant in intellectual import.

Kechnie maintains that farm women at first showed little interest in
the Institutes that popped up after educational reformer Adelaide
Hoodless called for, in 1896, a female equivalent to the Farmers’
Institutes. The male officials in Ontario’s department of agriculture
supported the idea materially because they saw such associations as a
way to spread knowledge of domestic science that would make farmers
happier and inhibit migration to cities. Only limited numbers of women,
in towns and smaller centres especially, found the prospect of
organizing for household efficiency to be appealing, but once women
themselves added objectives of community betterment to the
government’s agenda, the Institutes expanded in Ontario to some 30,000
members in 900 branches by 1919.

This valuable book will challenge historians to rethink previous
presuppositions.