Jambusters (4 page)

Domestic science was a new concept to the audiences at Adelaide Hoodless’s lectures given as part of her promotion of the importance of home economics. She defined it as ‘the application of scientific principles to the management of the home. It teaches the value of pure air, proper food, systematic management, economy, care of children, domestic and civil sanitation
and the prevention of disease.’ She urged her listeners to consider the importance of respecting domestic occupations and giving value to the education of the woman as a homemaker, concluding: ‘The management of the home has more to do with the moulding of character than any other influence, owing to the large place it fills in the life of the individual during the most plastic stage of development. We are therefore justified in an effort to secure a place for home economics or domestic science in the education institutions of this country.’ Most importantly, she believed in ‘elevating women’s work to the level of a profession and putting it on a par with a man’s work’.
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Her appeal did not fall on deaf ears. At that time in North America women’s issues were beginning to come to the fore. The International Council of Women had been formed in 1888 in the United States, advocating women’s human rights and working across national boundaries. At their first conference in Washington DC in March and April of that year there were eighty speakers and forty-nine delegates, representing women’s organisations from nine countries. Britain was represented by Lady Aberdeen, wife of the Governor General of Canada, who became the council’s president in 1893. At the conference of the Canadian National Council of Women in the same year, Mrs Hoodless succeeded in persuading them to back her campaign to introduce domestic science into the school curriculum.

Her conviction that things would only change if women could bring basic scientific knowledge into their homes convinced her to tackle the issue at the grass roots as well as at the national level. ‘Is it of greater importance that a farmer should know more about the scientific care of his sheep and cattle, than a farmer’s wife should know how to care for her family, or that his barns should have every labour saving contrivance, while she toils and drudges on the same old treadmill instituted by her grandmother,
perhaps even carrying water from a spring, a quarter of a mile from the house, which I know has been done?’
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The emphasis on raising the status of women’s work to that of men was a key part of her message.

A speech she gave at a conference of the Farmers’ Institute at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph was heard by Mr Erland Lee, secretary of the Farmers’ Institute of Wentworth County. He immediately invited her to speak at their next Ladies night at his institute in Stoney Creek. Some thirty-five farmers’ wives were present at the talk. They received enthusiastically her suggestion that as the men had a Farmers’ Institute so the women should consider having one of their own. The farmers’ wives were so keen that they invited her to return the following week, on 19 February 1897. That night the idea of a women’s institute was born and a week later what became known as the ‘Stoney Creek Women’s Institute’ was called into being and its first meeting was held. Its motto, chosen five years later, became ‘For Home and Country’.

Mrs Hoodless continued to lecture on girls’ education while the movement of women’s institutes grew and flourished throughout Canada. She herself was credited with founding the movement but it was the women who set up the individual institutes who were its champions. They set to work with Mrs Hoodless’s words ringing in their ears: ‘What must be done is to develop to the fullest extent the two great social forces, education and organisation, so as to secure for each individual the highest degree of advancement.’
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Women alone were not responsible for the success of the Women’s Institute movement in Canada any more than they would be in England and Wales two decades later. The movement needed the approval of the male-dominated establishment and it had Mr Erland Lee and members of the Farmers’ Institute and
the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture firmly behind it. Both bodies could see the value of motivating and empowering rural women in their plan to improve life in rural villages. They threw their support behind institute initiatives, both at a local and national level, so that by the early years of the twentieth century, just a decade or so after the first meeting at Stoney Creek, there was a pool of speakers, a list of topics for discussion and training colleges for teachers as well as short courses for institute members on cookery, home nursing, food values and sewing. One report concluded with satisfaction: ‘We have learned so much now that if we have typhoid fever or scarlet fever, we do not say “This is the Lord’s will”, but examine drains, sinks, cellars, walls and backyards where we know there may be conditions favourable to the development of these germs. We have learned that the best way to get rid of them is to let the sunshine stream in.’
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More than anything else the Women’s Institutes, of which there were 3,000 in Canada by their twenty-first year, gave women who had lived isolated lives the opportunity to meet together regularly, providing a network of friendship as well as expertise and education, which few had ever experienced in their lives. It was enormously empowering.

Why did it take until 1915 for this movement to catch on in Britain? After all, Norway had independently formed the House Mothers Association in 1898, which spread throughout Scandinavia and had a membership, within two decades, of 70,000. Belgium formed Cercles des Fermières (Circles of Farmers’ Wives) in 1906 and the United Irishwomen were formed in Ireland in 1910. To some extent it was the conservative nature of the British that meant that change came only very slowly. Life in the countryside was shaped by tradition and an unwillingness to exchange the familiar, however imperfect, with
the new and unknown. A typical village at the beginning of the twentieth century would have a manor house, inhabited by the squire and his family, who might be resident full time or who might only come down for the hunting. Then there would be the farmers, some owning their own farms, others as tenant farmers but many of very long standing. These families, headed by the men, might have been working the land for many decades, if not centuries. Resistance to change, and in particular to book learning, was strong amongst this group. They had learned from their forebears and from experience. There were no short cuts to be had when it came to farming and managing the land. The main body of the village would comprise farm labourers and their families, who again might have been living in the village and serving the big house for generations. Some villages had a doctor and he, as a man of learning with knowledge of science, was viewed with awe and suspicion in equal measure. The vicar or priest was accorded equal respect. A few villages could boast an artist or two but they were generally on the periphery of village life and not part of the hierarchy.

