Macdonald Institute: Remembering the Past, Embracing the Future.

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

With the exception of its graduates, few people remember the Macdonald Institute. Initially begun in 1903 as place to spearhead practical education—especially for women—Macdonald Institute was constructed next to the campus of the Ontario Agricultural College outside Guelph. The Institute shared its name with Macdonald College at McGill University in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue because both were built as a result of the philanthropy of Montreal tobacco magnate Sir William Macdonald. Originally offering only diplomas rather than university degrees, the Institute’s offerings were less comprehensive that those of Macdonald College. Although it came to offer degrees, the Macdonald Institute was officially merged into the College of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Guelph in 1970. Still, the centennial of its founding in 2003 was observed by the publication of a full history of this now forgotten experiment in post-secondary education.

University of Guelph Professor Emeritus James Snell writes engagingly and comprehensively about the school that grew and expanded to become the largest educator of home economics teachers in English-speaking Canada by the 1950s. Along with Sir William Macdonald, two other individuals were vital to the early enterprise. One was Hamilton, Ontario, socialite Adelaide Hoodless, anxious to find a new site for the home economics school she had begun in her home city YWCA, and the other was Macdonald’s educational consultant, the federal dairy commissioner James Robertson.

The Institute began as an experiment in the practical education favoured by these three individuals, directed primarily toward educating rural offspring. Young men were trained in the manual arts and women in domestic science (foods) and domestic art (sewing). Within a couple of decades manual training had metamorphosed into agricultural engineering and the men moved off to courses in the agricultural college, leaving the Macdonald Institute as an exclusively women’s institution. In addition to training teachers, it also educated dietitians and nutritionists that served in a variety of institutional settings. In this instance it served as the precursor of Canada’s first university school of hotel and food administration, which was begun after Guelph received its university charter in 1964.

James Snell does a fine job of helping us to recall the mixed benefit bestowed through exclusively women’s education. It has been shown that women excel in educational environments free of the sexual rivalries and tensions prevalent in coeducational classrooms, but at the same time schools such as Macdonald Institute, with their limited curriculum, channelled women into what were perceived as helping professions and ones that afforded poor remuneration. Men, in contrast, were offered greater possibilities and higher salaries; however, women in non-coeducational facilities such as Macdonald Institute still gained a greater presence outside the home. This was clearly a legacy of the past, but it difficult to discern how such a trajectory provides a means of embracing the future, as the subtitle of this book maintains. Today Macdonald Institute is remembered principally through a building with that name on the campus of the University of Guelph.