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Biography & Autobiography General

A Great Rural Sisterhood

Madge Robertson Watt and the ACWW

by (author) Linda M. Ambrose

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2015
Category
General, General, General, General, Gender Studies
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442669024
    Publish Date
    Feb 2015
    List Price
    $35.95
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781442647725
    Publish Date
    Feb 2015
    List Price
    $91.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781442615793
    Publish Date
    Feb 2015
    List Price
    $45.95

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Description

As the founding president of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW), Madge Robertson Watt (1868–1948) turned imperialism on its head. During the First World War, Watt imported the “made-in-Canada” concept of Women’s Institutes – voluntary associations of rural women – to the British countryside. In the interwar years, she capitalized on the success of the Institutes to help create the ACWW, a global organization of rural women. A feminist imperialist and a liberal internationalist, Watt was central to the establishment of two organizations which remain active around the world today.

In A Great Rural Sisterhood, Linda M. Ambrose uses a wealth of archival materials from both sides of the Atlantic to tell the story of Watt’s remarkable life, from her early years as a Toronto journalist to her retirement and memorialization after the Second World War.

About the author

Linda M. Ambrose is a professor in the Department of History at Laurentian University.

Linda M. Ambrose's profile page

Editorial Reviews

‘Ambrose has put together a rich and detailed portrait of Margaret "Madge" Robertson Watt that highlights her contributions to early twentieth-century rural and international women’s activism…She offers a fascinating portrait of what it meant to build an international movement of women.’

BC Studies issue number 195

"Ambrose’s study will command a broad audience; it is not only a valuable scholarly text about significant themes and topics in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it is also an accessible read that provides a complex portrait of a key figure in the history of women’s movements who had a vision of "a great rural sisterhood" and worked tirelessly to realize that vision."

The Canadian Historical Review Vol 99:2: June 2018

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