RED DEER – The founder of the women’s institutes is being recognized as one of the top 25 Canadians.
Adelaide Hunter Hoodless, born in 1857, near Hamilton, Ont., gave talks that led rural and farm women to organize. Her role in educating and provoking was first recognized when the federal Historic Sites and Monument Board named her a national significant person in 1960. In 2007, she will be one of 25 citizens to be featured in an exhibit by the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec.
The homestead where Hoodless lived for 24 years until her marriage is now the office location for the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada. FWIC had bought the rural property in 1959 and last year moved its administrative office out of Ottawa to the museum to save money.
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Curator Karen Richardson is passionate about Hoodless and said she was an early social activist. Richardson told the recent FWIC triennial conference that although Hoodless married a rich manufacturer and had servants, she lost her youngest child to contaminated milk. That tragedy started Hoodless on her crusades for better public health. She forced the dairy to agree to start pasteurizing its milk so no more children would die.
She felt women and girls needed more training so they could take better care of their families. She asked the Hamilton school board to teach home economics, which it refused, even though her husband, John, was a trustee on the board. He was supportive, however, and let her continue to campaign for the classes.
She had helped found the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1893 and turned to that group to train women in domestic science. Then she persuaded her old school in Brant County to offer the same cooking and cleaning instruction.
She eventually convinced the Ontario education minister of the value of the classes and by 1908 home economics was taught across Canada. She even wrote the course’s textbook, receiving $600 for her work, a sum equivalent to one year’s teaching.
Hoodless didn’t like the quality of teachers she was seeing and wanted to start a teacher’s college. In 1903 she sat next to William Macdonald, a wealthy man from Quebec, while traveling on a train. She badgered him enough on that trip that he wrote her a cheque for $75,000 to build the Macdonald Institute in Guelph.
She became one of the directors and the institute lives on as part of the University of Guelph.
She also started the Victorian Order of Nurses to provide help for new mothers and was a founder of the Canadian Council for Women. Her most notable accomplishment was the women’s institutes, a group that now has nine million members worldwide.
Hoodless died on the eve of her 53rd birthday while giving a speech. Of her three surviving children, only one granddaughter was born. That woman never married and Hoodless’s direct line died out.
Last year 1,900 adults and children visited the homestead.
