In Good Hands: The Women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild 9780773574175

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IN GOOD HANDS

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IN GOOD HANDS THE WOMEN OF THE CANADIAN HANDICRAFTS GUILD

Ellen Easton McLeod

PUBLISHED FOR CARLETON UNIVERSITY BY MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS, MONTREAL & KINGSTON, LONDON, ITHACA

Copyright © Carleton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-88629-356-1 Printed and bound in Canada

Canadian Cataloguing-in-Publication Data McLeod, Ellen Mary Easton, 1945In good hands : the women of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Women's experience series ; # 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88629-356-1 1. Canadian Handicrafts Guild—History. 2. Peck, Alice 3. Phillips, May 4. Arts and crafts movement—Canada. I. Title. NK841.M344 1999

745.5'06'071

C99-900828-5

The design motif used on chapter heads is from the WAAC Montreal Branch exhibition catalogue for Oct. 22-Nov. 3, 1900. [CHGA] Design and interior: Mayhew & Associates Graphic Communications, Richmond, Ont. in association with Marie Tappin This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canada McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

In memory of Virginia J. Watt, C.M., and with gratitude to my husband John Curry Seixas McLeod

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction I Remarkable Women

viii x xii i n

II Arts and Crafts Movements and Women in Britain, the U.S. and Canada

50

III Attempts to Promote Crafts in Canada: 1880-1902

72

IV Montreal Stakes its Claim for Handicrafts

90

V Breakaway: 1904-1907

114

VI The Canadian Handicrafts Guild: Establishing a Reputation

140

VII National and International Exposure

167

VIII Embracing the "Other"

203

IX The Guild's Multicultural Mosaic

234

X The Saga of the Guild's Book on Crafts

250

XI Crafts Come Into Their Own: 1920s to 1940s

261

XII The Legacy

280

Conclusion: Something Worthwhile

296

Appendix A: The Constitution and By-Laws of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild Appendix B: Presidents of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild: National Guild and Quebec Branch

307

Bibliography Index

309 342

301

ILLUSTRATIONS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Map of Montreal Mary Alice Skelton Peck The Skelton family drawing room "Undermount" Alice Peck, weaving Mary Martha (May) Phillips May Phillips' School of Art and Applied Design "When the Sap Begins to Run" May Phillips, ca. 1937 The Art Association of Montreal (AAM) building Miss Edith Watt Canadian crafts at the St. Louis World's Fair Handwoven carpets, portieres and lace Indian arts Catalogue for "Our Handicrafts Shop" A patchwork quilt Indian beadwork Doukhobor embroidery, Quebec homespuns, and hooked rugs 19 Indian beadwork and basketry 20 Invoice form, "Our Handicrafts Shop" 21 MmeeVenne weaving the ceinture flechee 22 Display at the 1907 Canadian Handicrafts Guild Exhibition 23 The Canadian Handicrafts Guild Exhibition, 1924 24 Craft demonstrations, 1927 25 Hand-made rugs, 1927 26 Wrought ironwork, fine metalwork, and batik 27 A World War I veteran demonstrates bookbinding 28 West wall in the AAM Art Gallery, 1931 29 Canadian Handicrafts Guild Exhibition, 1933 30 Exhibit of furnishings, including weaving and pottery, 1934 31 Exhibit of wood carving, 1933 32 Provincial Guilds entered articles in competition, 1933 33 Mary Dignam 34 Advertisement for the Canadian Handicrafts Guild 35 Drawing of an Ojibway loom for beadwork 36 Dramatic entrance

6 12 13 18 23 25 32 33 35 104 106 117 125 126 145 146 146 153 154 155 169 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 194 217 219 222

37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Alice Lighthall, ca. 1948 Guild craft class for immigrant children Children's craftwork A blind man does a weaving demonstration Karen Bulow, weaving The interior of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild Shop A boutonne bedspread

22,6 239 240 241 243 268 273

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am greatly indebted to Virginia Watt, Archivist of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, and to the archives she founded. I thank her for her friendship and support. I also wish to thank Dorothy Stillwell, as well as Nairy Kalemkerian, Olga Burman, and others at the present Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec. My special thanks to members of Alice Peck's family, her grandchildren and their spouses: to Barbara and Owen Carter, Jim and Daryl Peck, Richard and Anne Peck, Margaret Peck, Elizabeth Archibald, great-granddaughter Pat O'Brien, the late Alice Kingsmill Stevenson, and the late Esmond H. Peck. I thank them for their memories, assistance, and hospitality. Thank you also to the late Amy Parker and her daughter Louise Chesley who wrote to me about their great aunt, Edith Watt. I thank the many people from Carleton University's School for Studies in Art and Culture: Art History, who have been inspiring and helpful, especially: Natalie Lucky], Mame Jackson, Ruth Phillips, Michael Bell, Angela Carr, Barbara Stevenson, Carole Luff, Mary Browne, and my fellow graduate students. I also thank the Teaching and Learning Resource Centre, the librarians at Carleton Library and Interlibrary Loan, and the Friends of Art History. I very much appreciate the support of both Carleton University Press and McGill-Queen's University Press, and thank John Flood, Naomi Griffiths, Heather Sherratt, Marie Tappin, Sue Williams, and most especially Jennie Strickland for her professional dedication. I am grateful for the care taken by James Bladder of Gilmore Printing. I am also greatly indebted to the ASPP at the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada for its help and support. Thank you. I am grateful for the assistance I received at the McCord Museum of Canadian History from Pamela Miller, Annette McConnell, Heather McNabb, Nora Hague, and Suzanne Morin. At the National Library of Canada, I particularly thank Diane Thomson; also Mary Collis, Norma Gauld, and Mary Jane Starr. Others I thank for their interest and help are: Victoria Baker, Cindy Campbell, Charles Hill, Douglas Schoenherr from the National Gallery of Canada; Colleen Dempsey at the National Archives of Canada; Sandra Flood, especially, and also Isabel Jones, Margot Reid, and Benoit Theriault at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; Eric Vanasse at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Mary Bursey, Lynn Cumine, Fran

Hill, Helga Scott, Dot Seixas, and Ruth Upjohn at the Women's Art Association of Canada in Toronto; and Margaret Craze of the Women's Art Society of Montreal. Others I would like to thank for their help at various stages are Susan Butlin, Susan Close, Gail Crawford, Sandra Dyck, Bruck and Carol Easton, Alison Easton and Jon Corchis, James Easton, Edna Foley, Dominique Gagne, Ruth Grace, Carroll Holland, Anne and Tate McLeod, Janet and Kathy McLeod, Marybelle Mitchell, Jean Palmer, Marjorie Robertson, Leslie Sheffer, Bob Stanley, Bobin Tindale, Celia Verrier, Jo Weston, and George Wright. To so many others, whom space does not permit me to name, I have appreciated your long-standing interest and encouragement. And thank you, John, for caring as much as I did, and for always being willing to listen, and read it yet again. Lastly, I thank Alice Peck and May Phillips, the women who have enriched my life through the contribution they made to Canada, which I could recount to others.

ABBREVIATIONS AAM AGO ANS CAC CCC CCE CCF CHG

Art Association of Montreal Art Gallery of Ontario (formerly Art Gallery of Toronto) Antiquarian and Numismatic Society

CHGA CMC CNE CNR CPR

Canadian Art Club Canadian Crafts Council Central Canada Exhibition Canadian Crafts Foundation Canadian Handicrafts Guild now, Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec Canadian Handicrafts Guild Archives Canadian Museum of Civilization Canadian National Exhibition Canadian National Railway Canadian Pacific Railway

IODE ICW

Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire International Congress of Women

McC MLCW MLEA MMFA

McCord Museum of Canadian History Montreal Local Council of Women (Montreal city branch of NCWC) Montreal Ladies' Educational Association Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

NAC NCWC NGC NLC NYASL

National Archives of Canada National Council of Women of Canada National Gallery of Canada National Library of Canada New York Art Students' League

OSA OHS

Ontario Society of Artists Our Handicraft(s) Shop

RCA ROM

Royal Canadian Academy Royal Ontario Museum

xiii

WAAC WAS WASMF WI

Women's Art Association of Canada (first: Woman's Art Association of Canada) Women's Art Society (of Montreal) Women's Art Society of Montreal Files Women's Institutes

