Women’s group relevant at 100

Your reading list

MORRIS, Man. – After 100 years, the Manitoba Women’s Institute isn’t getting tired but it’s definitely getting stretched.“We’re either going to have to get more people to move back to the rural or we’re just going to have to get louder and louder to be heard,” said new MWI president Justina Hop about challenges in the midst of rural depopulation.“We’re still a viable organization. If we have been around for 100 years, it’s because our concerns and issues haven’t changed that much. We still have to go out there and promote rural women.”Both the MWI and the University of Manitoba’s faculty of human ecology are 100 years old in 2010. At the MWI annual convention in Morris, women from across Manitoba, deputy premier Rosann Wowchuk, lieutenant-governor Philip Lee and Canadian aid worker Flora MacDonald toasted the organization’s contributions.WIs were first founded in Canada to help protect farming families from the dangers of ill prepared and preserved foods.The Morris women’s institute was the first one formed in Manitoba in 1910.At the same time, the university embraced the concept of training women to avoid these dangers and protect their families’ health, setting up a faculty to educate rural women and transfer knowledge.Human ecology dean Gustaaf Sevenhuysen said the faculty made major contributions to the status of women and brought the principles of engineering and science to households.Over the decades, the food preparation focus has changed to include health and safety.Sevenhuysen said that focus makes the roles of both organizations relevant today. Life has become much less labour intensive for rural women and they are losing the old skills.But Sevenhuysen said neither his faculty nor the women’s institutes should be teaching these basic skills, but should be lobbying for those to be taught in high schools.