Biography & Autobiography General
A Great Rural Sisterhood
Madge Robertson Watt and the ACWW
- 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
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
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.
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