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INTRODUCTION

THE RUGS, WEAVING, AND NATURAL DYES they admired in rural Quebec kindled the inspiration of a group of privileged Montreal women. By selling these crafts at small outlets, they hoped to revive home art production and provide an income to needy farm women. With this idea, they began an arts and crafts movement in Canada in the late 1890s. The movement was led by two mid-Victorian women, then in their forties. Alice Peck1 was a well-to-do Montreal mother of seven with a summer home at Metis Beach on the lower St. Lawrence. Schooled in England, well travelled in Europe, she was an accomplished weaver and book binder in her own right. Mary (May) Phillips,2 an artist who had spent five years studying art and working in New York City, was principal of the School of Art and Applied Design in Montreal. Alice Peck and May Phillips were among the recently enfranchised fln-de-siecle club women. Active in the National Council of Women of Canada and the Women's Art Association of Canada, they became respected cultural leaders. The goal they set themselves was to help women find productive work in the arts. They knew few could hope to earn a living in painting or sculpture, but they were aware of other possibilities. Urban arts and crafts societies and social reform movements promoting craftsmanship were gaining importance in other countries. This arena appealed to them and promised a broad reach. Alice Peck and May Phillips believed that arts and crafts were the basis of a country's artistic reputation. They valued the decorative arts and crafts of their peers. They were also attracted to French-Canadian rural home arts, Indian basketry, beadwork, and quillwork, and the

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weaving, embroideries, and laces of new settlers. The good design, natural colours, fine workmanship, and originality were too significant to ignore. They worried that ready-made goods from catalogues would destroy home-arts production, and that immigrants might stop making their traditional handicrafts in a new country. They saw that Indian3 arts were beginning to decline in quality. Believing that Canadians did not properly appreciate all these arts and crafts, they decided to act. Their vehicle was a committee in the Montreal Branch of the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC). In 1896, Alice Peck and May Phillips started the Home Arts and Handicrafts Committee to exhibit and sell these Canadian crafts. Its strong early success created tensions with the national WAAC leadership in Toronto. By December 1904, over the objections of national president Mary Ella Dignam,4 the Montrealers decided to take their handicrafts project out of the WAAC. As a result, in January 1905, they founded the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal. The Guild was incorporated nationally in 1906. For 30 years, it continued as a leading national patron of Canadian handicrafts as art. In 1936, when Peck and Phillips as elderly women were no longer active, the Guild devolved its assets and liabilities to a new Quebec Branch, which assumed leadership along with other Guild branches and affiliates. As one era ended, a new one emerged in which crafts were encouraged by many agencies across the country. This book, although it casts forward in its closing chapters, focuses on the background of the handicrafts movement and the Guild's history in Montreal up to this change of status in 1936. The Canadian Handicrafts Guild encouraged the best arts and crafts made by Canadians of all backgrounds. The Guild's raison d'etre was to promote art, preserve this heritage, and create employment for craftspeople, many of whom did not have other sources of income. The name "Guild" was a misnomer. Rather than a co-operative of skilled workers in one craft, like medieval guilds, the Guild in Montreal began as a steering committee organized to develop Canadian handicrafts. It never required the craftspeople to join as members. Its members were primarily the activists who ran the association or contributed financially to its work. Most of the association's work was done by women. This book documents the founders and early history of the first national organization to develop arts and crafts in Canada, including handicrafts made in Canadian homes. This early history is little known today.

INTRODUCTION

For many years, decorative arts and crafts have been depreciated by art history, the "master narrative" of Western art. The status of craftsmanship began to diminish in the late fifteenth-century European Renaissance when a new intellectual distinction divided crafts from fine arts.5 Crafts became known as the manual arts, and hence minor arts. The physical execution of an art object came to be regarded as inferior to its creative idea. Painting, sculpture, and architecture were no longer considered co-operative manual arts, but instead were seen as original works by a unique creator or "genius." Today, the "genius" worship that previously discriminated against crafts has been questioned.6 The distinction between high arts and minor arts can be seen as an artificial ideology favouring only the high arts. It is being acknowledged now that all artistic practices engage the mind and require specialized knowledge of techniques, materials, and design. Early modernism also devalued the decorative arts because the term "decorative" implied a "subordination, the necessity of staying within a given boundary, or orienting oneself in a direction, determined by the manner of being and the character of the object being decorated."7 Yet, physical requirements in painting, sculpture, and architecture, such as support, media, and site, circumscribe every artistic endeavour. Crafts and decorative arts are not alone in dealing with the constraints of reality.8 Until recently, art historians did not consider either women or craft as important, due mainly to inherent biases in past scholarship in history, and particularly art history. Art history is now widely acknowledged to have evolved from the patriarchal, high-art attitudes in the European Renaissance. A generation ago, it was still possible to describe art history as the investigation of style, attribution, dating, authenticity, rarity, iconography, and the rediscovery of forgotten (male) artists.9 Its focus on only painting, sculpture, and architecture had not been recognized as too narrow. Like many of the humanities, art history has since been shown to be restricted by its class and gender biases. Linda Nochlin, who asked in a 1973 article the revealing question, "Why have there been no great women artists?"10 was one of the first to expose the gender bias of art history and art practice. Soon after, a young Marxist scholar, T.J. Clark, publicly advocated a rigorous questioning of art and its societal origins.11 Since then, many art historians have analyzed the discipline's past assumptions about what constitutes art, and why some objects and not others were deemed worthy of scholarship.

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Art historians have examined the social aspects of art, formulating a critique of how patriarchy influenced art history and art practice. Diverse theoretical approaches revealed areas previously neglected in art history. During the last few decades, feminist art historians have altered the traditional canon of art, introducing names of "forgotten" women artists and identifying obstacles they faced. The old art history is being supplanted by a more complete version. Among other things, this has opened a discourse on the role of women in the decorative arts, crafts, and design,12 and also the substantial part played by women as volunteers, educators, and patrons of the arts.13 Because, in the past, women were excluded from the written history of art, their role in crafts was forgotten. Regarding women's handicrafts, feminist art historian, Rozsika Parker, has suggested that categorization does not depend on the art objects themselves, but on " where they are made and who makes them."14 Women made crafts in the home for the family to use. Intended for a useful purpose, their origins were domestic and female. The conditions of their manufacture determined where they fitted in the hierarchy of arts.15 Both women and their crafts became invisible. The institutional discrimination and gender stereotypes that circumscribed women's participation also encouraged one-sided art history. As sources of information, cultural institutions were not impartial, and Canada was no exception. Institutional records illustrate the bias. In the few cultural institutions in nineteenth-century Canada, the voting members and beneficiaries were men. Art societies, such as the Art Association of Montreal (1860), the Ontario Society of Artists (1872), and the Royal Canadian Academy (1880), controlled professional validation and discriminated against women artists. The Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) in Toronto was open to all professional Ontario artists by election, but excluded women from voting and from the business functions of the Society. When the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) was founded in Ottawa by Governor General, the Marquis of Lome, only one woman, Charlotte Schreiber, was granted full academician status. It was over 50 years before another woman, Marion Long, was elected to the same rank in 1933. Women artists could be associate members, but were denied voting privileges in the Council and committees until 1913. Such restrictions, which had little to do with artistic ability, rested on the patriarchal presumption that a "lady" should not know or concern herself with business, and thus should not be involved in the running of these societies. Women

INTRODUCTION

artists rarely sat on any exhibition juries, although those judged worthy were admitted as exhibitors in annual shows. Although a woman writer in 1900 claimed that "on an average, from a quarter to one-third of the annual exhibitors are women,"16 the exhibiting record of the Canadian Art Club reveals that Laura Muntz Lyall was the only woman of the 35 listed exhibitors during its lifespan from 1907 to 1915. In Montreal, male artists and art patrons founded the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) in 1860. The AAM established a permanent art gallery on Phillips Square in 1879, with a bequest from Benaiah Gibb. Later, when the AAM moved into the new gallery building on Sherbrooke Street West in 1912, its collections and exhibitions boasted even grander space. The AAM held annual spring art shows open to Canadian artists from across the country, and every few years, it played host when the RCA exhibitions were held in Montreal. However, the AAM did not purchase Canadian art. In its acquisitions, the AAM almost totally neglected Canadian artists because of its preoccupation with European painting; by 1913, the AAMs collection of 625 works included only 33 by Canadians.17 At the AAM too, full privileges were for male members only. Women members could not vote or serve on hanging committees. In Montreal, high art was conspicuously visible and had a permanent home. It is, therefore, especially noteworthy that it was here Alice Peck and May Phillips promoted Canadian arts and crafts, including women's handicrafts, exhibiting them in the AAM art gallery every year for 30 years. The AAM annual reports did not record this event for years, although newspaper clippings on the Guild's exhibitions at the AAM have been consistently preserved in the AAM's archival scrapbooks.18 The fact that these exhibitions were inaugurated by women in the WAAC Montreal Branch, and later run by the same women volunteers in the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, may explain the silence in the AAMs annual reports. Nevertheless, the loan of gallery space that began as a favour to the women grew to become a significant annual event in the art life of Montreal.19 This book owes its existence to a wealth of primary source material. Early minutes and yearbooks of the National Council of Women of Canada and its Montreal Local Council in the National Library and National Archives in Ottawa, and the papers of the WAAC in its Toronto archives and at the McCord Museum archives in Montreal all document the relevant activities of Alice Peck, May Phillips, and their

