Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario, 1897-1919 (review)

Reviewed by: Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919 Terry Crowley (bio) Margaret C. Kechnie. Organizing Rural Women: The Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario, 1897–1919 University of Toronto Press. x, 194. $75.00 History serves a variety of purposes, but it is only genuinely valuable when it provides us an intellectual guide. The old aphorism that history is written by the victors indicates a generalized cynicism of those propagandistic or triumphalist elements that can infest historical writing, yet in free societies such as our own the saying is primarily a comment on majority versus minority views. Historical views differ, the ideas of historians sometimes clash, and certain ideas are more fashionable at particular times than others. History evolves through encountering the challenge from unconventional ideas and the confrontation with new evidence. Revisionists such as Thorneloe College women's studies professor Margaret Kechnie want to change historical interpretations. Her topic is the Ontario Women's Institutes, a rural women's organization that began in 1897. This provincial voluntary association - comparable to the Cercles des [End Page 480] Fermières in Quebec and western Europe or Homemakers' Clubs in western Canada - led to the formation in the United Kingdom of the Associated Country Women of the World. Kechnie is only interested in the Women's Institutes during their first two decades before the provincial federation mentioned in her title was formed in 1919, but her book is important enough to influence subsequent scholarship in approaches to this and other rural women's organizations The significance of Margaret Kechnie's study is best understood in relation to the literature that has preceded it. As the Women's Institutes valued history, individual branches compiled what are called Tweedsmuir Histories of their localities. Provincial and national federation also subsidized more general accounts that were written within a hagiographical mould to praise the saints who had gone before in the work. This long initial stage was superseded when accounts by historians and political scientists appeared during the 1980s and 1990s that extended interpretations in new directions. These studies emphasized the Women's Institutes' popular base and adherence to various forms of feminist beliefs, but seldom did they challenge the earlier accepted story of the triumph of the Institutes as the farm women's organization par excellence. Margaret Kechnie presents a considerably more subtle and nuanced interpretation of the Institutes before 1919 that examines the dynamic interrelationships between men and women, farmers and town folk, and private and public sectors. She sees the Women's Institutes as evolving through three stages: an initial private sector phrase in which so little popular interest was expressed in the concept of a rural women's association that it nearly collapsed; a second stage with Ontario Department of Agriculture financial involvement and male leadership that led the Institutes to move into towns and villages as their principal source of strength; and a third stage in which the women members themselves claimed back their programs from the emphasis on home economics that government personnel attempted to foster in order to redirect their efforts to a host of community projects that involved such things as medical inspection of school children. Elements of the interpretation Kechnie forges have been suggested before, but they have not been tied together so ably or substantiated to the same degree. At first, farm women showed little interest in the Women's Institutes because they were too busy earning a living at a time when reliance on horse transportation made off-farm activities difficult to undertake except on Sunday visiting days. Male government officials supported the Institutes because they saw them as a way to spread knowledge of domestic science in such a way as to keep farmers happier and diminish the rural exodus to the cities. The prospects of improving the household appealed to some women, especially those married in town and without other employment, but ultimately such allurements proved insufficient to attract [End Page 481] large numbers without the prospect of larger collective efforts directed at community betterment. The newly Federated Women's Institutes of Ontario in 1919 had thirty thousand members organized in nine hundred branches around the provinces...

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