Rural Britain in the early twentieth century was in decline. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century in excess of 2 million acres of arable land had been allowed to go out of production. An exodus to the cities in search of an easier way of life had left agriculture a bereft and flagging industry. Many farmers had gone bankrupt and unemployment among agricultural labourers was high. This in turn brought great hardship to their wives, children and other family dependents. Many rural communities were under-populated and impoverished, not just financially but also educationally. Most of the poorest children did not have the opportunity to attend school as they were needed for labour. Often the only education available was at Sunday school. A vicar in Kent described how the children of the poorer part of his parish
were taught to read and ‘to be instructed in the plain duties of the Christian religion, with a particular view to their good and industrious behaviour in their future character as labourers and servants’.
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Village life was also riven by class and an attitude amongst the gentry that it was not necessarily wise to educate the servant class in the same way that it would not be sensible to teach a cow her value or a horse its power. Abhorrent as it now seems, this attitude prevailed. Yet there were some people who were determined to make a difference to rural communities in spite of the opposition they met.

The government was sufficiently concerned by the situation in the countryside that it set up the Board of Agriculture in 1889 which brought together all government responsibilities for agricultural matters under one department.

Twelve years later, in 1901, the Agricultural Organisation Society (AOS) was formed. It grew from a voluntary body into an organisation to help to stem the decline in agriculture. The AOS had the specific brief to encourage the formation of local societies of farmers, smallholders and growers who could work cooperatively. Initially the cooperatives concentrated on the supply of fertilisers, mixed feed and seeds; the development of trading came later. The forming of these groups created a structure which had political representation at a high level. England, Wales and Scotland each had branches with chairmen and committees. Its secretary was a man of great determination and vision, who would play a role in the setting up of the Women’s Institute. His name was John Nugent Harris, but on the eve of the First World War he was still dealing with the resuscitation of a depressed agro-economy.

As early as 1904 Edwin Pratt, author of
The Organisation of Agriculture in England and other Lands
, proposed that women’s institutes might be a good way to educate British countrywomen. The
suggestion received little acknowledgement and no interest. Eight years later, Robert Greig, who had worked as a staff inspector at the Board of Education, pushed rather harder. He had been tasked to carry out an investigation into agricultural instruction in other countries and was impressed by the WIs he saw on his visits to Poland, Belgium and across the Atlantic in Canada. Most importantly he saw the value not only of the educational talks geared towards child-rearing and homemaking, piggery and poultry, gardening and dairy work but also the purely entertaining topics, including music and literature. He wrote a pamphlet which explained the great work being done in other countries by Women’s Institutes, concluding that: ‘perhaps the most profitable outlet for the expenditure of energy and public money in the improvement of agriculture will be found in widening the mental horizon of the farmer’s wife and especially the wife of the labourer, smallholder, and working farmer . . .’
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He stressed the fact that women in the countries he had visited had risen to the challenge of setting up institutes and had been aided by their governments through generous grants. He urged ‘energy, enthusiasm and bold optimism’ from women who should be encouraged to follow the lead of those in other countries.

There was still no reaction from anyone in rural Britain. As Mr Robertson Scott concluded in his history of the WI, written in 1925: ‘Unfortunately Mr Greig did not go a-gospelling with his pamphlet. Nothing was done to forward this plea for Women’s Institutes, the case for which has seldom been more effectively made.’
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The WI movement needed an advocate to sow the seed and fertile soil in which to flourish. Two things coincided to bring this about: the champion was Mrs Margaret Rose ‘Madge’ Watt; and the fertile environment was the First World War.

Mrs Watt was Canadian born although her parents were both of Scottish descent. She was highly educated, having obtained a
first class honours degree in modern languages at the University of Toronto in 1889 and gone on to do postgraduate work in history and pedagogics. She worked as a journalist in New York and wrote literary criticism for American and Canadian newspapers. In 1893 she married Alfred Tennyson Watt, who was the medical officer of health for British Columbia. In 1909 Mrs Watt became a founder member of the Metchosin Women’s Institute on Vancouver Island and was soon involved in developing the movement in British Columbia. In 1913 her husband died and she decided to move to England in order to educate her two sons.

From the moment she arrived in Britain she began promoting the idea of women’s organisations. She spoke at public meetings and private gatherings but there was little interest. Some listeners felt she was out of tune with English village life and the comparison with Canada, with its more progressive views, jarred. Her breakthrough came when she wrote a pamphlet explaining how Women’s Institutes could function as a valuable part of the war effort by encouraging countrywomen to take responsibility for increasing and safeguarding the supply of food. Mr Nugent Harris, then general secretary of the Agricultural Organisation Society, met her at a conference in London in February 1915. She introduced herself and said she wanted to talk about Women’s Institutes. He had never heard of such a concept but he was impressed by her and invited her to talk to him at his office.

Mr Nugent Harris had been looking for a way to involve women in the cooperative agricultural societies and indeed he even succeeded in persuading some groups to allow women to attend the meetings. However, it was not a successful experiment as the women never spoke at the meetings, although afterwards they would talk to him and criticise or comment on this or that decision. When he asked them why they would not speak up they replied: ‘We dare not because our husbands and sons would make
fun of us.’
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He was frustrated by the reaction but refused to give up: ‘I would not rest until I could establish some movement that would give the women-folk a chance to express themselves free from the fear of being ridiculed by the men. By the merest chance, I met Mrs Watt. I felt I had come in touch with the very movement I wanted.’
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With permission from the AOS he appointed Mrs Watt to start Women’s Institutes in July 1915.