5

6 MONTREAL, EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

1. Edith Watt's home 2. "Rokeby," home of A.F. Gault, Alice Peck's uncle 3. AAM after 1912 4. The Old "Sherbrooke" 5. CHG Shop, several locations, 19031933 6. "Wigwam" store, 1921 7. Windsor Hotel full expansion, 1909 8. YMCA where Montreal WAAC first met 9. "Undermount," Alice Peck's home, 167 Durocher St. 10. 28 McGill College Ave., home of the Skelton family

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

CHG after 1933 Morgan's store AAM 1879-1912 May Phillips' Schools I) Victoria II) Applied Art & Design St. James Cathedral Christ Church Cathedral Royal Victoria Hospital "Ravenscrag," home built by Sir Hugh Allan McGill University Reservoir

Source: © Ellen McLeod/James Easton, 1999. Sights and Shrines of Montreal. Montreal: F.E. Grafton & Sons, 1909.

INTRODUCTION

colleagues. The Marius Barbeau Correspondence at the archives of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec, and the artist files and early journals at the National Gallery in Ottawa also furnished information on the period and its contemporaries. However, it is the files of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal that reveal the true measure and extent of this organization's enterprise. The papers of the Guild and its antecedent, the Montreal Branch of the WAAC, have been organized as an archive only in the last decade. Thanks to the women who mandated the keeping of records and cared for them over the years, and to the dedication of the Guild's former director, Virginia J. Watt, these valuable materials have been lovingly preserved. Details of the personal histories of Alice Peck and May Phillips remain tantalizingly elusive. A CBC radio interview about the first airmail flight made by Alice Peck's son, Brian Peck, led me to her granddaughter, Barbara Peck Carter and, later, to seven other grandchildren who shared their memories and family history. Papers and photographs from Alice Peck's collections were generously made available by Barbara Carter, Jim Peck, and Richard Peck. May Phillips has no direct familial line, but a rich, if limited, source is found in the Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection at the McCord Museum of Canadian History archives. It contains, among other things, five years of weekly letters sent from New York City to her mother while May Phillips attended the New York Art Students' League. The founding of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild is part of the social, intellectual, and cultural milieu of a particular time and place, but it was created by the artistic vision and leadership of Alice Peck and May Phillips. As women of privilege, they worked unstintingly as volunteers for the Guild, and inspired hosts of others to do the same. Women's history has been investigated increasingly in the last 25 years, yet anglophone women in Quebec have received sparse attention. Besides Alice Peck and May Phillips, there are many women in this book about whom much less is known. This account, focusing on the first 30 years of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, acknowledges the voluntary contribution of many such women, and begins to address the neglect of women and handicrafts in earlier scholarly writing in Canada. In June 1993, in Toronto, a large travelling art exhibition, The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris and his Circle in Canadian Collections, opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From Toronto, this

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IN GOOD HANDS

exhibition travelled to Ottawa, Quebec City, and Winnipeg before it closed in October 1994. Building on previous scholarship on the British Arts and Crafts Movement, it marked a major recognition by the official arts community in Canada. And, by being shown at major art institutions in four cities, it bolstered the view of many who regard crafts as art. However, its focus was specifically on British arts and crafts, not Canadian. The American Craft Museum in New York City has also launched a long-term documentary project, "The History of Twentieth Century American Craft: A Centenary Project." In 1993, it began with a wellresearched first exhibition called The Ideal Home: 1900-1920. In the accompanying catalogue, many scholars compiled information on early organizations, craft artists, schools, publications, and exhibitions which formed the beginnings of the twentieth-century American craft movement. This research indicated that the Montreal women were promoting Canadian handicrafts in a manner not unlike their counterparts in the United States. Canadian connections to the arts and crafts movements in Britain and the United States were evident in these 1993 exhibitions in Canada and New York City. Both referenced much background material on the arts and crafts of their respective countries. The lack of similar documentation in Canada was apparent when I began examining the Montreal origins of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. This book offers a Canadian context, linking it to the British and American experience, and presents the early history and accomplishments of the Guild as one vibrant example of the arts and crafts experience in Canada. That it was the partnership of two women, virtually unknown today, whose vision brought the Guild into existence and whose leadership defined it for a generation, is an added bonus that broadens our understanding of Canadian women in our history. NOTES 1. Mary Alice Peck (nee Skelton) was formally referred to by her married name, Mrs. James Peck, and always signed herself "M.A. Peck." Throughout the book she will be called "Alice Peck," the name by which she was known to family, friends, and colleagues. 2. Mary Martha Phillips, although she formally signed her name "Miss Mary M. Phillips," will be referred to in this book as "May Phillips," the name she was called by her family, friends, and colleagues.

INTRODUCTION

3. The term "Indian" is used throughout, rather than later terms such as Native, Aboriginal, or First Nations, to be consistent with contemporary usage in the period under discussion. 4. Mary Ella Dignam, who was formally referred to as Mrs. John Dignam, will be called Mary Dignam. In general, the women in the book will be referred to by their given names, whenever they are known, rather than by the prefix Mrs. 5. During this period art history was accepted as a scholarly discipline and the prevailing attitudes at that time became entrenched. 6. Cultural sociologist Janet Wolff argues that art has always been a social product, the work of many, not solely one "genius" artist. The idea of "genius" distanced artists from guilds and craftsmanship, denying the fact that art is a by-product of multiple energies. Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1981), 29, 32-33. 7. The quote is attributed to Rioux de Mailloux in 1895. Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 2. 8. The demands of the patron or the marketplace, which modernist artists were determined to resist, are the same for the "high arts." 9. A.L. Rees and F. Borzello, eds., "Introduction," The New Art History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 2. 10. L. Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in Art and Sexual Politics, ed. T.B. Hess and E.G. Baker (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 1-44. 11. T.J. Clark, "The Conditions of Artistic Creation," Times Literary Supplement (May 24, 1974): 561-62. 12. I am referring to works such as the following: Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870-1914 (London: Astragal Books, 1979); Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch (London: Women's Press, 1984); Isabelle Anscombe, A Woman's Touch: Women in Design from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago Press, 1984); Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, eds., A View from the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (London: Women's Press, 1989); Cheryl Buckley, Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry 1870-1955 (London: Women's Press, 1990); Jude Burkhauser, ed., Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design, 1880-1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing, 1990); Janice Helland, "Frances Macdonald: The Self as Fin-de-Siecle Woman," Woman's Art Journal \4, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1993): 15-22; Janice Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1996); and Paul Larmour, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland (Belfast: Friar's Bush Press, 1993).

