Brotherhood Economics: Women and Co-Operatives in Nova Scotia

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

Nova Scotia co-operatives have been the subject of many studies but none
of them mention women other than in passing. Not surprisingly, Rusty
Neal’s research turned up women in many capacities and it is a tribute
to her narrative skills that she has been able to convert her Ph.D.
thesis into this engaging book, chronicling the work of women who helped
to sustain a movement fronted by male workers, priests, academics, and
bureaucrats.

While she acknowledges developments in other areas of the province,
Neal focuses her attention on co-operatives in eastern Nova Scotia and
Cape Breton, where the Antigonish Movement, a marriage of adult
education and co-operative principles orchestrated by the Extension
Department of Saint Francis Xavier University, made a major impact after
it got underway in the 1920s. Chapters are devoted to Sister Marie
Michael MacKinnon and Sister Frances Dolores Donnelly, whose work was
central to the development of co-operatives in Antigonish and Reserve
Mines, respectively. Perhaps more surprising is the contribution of
three women from the United States. In the interwar years Lilian Burke,
a friend of Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell, helped to organize the sale
of Cape Breton women’s handicrafts in the United States and put
Cheticamp on the map for its floral-designed hooked rugs. Meanwhile,
Mary Arnold, supported by her companion Mabel Reed, spearheaded a famous
co-operative housing project in what became known as Tompkinsville
(named after one of the priest–academics of the Antigonish Movement)
before moving on to other challenges in the Newfoundland, the United
States, and Latin America.

Neal underlines the point that, despite their achievements, these women
did little to change the image of Catholic womanhood—the fetching
photograph of a young girl with a basket learning to be a good consumer
is very telling—or the male-dominated structures of the co-operative
movement. Nor were they able to disentangle themselves from the power
struggles between the men whose heroic efforts on behalf of the
dispossessed are widely documented in book and film. They nevertheless
demonstrated the art of the possible for women in a movement predicated
on democratic equality for all peoples.