Macdonald Institute: Remembering the Past, Embracing the Future (review)

The Macdonald Institute was built on the campus of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph in 1903 in order to teach domestic science to rural women. James Snell's book, written to mark the Institute's one hundredth anniversary, tells the history of how this small, special-purpose post-secondary educational program evolved and changed to become a key component of one of Canada's leading universities.

On the surface, this volume looks like a high-quality coffee-table book that simply portrays the Institute's distant and more recent pasts, but it offers much more than eye candy for those with fond memories to recall. James Snell is a serious historian and the book does two things that all good works of history should do. It tells a good story about something important and it explores the social, political, and economic context that shapes and directs the behaviour of the key players in the story.

This highly readable book tells us about the people that defined the Institute's goals and developed its programs, shows how student life on campus changed over the decades, and reveals how the Institute eventually became integrated into the University of Guelph. Snell also interweaves into this story a strong sense of the changing roles of women throughout the twentieth century against a backdrop of deeply conservative attitudes in the early decades, limited government resources, and the effects of economic depression and war.

The text of the book is composed of six chapters and an epilogue. In addition to the textual chapters, which are themselves richly illustrated with many photographs, there are two extensive photo albums. The first of these, 'The Kemp Family Album,' pictures life on the Guelph campus in 1914-15. The second, at the end of the book, shows the facilities, faculty, and students in today's Macdonald Institute as part of the university's College of Social and Applied Human Sciences.

The narrative material is divided into chapters that deal with the key eras. The period to 1915 is the story of the founding of Macdonald Institute, while the period from 1915 to 1929 is a story of consolidation. Ground is lost during the depression years and after the Second World War begins, the entire Macdonald Institute program comes to a halt when the facilities are turned over to the military. As Snell observes, in the struggle of national priorities the education of women is judged less essential. With the end of the war, new appointments are made and more advanced academic programs are developed. By the mid-1960s, however, society and women's sense of their social roles have changed faster than the Institute's programs. The book's final sections examine how the faculty responded to a realization that they had to renew their mission and their relationship with their students. Each chapter begins with a consideration of the wider social context of the day, moves onto a description of the faculty and the program developments, and ends with a description of student life of the period.

At a surface level, Snell's book can be enjoyed as a simple story of a remarkable institution on the Canadian educational landscape. At a deeper level, Snell tells how an early group of visionaries were ahead of the curve in seeing that science and advanced ideas could be used to enhance the roles and lives of the women who were responsible for Canada's households. And then he shows how, sixty years later, those early visionaries had been replaced by academics whose eyes might have been too strongly directed to the past. They seemed not to have noticed that they were now behind the curve and society was looking for a very different kind of education for women not as housewives but as persons. As Snell so deftly explains, it was the courage and creativity of a new generation of faculty who grasped the depth of social change and found ways to bring the ideals of the Institute into...