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13. On American philanthropy and art, see Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women's Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). On women's involvement in craft, see Janet Kardon, ed., The Ideal Home, 1900-1920: The History of Twentieth Century American Craft (New York: Abrams, 1993). In Canada, see Maria Tippett, Making Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) on English Canadian art institutions before 1950. 14. Parker, Subversive, 5. 15. Parker, Subversive, 70. 16. Mary Dignam, "Art, Handicrafts, Music and the Drama," in Women of Canada: Their Life and Work, ed. NCWC (Ottawa: Minister of Agriculture, 1900; NCWC reprint, 1975), 217. 17. Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1995), 38. 18. MMFA Archives. The first mention of a Guild exhibition is in the AAM Annual Report, 1921, 60. The AAM is now called Le Musee des beauxarts de Montreal/ Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). It is partly housed in the same building at 1379 Sherbrooke Street West. In 1990, a new wing was constructed by architect Moshe Safdie directly across the street at 1380 Sherbrooke. 19. H.B. Walker, President of the Art Association of Montreal, to Wilfrid Bovey, President of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, Feb. 25, 1935. [CHGA]

I REMARKABLE WOMEN

ALICE PECK AND MAY PHILLIPS were two accomplished Montreal women from different backgrounds, yet on their principal ambition to revive handicrafts in Canada, they collaborated closely for over 30 years. Mary Dignam of Toronto, another accomplished woman, was a respected colleague who became a formidable rival over the handicrafts movement. Alice Peck and May Phillips founded the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in 1905, partly in defiance of Mary Dignam. MidVictorians born in the 1850s, they were undoubtedly a product of their age. Their middle and later years were devoted to founding and developing the Guild, spanning the Edwardian era, the First World War, and the twenties. Their biographies illuminate their whole era and give a personal context to their achievements. MARY ALICE SKELTON PECK

Mary Alice Skelton Peck came from a cultured, well-to-do background which valued not only the finer things in life but also service to society. She was born on December 28, 1855, the eldest daughter of businessman, James W. Skelton, and his wife, Mary Anne Gault.1 The Gaults were both prominent and successful. Alice's uncle, Matthew Gault, president of the Exchange Bank of Canada and managing director of Sun Mutual Life Insurance Company, was the Conservative MP for Montreal West from 1878 until his death in 1887. Alice's beloved

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One of the two mid-Victorian founders of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, this is Alice Skelton Peck as a young wife and mother, ca. 1890. Source: Barbara Carter Collection Uncle Fred, textile magnate Andrew Frederick Gault, was president of the Dominion Cotton Company. Through him, she was close to extreme affluence and the family's philanthropy. A.F. Gault was known for his generous gifts to the Church of England, his endowment of the Montreal Diocesan College at McGill University,2 and for his medieval castle-like home, "Rokeby," built in 1875 at the corner of Sherbrooke Street and Mountain (now the site of the Chateau Apartments). His son, Andrew Hamilton Gault, funded the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry Regiment in World War I,3 and later willed his 11,000hectare property on Mont-Saint-Hilaire to McGill University. Alice's

REMARKABLE WOMEN

Alice Skeltons family was privileged and cultured, but more comfortable than wealthy. Her mother, father, and sister, Emma, are shown in the Skeltons' drawing room at 28 McGill College Avenue, Montreal, ca. 1877. Source: Barbara Carter Collection immediate family, which was comfortable rather than wealthy, was nevertheless conscious of its privileges. She was raised to appreciate history, art, music, literature, and creative pursuits in all areas. The first Montreal home Alice remembered4 was at 57 Metcalfe Street, opposite Dominion Square when it was an abandoned cemetery. The now-commercial St. Catherine Street was then residential, the route of only an occasional one-horse tram. In 1868, she witnessed the funeral of assassinated MP, D'Arcy McGee, from her Aunt Emma Gault Finley's verandah at the corner of St. Catherine and McGill College Avenue. As a child, she watched ducks swim on the reservoir where St. Louis Square now is, and played in the apple orchard on the north corner of Drummond and Sherbrooke. She bought eggs at the tumble-down farm where the Royal Victoria Hospital now stands, and cavorted in the trilliums and violets on the mountain, picking up Indian arrowheads. A faraway part of town called Cote-St.-Antoine adjoined the city with a tollgate, beyond which lay countryside with grazing cows and fields of corn. Her family moved to 28 McGill College Avenue on what was then a fine residential street. In the winter, she tobogganed down McTavish Street. She often watched the six-mile snowshoe races which ran from

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the top of Union Avenue, through the McGill grounds, over the mountain, ending up at Lumkins Hotel on Cote-des-Neiges. She learned to measure distance by the standard of the mile-long snowshoe race: from the corner of Union Avenue to the towers on what was then called the "Priests Farm" (a meadow between Dorchester and Sherbrooke west of Guy). Church bells rang out as fire alarms. Once she saw the spire of burning St. Andrew's Church slowly keel over and fall into the street. A stream ran through the spot where Christ Church Cathedral was built, and there was a pond where the Windsor Hotel erected its new addition. Fawns frisked in the paddock beside the Crystal Palace on St. Catherine Street, opposite the future site of Eaton's department store. And there was a graceful old-world elegance about Phillips Square where Benaiah Gibb lived in a square stone house. Her familiarity with rural Quebec began when Alice spent childhood summers at Cacouna, a picturesque village just east of Rivieredu-Loup, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. It was frequented by wealthy anglophones, such as William Markland Molson, Andrew Allan, Sr., and John Ross, who built grand summer homes in the 1860s that still stand. The children loved the freedom, the beach, the steep climb up the cliff, the flying squirrels and other pets they were allowed to keep. Reading the Bible was encouraged, and novels were forbidden. Alice was thrilled when her father presented her with her very own book of John Milton. At Cacouna, their house was always full of relatives and friends. "Uncle Fred was famous company and we loved the day of his arrival and loathed the day of departure." In 1878, her Uncle Fred Gault built his own Cacouna summer house on the cliff above the sea (restored and converted in 1994 to a bed and breakfast). Alice Skelton had two older brothers, Leslie, who was seven years her senior, and Charles, and three younger sisters, Rachel, Kate, and Emma. As a child, Alice attended a small private school run by Lady Graham in Montreal. For a time later, she and her sisters also had a religious school mistress, Miss Hervey, who was "a very fine old Scotch woman full of ideas for the betterment of mankind, and good ideas too."5 At age 14, her parents decided Alice should be sent to England to school. One of only two females on board, she crossed the Atlantic with her father on the Allan ship Peruvia, enduring a stormy 19-day crossing. They stopped first in Ireland to visit her gentle Grandmother

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Skelton. In London, her father introduced her to the theatre with an unforgettable performance of The Merchant of Venice. I do not remember the names of actors or actresses, but never as long as I live shall I forget that marvel. I had, unlike the children of the present day, never been to the theatre. For this I am deeply grateful to my parents, for now the whole thing entered into my soul like a flame that has never died down. It burns on still and I close my eyes and still I see Portia as I saw her that night, still I listen to the exquisite voice and I am once more a child of fourteen with my heart throbbing to the cadence of the lines.^ Reluctantly, she began her English boarding school life, knowing she would be away from her family for three years. Alice initially disliked the school, but she soon made friends and, when the pond froze over, everyone came to watch the Canadian girl skate. She loved her singing lessons and all the musical concerts she attended, thanks to the arrangements made by her parents. "For this I can never thank them enough. I heard all the great singers, violinists, and pianists of the day. I was sent to every Oratorio, every Monday Pop(ular), and I gained a knowledge of the best kinds of music which has stood me in good stead all my life."7 On occasion, the school took the girls out into the community. A memorable visit for Alice was meeting Miss Octavia Hill, one of the first social workers in London. The head mistress was one of nature's noble women, with ideals and a genius for making those under her eager to learn the lesson she wished to teach, i.e., how to live more than how to be scholars. We were taken to visit Miss Octavia Hill's Settlement-work, that was not called settlement-work at that time. That was inspiring. She had just been given a row of houses by Lord some-body and they had been done over, and the tenants established a few days before we went to help with a tea-party to celebrate the occasion.... The following Saturday night Miss Hill went according to her custom to collect the re and to make friends with the tenants. She did not seem to be urprised finding the banisters broken down for firewood, and many shortages in various parts of the building.... During the week the damage was repaired and from that time on the tenants began to take some sort of pride in Miss Hill and they became more considerate of her feelings and her property.8

