Margaret Robertson Watt

Margaret Rose Robertson Watt MBE
Mrs Alfred Watt, one of the founders of the Women's Institutes in Great Britain.
Born	(1868-06-04)June 4, 1868 Collingwood, Ontario
Died	November 29, 1948(1948-11-29) Montreal, Quebec

Margaret Robertson Watt MBE (June 4, 1868 – November 29, 1948) was a Scottish-Canadian philanthropist. She introduced the concepts and practices of the Canadian Women's Institute movement to Europe in 1914. Officials in the Agriculture Department were receptive to the idea of organised groups of rural women helping to produce food during wartime. As was the custom at the time, she was usually known as Mrs Alfred Watt.

Jane Robinson, in A Force to be reckoned with, noted that Adelaide Hoodless had already visited London and spoken about the movement.^[1] Hoodless was the original founder of Women's Institutes which began in the town of Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada. In 1899, Lady Aberdeen, wife of a former Governor General of Canada, welcomed Hoodless to England and was enthusiastic about the usefulness of such a women’s organization. But the ideas needed the right time and place to take root. Mrs Alfred Watt had the determination and stamina to keep bringing the topic to everyone’s attention until the Agriculture Organizations Society (AOS) began offering funds. This initiative enabled a group of women to organize in 1915 as the first Women’s Institute. They lived in and about the village of Llanfair PG in Wales.

Mrs Watt was a person of great energy and drive who believed strongly in the power of women working together for worthwhile goals. By 1919, she began suggesting the formation of an international organisation of Women’s Institutes for rural women all over the world. This vision came to reality in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1933 as the Associated Country Women of the World.

Personal life

Madge Robertson Watt was born Margaret Rose Robertson in Collingwood, Ontario, on June 4, 1868. Her father was Henry Robertson Q.C. (1840-1923), son of John and Catherine Smith Robertson of Hamilton. Her mother Bethia (1844-1893) was the daughter of John and Margaret Climie Rose of Bradford. Both parents were Canadian-born children of Scottish emigrants.

She liked "Madge" as the short name for Margaret and used it all her life. She also liked short hair and wore hers that way in spite of the fashion in her early life that dictated otherwise.

Madge Robertson, writer, 1893

Madge graduated from the University of Toronto as one of the first women to be granted a Master of Arts degree in 1890. She earned a good living as a Canadian writer, editor, and reviewer in the years between 1890 and 1907. Writing under the name of Madge Robertson, she had many articles published by newspapers and magazines, such as the University of Toronto's The Varsity, the Ladies Pictorial Weekly (she also edited it in 1892), The Globe, some USA titles, and the British Columbia Victoria Times. Ambrose & Hall (2007) hail her as an example of a New Woman because, in her writings, she used ideas from emerging feminist thought while recognizing women’s need to avoid being uprooted from basic family life and ties.^[2]

Although a believer in marriage reform, Madge became engaged to, and then married, Alfred Tennyson Watt, M.D., and bore two sons, Henry Robertson (Robin) in 1896 and Hugh Sholto (Sholto) in 1906. She continued her writing in William Head, Metchosin, British Columbia, where they lived while Dr Watt carried out his duties as chief medical officer, Superintendent of Quarantine for the Province of British Columbia. She joined the Metchosin Women's Institute in 1909, wrote pamphlets to entice agriculture settlers to Vancouver Island, and became a member of the senate of the University of British Columbia. She was also appointed to the first Advisory Board of the British Columbia Women's Institute.

When Dr Watt died suddenly in 1913, Madge took her two sons to England to complete their education. When World War I broke out and many men left their jobs to join the army and navy, farm and village women had to do the work they had left behind. Madge realized that a concerted agricultural effort was needed in the country and that women needed to work together with the Department of Agriculture to produce food effectively. She offered the concept of the Women's Institutes, as developed in Canada, and used her own experience of the Metchosin Women's Institute as a model.^[3]

Early Women's Institutes in the U.K.

With funds from the Agriculture Organizations Society, she helped set up the first Women's Institute in Wales in 1915 and went on to help a good number of WIs to organize quickly, following the success of the Welsh group. By the end of World War I, the movement was credited with being a strong force in agriculture, having increased the food supply from 35% to 60% of the country's requirements.^[3]

Madge was a good speaker and able to put her points across clearly. Audience members sometimes said they felt as if she was speaking directly to each individual. Madge continued encouraging women to set up and work within Women's Institutes and helped train workers to carry on the administrative side of the organization. As a superlative organizer, she helped set up the first 100 Institutes and was Chief Organizer under the Board of Agriculture.

As Chief Organizer of WIs in Great Britain during World War I, Mrs Watt helped bring over 100 Institutes into being within three years. In this picture, she wears the uniform for Voluntary County Organisers.

She developed and presented the first Women’s Institute School in Sussex in 1918 because she knew the organization needed good administrative staff who would continue to bring on new groups. She wanted women to realize their own talents and skills for training. In her history book, Jean M. Robinson reproduced an excerpt from the first Women's Institute School manual,^[4] which may have been the words that Madge actually spoke:

I always tell them, in getting out a programme, to remember these points:

Something to hear. Something to see. Something to do. This provides for everyone. I explain the glorious unity of the Women's Institute Organization, and then how the home is the beginning of all that the country will be.

