Margaret Addison: A Biography

Alexander D. Gregor is director of the Centre for Higher Education
Research and Development at the University of Manitoba and co-editor of
Postsecondary Education in Canada: The Cultural Agenda.

Although Margaret Addison (1868–1940) is hardly a household name in
Canada (even in the households of historians), her story is an important
part of Canadian social history. With this well-researched and
well-written biography, Jean O’Grady has provided us not just with an
engaging story of an educational pioneer, but also with a “case
study” of sorts that offers an enticing window into the early stages
of women’s postsecondary education in Ontario and, by extension,
English Canada.

Margaret Addison spent her career principally at Victoria University (a
Methodist institution, now a federated part of the University of
Toronto), as dean of women’s residence (Annesley Hall) and as dean of
women—roles in which she had the opportunity to influence the
character and thinking of a significant number of what the author
categorizes as the second generation of university women (Margaret
Addison herself being a member of the first such generation in Ontario).
Through Addison’s story, we see something of the set of assumptions
and influences that shaped her and her generation’s views of women and
women’s education. Addison essentially worked “within” the system,
accepting its basic premises but at the same time attempting to expand
the possibilities for women within that milieu.

O’Grady is careful not to introduce tempting anachronisms into her
analysis: Addison is scrupulously placed within the framework of an
English Canada that was defined and directed primarily by its Protestant
middle class. Although the basic tenets of that milieu were not
questioned by Addison, its paternalistic control was; much of her energy
was spent in politically sensitive efforts to argue the case that women
have special needs in education that could be addressed better by women
themselves than by male administrators. In her own time, though, Addison
still very much reflected contemporary notions of women’s special
nature and the social mission accorded them by virtue of that nature.
Though many of those notions have been long abandoned, their examination
furthers our understanding of the forces and events that shaped
women’s education through the last century.