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During her boarding school years, Alice usually spent holidays with friends and relatives in Britain. However, in the summer of 1871, she travelled on the continent with her older artist brother, Leslie Skelton.9 Their sojourn produced much to remember, including how they were mistakenly taken for an eloped couple, although she was only 15. The Franco-Prussian War was just over, and in Paris, they saw graves everywhere, shells embedded in walls, and the Colonne Vendome lying on the ground. But Alice also recalled the excitement of seeing her first opera in Paris, hearing Strauss play the Blue Danube in Wiesbaden, seeing the mountains in Switzerland, and visiting the art galleries and cathedrals in France, Germany, and Belgium. In London, she visited the South Kensington Museum (forerunner of the Victoria and Albert) to see examples of the craft revival in the decorative art collections. She was immensely struck by the joyous expression she observed once on the face of a young disabled girl who was weaving a replica of a famous painting on a loom. Much later, in Quebec, Alice recalled this English girl when she saw the changed outlook of a disabled man she taught to weave saleable baskets so he could support his family again. Alice came home to Montreal to a debutante year filled with balls and musical parties. Her social position allowed her the leisure to pursue her interests in handwork and to be enriched by the cultural life around her. As a child, Alice had sung with the Young Mozart Society. Now she sang in the Mendelssohn Choir under Joseph Gould. Later she would sing with the Philharmonic Society under its founder, Mr. Lucy-Barnes, and then under Guillaume Couture. Her father was a great reader and encouraged her to have an informal Shakespeare Club which met every Saturday night at their home in Mount Royal Terrace at 28 McGill College Avenue. In 1875, plans were made to travel abroad again and spend seven months in England and France, ostensibly to help her mother's rheumatism. In May of that year, 19-year-old Alice, her mother, her sister Emma, and Leslie sailed from Quebec. With unpredictable weather conditions and Governor General Dufferin and his wife on board, it was a memorable crossing. We sailed ... through a snow-flurry. When we were somewhere near Cacouna we awoke to find the engines stopped. We had run on a sandbank! ... there we remained for thirty-six hours when a high tide drifted us off again. No damage had been done so we continued on our way rejoicing,

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and had a concert that evening to celebrate the event. A professor of McGill, Armstrong by name, & I sang duets & we had so many encores that our repertoire was exhausted. The next evening Lord Dufferin asked us to have a concert for him, which we were only too delighted to do.... We had wonderful weather for the next couple of days & then we ... ran into an enormous pack of ice, Capt. Brown said at least a hundred miles in extent. The "pans" stood 4 or 5 feet out of the water which could only be seen in an open crack here and there. Here we remained for four days, just drifting with the pack. The solidity of the ice will be realized when I say that Lord Dufferin and several of his suite climbed over the side of the ship and walked for a quarter of a mile on the pans, "Just to say that we had walked on the Gulf of the St. Lawrence!" said Lord Dufferin. It was certainly a unique experience and I should very much have enjoyed doing the same thing only that in those Victorian days it would have been out of the question for a young girl to suggest such a thing.10

They went to several spas for her mother to take the cure, and stayed over the winter in France at Menton and Nice. Some time after returning to Montreal in 1876, Alice became engaged to be married. It is not known how she met her fiance or the extent of their courtship, but he was a Montreal businessman, five years her senior, of "a most genial disposition." On October 15, 1878, at Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal, Alice Skelton married James Henry Peck. The groom's late father, Thomas Peck, of United Empire Loyalist background, had come from New York first to Brockville, and then to Montreal where he founded one of the earliest steel mills in Canada. Thomas Peck and Company11 (known later as Peck, Benny and Company, and Peck Rolling Mills), manufactured steel-cut nails and railroad and ship spikes, for which it won the Dominion Bronze Medal at the Dominion Exhibition in 1879. The firm made the Pecks one of the wealthy industrialist families of the age, although the family fortune and their residence predate the era of Montreal's famous "Square Mile." As a businessman, James Peck was a member of the Montreal Board of Trade and the St. James Club, and he and Alice were both members of the Art Association of Montreal (AAM). The Pecks belonged to an elite Montreal circle of leaders in business, government, law, academe, and society. Sir Hugh Allan, of the Allan shipping lines, was a family friend.12 In a rare public indication of their social prominence, it was reported that at a glittering reception, Alice and James Peck were pre-

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"Undermount," the Peck residence, 167 Durocher St. at Pine Avenue, Montreal, where Alice Peck raised her seven children and ran "Undermount Industries" to help World War I veterans learn saleable crafts. Source: Barbara Carter Collection sented to Lord and Lady Aberdeen immediately after Sir Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) and Montagu and Marguerite Allan.13 By virtue of family background and wealth, the Pecks were part of the well-established upper class in Montreal with a home at 167 Durocher to match.14 On a leafy elm-lined street, "Undermount" was set among trees and gardens on a property of over 50,000 square feet. In 1891, the Pecks had added a front tower and a large extension to the rear for a dining room, cloak room, and new kitchen on the ground floor, with a billiard room, library, and servants' quarters upstairs. "Undermount" had 40 rooms in all, including a conservatory, an elegant drawing room, and a large ballroom with two grand pianos.15 When Alice Peck sold the house many years later in 1926, a newspaper described its position and history: One of the oldest residences in the city, the Peck homestead fronts on Durocher street, just below Pine avenue, and the property extends for a whole block along Pine avenue to Hutchison street, opposite and east of the Molson Stadium. Of solid stone, it was built more than seventy years ago,

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and for that full period has been the residence of the family of the late James H. Peck. At the time it was built, that section of the city was very sparsely settled, there being only a few residences on Pine avenue, and none of the stores, residences, and office buildings which now stand on Park avenue, only a block away.16 In summers, the Pecks retreated to the sea to escape the heat of the city. In 1882, they were among the first Montrealers to build a summer home at Metis Beach (Metis-sur-Mer), a small village east of Rimouski, near the base of the Gaspe Peninsula. Reached by boat in the early days before the arrival of trains in 1920, Metis (pronounced like "Matisse" in English) became a gathering place for anglophones in the summers. Besides Principal William Dawson, the families of other McGill professors, such as Armstrong, Bovey, and Murray, summered at Metis as well. Between 1879 and 1892, Alice Peck bore seven children (Esmond, Bauman, Hester, Harry, Hugh,17 Stuart, and Brian), all of whom were sent abroad for a British education. Alice and James took trips to places such as Britain, Bermuda, Jamaica, and the Bahamas. On her travels, Alice kept diaries, wrote stories, and made drawings of her observations. On August 3, 1898, the Pecks' steel factory near the Lachine Canal burned in a fire. To celebrate the factory's reopening in April 1899, James and Alice Peck hosted a large reception for the workers, some of whom had almost 50 years' service with the company. Alice Peck spoke to the group in French and English, and presented gifts to the most senior employees,18 thus demonstrating her confidence and social standing at a time when women did not usually speak publicly. Indeed Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, the first Governor General's wife to make a public address, was roundly criticized in 1893 for doing so.19 During the 1890s, Alice Peck involved herself in the beginnings of various cultural organizations. She was a charter member of the Montreal Ladies' Morning Musical Club. In 1894, she became first president of the Montreal Branch of the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC), begun by Mary Dignam in Toronto. Peck and other WAAC members in Montreal helped establish a Women's Branch of the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society in 1896. At the same time, she and May Phillips began making home arts and handicrafts a priority of the WAAC Montreal Branch. Fostering handicrafts was to become Alice Peck's lifelong passion. She and Phillips founded the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, after taking their handicrafts committee work out

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of the WAAC. In orchestrating this break from the WAAC in Toronto, which is covered in a later chapter, Peck and Phillips proved to be a determined and politically canny team. In June 1903, James Peck died suddenly at age 52. Ailing for more than a year, he had still gone daily to his office in the Coristine building, even the day he died. At 47, Alice Peck was left with seven children aged 10 to 23. Fortunately, she had a good head for business and could help run the company until her eldest son, Esmond, took it over in 1917.20 She continued to live in "Undermount," maintaining the home as a base for her family and for business, social, and philanthropic functions. As a devoted mother and grandmother, she headed the large family on her own for 40 more years. Peck carried on a wide correspondence and was a prolific writer of many genres, including children's stories, poetry, fictional prose, and essays. She was also regarded as an excellent teacher. Musical, artistic, and adept at working with her hands, she spent many happy hours at weaving, needlework, potting, book binding, and operating her own handpress. A pioneer in caring about architectural heritage, she photographed old houses to persuade people to save them. On a trip to western Canada, Peck befriended a young woman named Patsy Andrews who had been robbed and raped when both her brothers died in the Klondike Rush (1897-99). After being widowed, Peck invited Miss Andrews to move into "Undermount." Andrews, who was an American from San Francisco with a background in fine arts, shared Peck's interest in crafts. She became a lifelong companion and friend, often reading books aloud while Peck worked at one of her many looms.21 In 1916, during the First World War, Alice Peck went to England with her daughter, Hester, to work in a hospital run out of a large home. Returning to Montreal the next year, she directed therapeutic craft-making at the military wards of local hospitals. To teach convalescing soldiers weaving, she used small reed looms made from a model she brought from England for that purpose.22 In 1919, after the War, Peck initiated a veterans' self-help project in her own home and named it "Undermount Industries." She and Patsy Andrews taught bookbinding, weaving, spinning, and basketmaking to 25 disabled veterans.23 On weekends, Peck taught her grandson Esmond most of these skills.24 This project, which integrated private and public spheres, was innovative, generous, and typical of the resourcefulness and leadership Alice Peck showed during her life.