On Madge's return to British Columbia after the war, she became involved with British Columbia Women's Institutes and was again appointed to the Women’s Institute Advisory Board, this time as president. Madge organized the first British Columbia Women’s Institute Provincial Convention. She ensured that, from 1924, delegates to the convention rather than government appointees would constitute future Boards.

International organization for rural women

Madge belonged to a number of women’s organizations from time to time, including the International Council of Women. From 1919 on, she talked up the idea of an international organization of rural women. From her research, she knew rural women around the world had many of the same problems, and that these were different from urban women's problems. The International Council of Women thought their organization could have a rural women’s branch and encouraged its formation. Madge, with others, thought through the implications and eventually decided that a truly independent body was needed.

Apparently, a great deal of talk and some personality clashes caused difficulties around this idea, but Madge was noted for being able to keep her train of thought and talk above the hubbub.^[5] She emerged from the fray with the independence of the Associated Countrywomen of the World assured. The Associated Countrywomen of the World was launched at a conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1933. A famous photograph of Madge showed her standing beside a blackboard at this conference with the title of the organization written in English, French, German and Swedish.^[6]

Madge became its first president and remained in that position until she retired in 1947. In 1936, she traveled around the world and visited many Women's Institutes in a number of countries. Elizabeth Smart, who became a writer in later years, accompanied Madge as her companion and secretary.

Although Mrs Alfred Watt had begun her adult career as the writer, Madge Robertson, she never wrote her own story. She was not a person who gathered things for herself. Except for a short period following World War 1, she lived on very little money and moved from one set of rented quarters to another. Over the years, Madge wrote many letters to her younger sister Katy describing her work and travels but did not ask her to keep these. Had the letters, postcards and notes been saved, they would have represented a useful record. Another disappointment to those hoping for contemporary records lies in Elizabeth Smart's published diaries in which Smart wrote only a small amount about the happenings, places and people she met on the tour around the world with Madge Watt.^[7]

Madge Watt lived in Victoria, British Columbia during World War II and then lived with son Sholto in Montreal, where she died aged eighty in 1948.

Legacy and influence

Madge was appointed a Member of the Order of British Empire by King George V in 1919 for her work in helping establish Women’s Institutes in the United Kingdom.

With others, Madge founded the Associated Countrywomen of the World in 1933 to take the concepts to other countries. She recognized that a number of other countries had organizations somewhat similar to the Women’s Institutes but, in many cases, these groups required stronger leadership and/or clearer goals. The Women's Institute mission and goals appealed to them, so these countries’ women joined together under the auspices of the Associated Countrywomen of the World and spread the movement around the world.

She received the Order of Agricultural Merit conferred by the governments of France and Belgium. Jean M. Robinson reports that she gained the cooperation of French and Belgian women in spite of their aversion to sharing recipes with anyone, not even their best friends.^[5]

Madge's work with the ACWW was honoured by the production of a Canadian postage stamp in 1959. The stamp, designed by Helen Fitzgerald Bacon, depicts a kneeling woman tending a green tree surmounted by a globe. Forming the border on three sides are the words, 'Associated Country Women of the World Union Mondiale des Femmes Rurale'.

In 1958, the Ontario Government honoured Madge and the Associated Country Women of the World by installing a plaque at the front of the small house where she was born in Collingwood.

Long-lost Associated Country Women of the World plaque formerly installed outside the Maple Street house where Madge was born in 1868.

At a square metre in size, this handsome plaque was somewhat overpowering in appearance, compared to the modest building behind it. The home owner asked that it be installed in a more appropriate place. It was taken down and stored, but later could not be located. In 1990, a new plaque dedicated to the Associated Country Women of the World was placed near the Collingwood Museum.

British Columbia WI historian Ruth Fenner notes that the Associated Country Women of the World now have non-governmental status at the United Nations and that Associated Country Women of the World representatives speak at international meetings held to decide how rural families can be helped.^[3]

Margaret Robertson Watt was named a Person of National Historic Significance by the Canadian government in 2007.

Several plantings keep Madge's memory green:

1. a flowering crabapple tree in Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, Vancouver Island,
2. an avenue of lime trees in the grounds of Denman College (the National Federation Of Women's Institutes' short-stay residential college), Oxfordshire, paid for by donations by WI members,
3. a memorial picnic shelter in the International Peace Gardens near the Canadian border with the United States, erected by the Manitoba Women’s Institutes.

As author Jane Robinson has stated: "It is clear that at certain periods in its history the Women's Institute appears to have lost its way. No doubt there are problems ahead. But it was never in danger of collapsing, and it won’t for a very long time because, at its core, working quietly and behind the scenes, are the women for whom and by whom it was created... supportive ‘sisters’ are still meeting together in villages and towns across the country to make the world a better place."^[8]

Madge Watt believed in ‘supportive sisters’ and knew that women could contribute to a better world. Her vision of women coming together in their own villages and working on common goals, both locally and internationally, far transcended her well-documented character faults and idiosyncrasies.^[9] She was a builder who believed in the power of women working together regardless of race, religion or nationality. She believed in women’s rights to higher education, access to careers, and opportunities to express their own individuality through use of their skills and talents. She helped many women broaden their horizons without upsetting their family grouping or breaking up relationships.

References

External links

• The Associated Country Women of the World
• British Columbia Women's Institute
• Jane Robinson
• Federated Women's Institutes Of Canada
• Laurentian University - Linda Ambrose
• National Federation of Women's Institutes