The number of women’s institute branches located in the Innisfail/Olds/Sundre constituency has diminished once again with the recent disbandment of Jackson Women’s Institute.
When a group of ladies in the Cremona area recently ceased operating a women’s institute they ended a nearly 70 year tradition but may have started another.
The 18 ladies who formerly met as part of the Jackson Women’s Institute (WI) until the end of 2010, will now be meeting next week for the second time under a new organizational name: the Parkhills Women’s Guild.
Giving up their charter has left 10 remaining women’s institute branches in district five of the Alberta Women’s Institute (AWI), the organization’s provincial association.
District five encompasses an area west to the B.C. border, east to the Saskatchewan border, north to nearly Red Deer and south to nearly Calgary.
“We felt alone. And it wasn’t benefiting us to try and work in with the others because they were so far away,” said former Jackson WI member Ev Robertson of the decision to disband the organization she had been a member of for 57 years.
In the later part of the Alberta Women’s Institute’s more than 100 years continued existence, there had once been a number of WI branches in immediate proximity to Jackson WI’s designated catchment area.
“We were five and then we went down to one,” Robertson said of the branches in the area, naming Westcott and Rugby as two which are no more.
Robertson surmised people moving away and an aging membership has contributed to many branches’ demise.
AWI District Five director Joyce Silbernagel says Jackson WI’s closure is a loss.
“It’s disheartening when you see a branch disband,” said the Elnora resident. “It’s very dear to me.”
A 40-year member herself, Silbernagel summarizes the organization’s draw and often decades-long hold of members, by reciting the AWI’s moto.
“For home and country,” said Silbernagel. “That’s just it.”
The objectives of WI are to help rural women acquire home management and leadership skills, strengthen communities through active involvement, and build mutually beneficial social networks.
It is these objectives that, while the new Parkhills group is not a WI, it has charted its own new course after.
The group plans to continue with activities such as taking lunch for participants of the annual first aid course hosted in Water Valley, and hosting teas and visits to a long-term care unit and lodges in Didsbury and Carstairs. They made 35 pies for Cremona’s recent Winterfest in 2009 and have resolved to do so again in 2011.
And just as they did under the women’s institute, the new group will undertake other charitable endeavours like those reaped from handicraft sessions from which scarves and mitts were made for people in northern Alberta.
Some members also intend to keep their ties to the women’s institute movement with membership at the international level.
Jackson WI’s reach internationally has provided sewing machines in Zambia and rudimentary birthing kits for mothers in developing countries.
Members have even weighed publicly into raucous debates of national and international magnitude having first become educated about them during meetings.
Jackson WI was one of many Canadian farm-related groups to have passed a resolution to exempt water from the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It is this very cornerstone of the AWI - education - which is what Robertson enjoyed the most during her time as a Jackson WI member, she said.
It just also happens to be the impetus for the creation of women’s institutes.
The AWI is considered a latter-day instance of the Mechanics Institutes movement.
During the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries there was a growing realization that the efficacy of the industrial workforce would be greatly improved if workers were better educated, AWI archive collaborators note.
Mechanics institutes began offering free short-courses for adults in the British Isles.
AWI archive collaborators also note the successes of the movement eventually led to the passage of the Education Act in 1870 which created publicly sponsored school boards and began the process of providing free access to education for all children.
The mechanics institutes movement was exported to the British Empire in the early 19th century.
The first mechanics institute in Canada was established in Montreal in 1828. When education through the institutes was expanded to include women, women’s institute clubs were formed in Ontario starting in 1897.
As early as 1909, women with previous women’s institute experience in Ontario had formed clubs in Alberta.
The province’s department of agriculture began to encourage the establishment of WI from 1912 onward, according to AWI’s archive collaborators.
The provincial government eventually formalized women’s institute in legislation in 1929 as a non-governmental organization sponsored by the province.
In the early 20th century, AWI’s primary goal was to provide emotional and intellectual support to the thousands of women who had settled in the new province of Alberta. AWI archive collaborators noted not many of them had agricultural experience and were living many miles from other women in primitive conditions on isolated farms.
Robertson offers a gentle laugh as she describes how she became involved in the Jackson WI.
“I was a newcomer to the area and I was a city girl. I didn’t know a lot about farming or breadmaking,” she said.
Her husband’s mother was a Jackson WI member and thus, she became one too, she said.
The Cremona area resident’s initiation to the organization came at a time of growth in AWI membership.
At the height of the organization’s operation between 1940 and 1965, the Alberta Women’s Institute had more than 350 branches located across the province.
By the early 21st century, these numbers had reduced to 50 branches Alberta-wide.
A generational aspect has kept branches going, both Silbernagel and Robertson say.
“It’s grandmothers bringing daughters, and daughters bringing babies and children,” Silbernagel said.
Jackson WI, and now the newly formed Parkhills Women’s Guild have benefited membership-wise by daughters of members moving back into the area, said Robertson.
Silbernagel describes the number of remaining AWI members - 122 at last count - as strong.
And the organization remains as one of the oldest voluntary associations for women in Alberta.
"It's disheartening when you see a branch disband. It's very dear to me."
Joyce Silbernagel
District Five WI director