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A frequent traveller, she always gathered information about crafts on her trips. She corresponded with and also sometimes met impressive leaders of her time. After writing American social worker Jane Addams about her innovative settlement work, Peck attended a formal luncheon at Hull House in Chicago. "In 1910 Jane Addams asked me to lunch at Hull House. There were 40 guests, everyone a specialist in some philanthropic work, mine being the preservation of the cottage industries in Canada."25 From Chicago, Peck travelled on to the American southwest on the Sante Fe Railroad. Her diary records an evocative glimpse of train travel at the time. On an evening late in August we boarded the train after a day of exhausting heat in Chicago. The brilliantly lighted Pullman presented a quite gay appearance, and was kept cool and fresh by the electric fans which were buzzing merrily at either end of the car. Passengers were settling down to the long journey with the usual nonchalance of Americans well used to make themselves at home under any circumstances. Large suit-cases were stowed away and small personal effects were disposed about giving little glimpses into the individuality of the passengers. Large and costly hats were tucked into paper bags provided for the purpose by The Company, and bearing a legend that no person should miss the thrill of visiting the Arizona Canyon.26 As usual, she sought out crafts, particularly admiring the Navajo work she saw at Albuquerque. The station itself is very interesting for it is almost a museum. In it one can watch a Navajo woman weaving into her blanket a wonderful pattern. She does not need a design to copy, for her grandmother taught her when she was a child just how to throw her shuttle and how to handle the warp as well as where to change red for white or blue for yellow, and she has become a skilled weaver. Her loom is of an ancient and very simple pattern and material. She just threads her warp on two branches brought from the distant woods and hung from a convenient beam. Her colours—ah! are they the cheap aniline dyes or are they too culled from the forest and the fields and made as the same old grandmother learned even from her ancestors.... One hopes the Indians may never lose the art of making their own fine dyes which they combine so effectively. Besides the weavers there are the potters and the silversmiths at work and many beautiful jars and delicate silver ornaments may be seen on the surrounding shelves or purchased at the long

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counter. And the baskets, perhaps the most fascinating part of the exhibit... for they too bear designs that have come down from long forgotten generations, and intrigue both the artist and the designer who find it difficult to follow some of the intricasies [sic] of pattern that the nimble fingers of the untutored women weave with such skill. A month may easily be spent in making such a basket and $25.00 is neither an uncommon or excessive price for such a treasure.2?

For many years Alice Peck was Chairman of the Guild's Extension Committee which initiated the Guild's outreach programs and new contacts, all of which were enhanced by her social position, prolific correspondence, and love of travel. In the late 1920s, she made train trips to both eastern and western Canada. In 1927, she went to the Maritimes, stopping in Cape Breton and New Brunswick. The summer of 1928, she took her grandsons west on the CPR. They made special visits to Winnipeg for the New Canadian Folksong and Handicraft Festival, and to Calgary for the Stampede, but other stops included Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Banff, Okanagan, Penticton, Vancouver, Victoria, Skagway, and Wrangell, Alaska. Everywhere she contacted craftspeople and collected crafts to sell at future Guild exhibitions. On the long train ride home, her grandsons took charge of guarding the large birchbark model canoe she had purchased in Alaska. In 1926, Peck sold "Undermount," her Montreal home of 35 years.28 Except for Stuart, her children were all married and the large house had become a burden. After a brief tenure at "The Acadia" on Sherbrooke West, she settled at "The Trafalgar" on Cote-des-Neiges in a two-storey apartment with Stuart, and Patsy Andrews. Around 1930, when it seemed too far to travel to Metis, she bought a 500-acre farm as a new summer home at Dunany near Lachute. Here, Alice Peck established new roots, returning summer after summer into her old age. From Montreal, she and Patsy Andrews were chauffeur driven in a Packard to a garage where Peck kept a black canvas-top Model T Ford tucked away. She did not want to appear too well-to-do to her country neighbours. Her grandchildren remember her as very happy at Lachute with her garden, a dog, the birds, and the boat on Lake Sir John. At the farmhouse, she kept several hand looms, including one over a century old at which she sometimes sat weaving. She invited Guild executive members out to see her looms and discuss the ongoing work of the Guild. Continuing her interests in handicrafts, history, and reading, she became active in the Women's Institute of Lachute and the

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Alice Peck, an accomplished weaver, collected many looms. She used some for teaching, and some she gave away to encourage others to weave. She is seen here, in 1934, using her small 130-year-old loom in her summer home at Lachute. Source: Barbara Carter Collection

Argenteuil Historical Society. She personally started a library at nearby Lakefield, Quebec.2? Alice Peck continued to speak at meetings and write about her life's work. In 1934, she wrote a comprehensive article on the Canadian Handicrafts Guild for the Canadian Geographical Journal.^ As late as January 22, 1940, she greeted Women's Art Society members at a reception in the Guild's Peel Street building in Montreal. Her health began failing in the early 1940s, but she kept up with her reading, writing, and correspondence. She experimented with new vegetable dyes even in the last year of her life. Alice Peck died on November 7, 1943, at age 88. She had outlived four of her children, and at her death left Bauman, Hugh, and Brian, twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Attendance at her Christ Church Cathedral funeral was enormous, drawing not only family and friends, but many whom she had worked with and helped. The Montreal Women's Art Society women mourned Alice Peck, their "beloved and revered" friend: Her unusual knowledge of all branches of Art, Music and Literature, both from study and practice, was continued with a remarkable ability of imparting that knowledge to others, inspiring those with whom she came in

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contact.... [S]he had exceptional charm of manner and won the love and loyalty of all who came under her influence.^1

Alice Peck's mourners did not include May Phillips, her long-time friend and colleague in the handicrafts movement, because she had died in Montreal six years before. Yet many people at Peck's funeral would have remembered her earlier close association with May Phillips. We can speculate, but it is unknown when, where, or how, the two women may have met before 1894. They were not neighbours, and they would not have mixed in quite the same social group. Peck's marriage and motherhood would have brought her into different circles from those of a maiden lady. They were less than three months apart in age, and must have known many Montrealers in common. Interest in art undoubtedly drew them together. They both held memberships in the Art Association of Montreal. Perhaps Peck enrolled her younger children in art classes run by Phillips. Christ Church Cathedral was another tie, but it is uncertain whether Phillips was an active member there until she moved into Montreal from Lachine in 1904. In any event, there is undisputed evidence that the two women participated in several of the same Montreal associations after 1894 and worked together as a team in the WAAC Montreal Branch, and for many years within the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. MARY MARTHA (MAY) PHILLIPS

May Phillips also received many honours in her lifetime. A 1906 tribute, which reveals her leadership qualities and devotion to the arts, is also a testament to the loyalty accorded her during the power struggle over handicrafts with the WAAC headquarters in Toronto. Upon her retirement as President of the WAAC Montreal Branch, the members presented Phillips with a hand-lettered, illuminated parchment, bound with a hand-embroidered cover. Part of its text read: [T]he undersigned members ... wish to place upon record our appreciation of the valuable work you have done during the ten years you have held office. Throughout you have succeeded in keeping around you all the Committees of this Association, not only in their official capacity but also as warm personal friends.

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A carte-de-visite portrait of Mary Martha (May) Phillips in Montreal made in 1901, the year she had a solo exhibition of her paintings. Source: II-140198.1 Miss Phillips, Montreal, QC, 1901. Notman Photographic Archives. McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal ... But above all, we feel that in founding this Montreal Branch you have not only provided an opportunity for the cultivation of artistic taste in women, but you have paved the way for that developement [sic] of interest in our native arts and crafts which has resulted in an organized effort for their maintenance.^2

Mary Martha (May) Phillips was born on March 8, 1856, in Montreal to William A. Phillips, a notary, and Mary Anne Johnstone, daughter of Dr. George Johnstone from Sorel. May had only one

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sibling, a younger brother, Edward. May's father, W.A. Phillips, practised law in Montreal and Lennoxville, but latterly fell on hard times. In debt in 1882, by 1886 he was not working at all, and he died in 1893. May and Edward helped support their mother from the mid1880s until her death in 1906.33 Edward W.H. Phillips, also a notary, was his sister's lifelong ally, and indeed played a role in advising the Guild. Erroneously, May Phillips' family name was sometimes linked to Alfred Phillips, the wealthy donor of Phillips Square.34 Although she was not wealthy and ranked below Alice Peck in society, May's uppermiddle class standing came from the professions rather than business. Nevertheless, she easily associated with the upper classes in areas of common interest such as church, culture, and good works. Church was important to May and she sang in the church choir. She was confirmed by the Lord Bishop of Montreal in 1871. After private schools,35 she studied English literature, history, and logic at the new Montreal Ladies' Educational Association (MLEA) in 1872 and 1873. During the next decade, little is known of May's activities. In August 1880, she visited Toronto where she saw Osgoode Hall, attended a Yacht Club regatta on Toronto Island, and went to Collingwood to see her friend, Forbie. Her Ontario visit apparently left her unimpressed with "Upper Canadian men."36 Phillips continued her education in art, perhaps in the fall of 1880 when the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) School began classes under William Raphael, Aaron Allan Edson, and Fra^ois Van Luppen. She took advanced classes at the AAM with Robert Harris in 1883, the first year he taught there.37 Harris introduced the French Academy system at the AAM, which emphasized drawing from plaster casts. Phillips went on to study and teach art in New York City from 1884 to 1889. Her art training, like that of many professional women artists, was acquired in a fragmentary manner over a somewhat longer period than her male contemporaries.38 At a time when Alice Peck was fully involved in young motherhood, Phillips was in Manhattan at the New York Art Students' League (NYASL). When she arrived in 1884 at age 28, the NYASL was almost a decade old.39 Based on the model of European studio schools, aspiring artists were admitted to classes at which practising (male) artists gave weekly critiques as a contribution to the profession. Women attended separate classes from male students. Through May's letters home from New York, we learn details about her art training.40 She was admitted to the League's advanced sketch class, although she did not have time

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to take the life-drawing class. She was always concerned with building up her portfolio: "I have joined a composition class at the League with Minnie [Bell], which will be something for me to work for," she wrote, "but I fear I will have a poor portfolio of sketches to bring back with me."41 She enjoyed applied arts and executed one design in both copper and leather for her portfolio. Mr. Jacobs, her modelling teacher, praised her "wonderful touch" and advised May "to give up all my time to it, my previous training in drawing having given me a long start ... [He] said if I could only get time to do a study from life of a boy or child and put in the Spring Exhibition, he would help me as much as I liked."42 Time was always scarce for May because she needed to teach to support herself. "[William Merritt] Chase's painting class at the League would suit my pocket and ambition, but not my time." Yet, when it came to doing the job properly, time mattered little, since May was dedicated to the high standards she was taught. "Yesterday's work must be done over again as I am not satisfied with it.... It is such a pleasure to work one's best regardless of time and money."43 In her last year, she realized how much she appreciated the fellowship of other practising artists. "I have determined to join a Costume Class at the League where the charge is only nominal and though there is not criticism, yet one has the benefit of seeing others work as well as the practise and that is really what I need most at present."44 When first in New York in 1884, she lived at her Aunt Delie's house on West 27th Street, paying $32 a month for room and board. Delie tried to endear herself to May by giving her room some Canadian touches, and inviting over artistic people. She reported favourably on May to her mother back home, praising May's "enormous Yankee 'go-aheaditiveness,'" and her success at getting pupils. She also conceded that May had gone to the theatre "with a young man and without a chaperon, for here we trust our daughters," and they go out with men "equally trusted."45 Delie was a widow with two sons. Despite her kindness, May did not warm to her. She liked her cousin Conant, Delie's elder son, who followed politics, wrote music, and took a great interest in the Tiffanydecorated New Lyceum Theatre. At Christmas 1884, he gave May a lace pin with three silver paint brushes in a tiny palette set with a diamond, sapphire, emerald, and ruby. The gift delighted her. Barely ten weeks later, however, Conant, "the light of Aunt Delie's life,"46 died suddenly of pneumonia on March 8, 1885. It was May Phillips' 29th

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birthday. Apart from her own grief, May was plunged into the unceasing gloom of a house in mourning. It must have been an immense relief to return to Montreal and Lachine for the summer that year. In her next four years at the NYASL, May did not go back to stay at Aunt Delie's house. Instead, she took various rooms on East 19th Street, University Place, and East 12th Street. Although she paid extra gas charges for heating and cooking, she preferred the independence. May Phillips' letters home make it clear that finances were an ongoing concern. Her League fees were $8 a month in 1884. She supported herself by teaching clay modelling, painting, and drawing at private schools and for various clients. Before beginning at the NYASL, Phillips was hired by Miss Annie Brown to teach at her school for girls. As well as a school principal, Brown seems to have been an officer of the NYASL School Committee.47 She informed May of the courses and introduced her to the art instructor, Champney, who agreed to criticize May's work. Brown's School, for 120 students, including 33 boarders, was conducted in two elegantly furnished houses at 711-7'15 Fifth Avenue. Phillips immediately realized her good fortune, observing how the staff, the girls, and the servants were "treated with such respect and deference." Annie Brown was a "little bit of a thing, not much older than myself," full of "condensed energy and determination" and generous empathy, who soon became a friend and mentor.48 She attended Conant's funeral and privately offered to pretend illness in order to let May "be needed away from the mourning house."49 Annie Brown sometimes gave May dresses which could be altered to fit her. To ease May's financial worries, Brown paid in advance the $36 a month she made teaching eight lessons to a class of six small girls. Sometimes she earned a little extra making lunch-party favours (sachets painted with the girl's initials, the date, and a pansy) for the senior girls at Brown's School. Annie Brown also arranged for her to teach drawing at $1.50 an hour twice a week to two children of the wealthy Dodge family at East 34th and Park Avenue.50 Through Mrs. Young Fulton at the Teachers' Agency, May garnered an art instructor's position at St. John's School in Brooklyn. She received $3 for each group lesson in drawing, modelling, and design. At the end of term in December, she felt overworked and wrote her mother: "You have preached method and system to me all my life and I assure you I fully appreciate its value now and shall endeavour to establish systematic work and order in my departments as far as I am responsible."51 Only a few months later, she was feeling more confi-

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dent in her teaching abilities. "My students are getting along nicely with both their drawing and their modelling and I feel encouraged with the result, although Mr. Todd of course lays out the line of work and gets the credit, yet I know the drill and teaching are mine and Mrs. Irving and Miss Howe recognize that I think."52 Sometimes she could pursue her own work at the school. In her second year, she decided "not to study at the League till after Christmas, but [to] work at modelling and wood carving in the work room at St. John's where I can have all the material at hand and then extra time at home to do some tapestries etc. for Christmas sale."53 She also tried to sell her own decorative artwork and illustrations on commission to booksellers and stationery stores.54 Taking advantage of New York's rich cultural life, May attended theatre, concerts, opera, art galleries, and lantern-slide lectures on travel and art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, incorporated in 1870, was 14 years old when she came to New York. In 1880, it had moved north to its Central Park location.55 She went there, but was not entirely impressed with all its collections. However, she was delighted when Cornelius Vanderbilt bought Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair (1855) at $53,000 for the Metropolitan Museum. Calling this woman's masterpiece "great (in every sense)," she asserted "there will now be something worth seeing up there."56 The next year she raved about three new Rembrandts she saw at the "Met." In New York, she deliberately set about "educating [her] eye and taste."57 She frequented the monthly art exhibitions at the elegant Union League Club where she met the president, Henry Blake. She went to the showrooms of Tiffany's and the Decorative Art Studios, the studios of artists such as William Merritt Chase, and saw exhibitions including James McNeill Whistler's watercolours and Albrecht Durer's drawings. Just before May left for Lachine at the end of May 1888, she went with Annie Brown to see the Vanderbilt Collection.58 May sampled many different New York churches, feeling nostalgic about her home church choir. "I miss the choir far more than it can me."59 She felt comfortable at the Church of the Heavenly Rest and St. George's Church, but criticized High Church St. Ignatius for its medieval attitudes. She became interested in Christian Science after attending the Church of the Ascension. She admired writer George Eliot, whose biography she sent to her mother: "She certainly was a wonderful woman, very earnest in her desire to elevate mankind through her writings."60 After her birthday in 1889, May reflected on

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her own life, "Thirty-three is not a very romantic age ... it is a sort of betwixt and between little milestones, the important places before and behind."61 May's Sunday letters home reveal her closeness to her mother. Knowing the distress caused by her father's unemployment, she often commented on ways to save money. Unlike her friend "poor Forbie," who had to return to Collingwood ("there her duty lies and she is much needed"),62 May was grateful to her mother for being able to continue her art education in New York. May's letters occasionally offered practical advice on altering dresses to make them more stylish, and on what to wear at a family wedding. When her mother's rheumatism was severe, she sent her money to hire a housecleaner for spring cleaning. Many years later, in 1900, when her mother was ill, May took her to Yarmouth, Maine, for a recuperative holiday. Mary Anne Johnstone Phillips died in 1906. Unlike Alice Peck, May Phillips supported herself and often had too little time for her own creative work. However, Phillips recognized that teaching would furnish a means to economic independence. After being voted the most popular teacher at St. John's, she admitted: "I feel that I am a more successful teacher than I ever thought I could be and as that seems to be the way I am to make my livelihood I suppose it is a good thing."63 The New York experience provided Phillips with credentials to teach art and to practise as a professional artist. The issue of professionalism was a new nineteenth-century idea based on schools with specialist training, formal organizations, and the regulated professional practice of many male, but not female, occupations.64 Watercolour, drawing, and needlework were part of a middle-class woman's education. These "feminine" accomplishments encouraged the idea that women artists were "amateurs," especially if they were married and financially dependent. Phillips challenged the male exclusivity of professionalism by working as an artist/teacher and remaining single. Back in Montreal, the fact that some of her works were accepted in juried exhibitions confirmed Phillips as a professional artist. Beginning in 1890, she exhibited watercolours in the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) shows; in 1893, the RCA sent one of her works to the Columbian Exposition World's Fair in Chicago.65 From 1891, her landscapes were also shown regularly at the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) exhibitions and in the AAM spring exhibitions. In addition, she frequently exhibited in the WAAC shows held in various cities.66 Phillips' drawing, A Street

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of a Canadian Village, appeared in 1894 in an American publication, The Quarterly Illustrator.67 In 1895, several of her works, including a portrait, were published in the Montreal Daily Herald in an illustrated supplement on the WAAC and Canadian women artists.68 A 1901 solo exhibition of 84 watercolours held at L.E.N. Pratte & Co. music store yielded a few immediate sales; some she gave to friends including Alice Peck and Mrs. E. Armstrong, and others she sent on to her Montreal agents, Johnson and Copping.69 Today the McCord Museum in Montreal has five of her streetscapes.70 By 1892, May Phillips had established herself as an art educator, when she and fellow artist Miss Harriette J. MacDonnell,71 became new co-principals of a revamped Victoria School of Art. Featured in the new Montreal arts journal, Arcadia, the school gave classes in oil painting, watercolour, charcoal drawing, modelling, and design, as well as china painting, for which it had a large gas kiln. The school also offered instruction in head and costume, still life, cast drawing, pen drawing for illustration, and children's classes.72 Minnie Bell (later Eastlake), who studied with Robert Harris in Montreal and at the NYASL with May, joined the staff in 1892 before moving to Almonte in 1893. Elizabeth Whitney, who had trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute,73 taught both china and glass painting at the school from 1893 to 1895. Other staff members, such as Alice Livingston (1892-97), and Margaret (May) Houghton (1897), taught there following art training in Europe. By April 1895, Phillips was sole principal of the newly named School of Art and Applied Design. In 1895-96, the school had expanded and added two male instructors to its roster of four women teachers.74 By 1897-98, the School of Art and Applied Design had 75 pupils and five assistant teachers.75 It operated five-and-a-half days a week, teaching adults days and evenings, and children in the afternoons and Saturday mornings. The school's curriculum had grown to include woodcarving, ceramic art, pyrography (burning designs on white wood), as well as the principles of design taught by Miss Jordan, another graduate of the Pratt Institute.76 Art was taught "with a view to its application in the art industries and crafts,"77 and carrying out designs for architects and manufacturers. Phillips' increasing interest in the applied arts showed her desire to train students for employment, and linked her with other professional areas not exclusively feminine. At the same time, May Phillips was working on illustrations for Little Canadians, a small book of children's verses by Elizabeth R.

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Sefyool of ftrt ai)d Applied Design;, 2278 8C. c;atberiD* Street, /l\orjtreal.

Xtst of Classes. There will be two terms, and the month of May, in the school year. October ist to January igth.—January zist to April aoth. During May classes will be arranged for out door work. A new staff of teachers has been engaged for this year, and the full course of instruction will admit student to various classes. The School will also be open in the evening. A Class of Design will be held in the evening under the instruction of Miss Jordan, ft graduate of Pratt Institute, specially intended for teachers and others engaged during the day. In view of the increased interest in China Decoration, it has been deemed expedient to form a class for the serious study of the principles of design and colour as applied in Ceramic Art. Forms and their appropriate ornamentation being duly considered, both in under and overglaze decoration. Wood Carving Classes will also be held. dWdmi Classes. — Drawing, Modeling and Wood Carving. Meet in the afternoons and Saturday mornings. Terms : $25.00 for season, $15.00 per term. JIdllt el*****.—Drawing, Colour, Design. Full course, $25.00 per term, $45.00 Season. Partial Students, $8.00 per month in any class including China Decoration, Wood Carving, Pyrography, Pen and Ink, etc. Season fees in any one subject $20.00 per term. Evening Classes, $8.00 per term, $4.00 per month. 8.00 to 9.30 p.m. twice per week By 1895, May Phillips was sole principal of the School of Art and Applied Design in Montreal. By 1900, it had 75 pupils and 5 assistant teachers. Source: Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection, Miss Phillips' File #662, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal

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"When the Sap Begins to Run, "a watercolour by May Phillips, was published, in 1899 in Little Canadians, a children's book by Elizabeth R. Burns. Source: E.R. Burns, Little Canadians (Ottawa: 1899), n.p. National Library of Canada, Neg. no. NL19293

Burns, published in 1899 by the (Dominion) Ministry of Agriculture.78 Phillips' drawings and watercolour engravings, which overshadow the nine slim pages of verse, suggest this publication was primarily a vehicle for her art. Earlier in the decade in 1893, Phillips joined the new Montreal Women's Club whose broad civic agenda included the arts. In 1894, she and Alice Peck founded the Montreal Branch of the Women's Art Association of Canada. After two years as vice-president, May became president of the Montreal Branch, a position she would keep for a decade. The work she and Alice Peck did promoting home arts and handicrafts within the WAAC Montreal Branch culminated in the establishment of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in 1905.

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Nevertheless in 1903-04, May Phillips took time out and travelled with a companion around the world. Sara Jeannette Duncan's similar trip, which she described in newspaper accounts and a popular book, A Social Departure (1890), may have inspired May.79 It was daring, but not unprecedented, for women to travel so far on their own. Phillips left Montreal in late October 1903, crossing Canada to British Columbia by train, and travelling by ship to Japan, Australia, India, and the Middle East. Ending with five weeks in Europe, England, and Scotland, she sailed home "after a grand tour."80 Her success at making her way in foreign languages, currencies, and cultures enhanced her social position in Montreal and undoubtedly prepared her for future travels in Canada for the Guild. Like Alice Peck's trips, May Phillips' travels were part of the "finde-siecle tourism" identified now by scholars as an aspect of modernity that defined "difference" by encouraging the collection of "exotic" objects. The allure of this travel was partly the thrill of perceiving oneself as different in terms of geography and culture, and often of language, race, and class. Exotic objects were collected as tangible souvenirs of the experience of "difference." A similar impulse inspired city dwellers who flocked to the countryside in summer to seek out "authentic" rural crafts.81 Bringing home local handicrafts extended the travel experience into everyday life. Phillips and Peck, who themselves took such tours, saw this as an opportunity to encourage and preserve traditional handicrafts.82 Before her sojourn abroad, Phillips had lived with her mother and her brother Edward in Lachine. During her absence, Edward moved into Montreal where he practised law with Theodore Doucet. After her return, May lived with her brother in Montreal, and when the luxury apartment, "The Sherbrooke," had a new wing added in 1905, they moved into the building's older conservative brick section.83 Here they lived together companionably for more than 30 years. While still president of the WAAC's Montreal Branch, May Phillips was elected first president of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild on March 16, 1905. She retired as head of the Montreal WAAC in 1906, but held the Guild presidency until 1909 when Alice Peck succeeded her. In 1910, Phillips made an important trip to western Canada on behalf of the Guild. From Kenora to Victoria, she promoted and publicized the Guild by speaking to groups of men and women, and sought out local craftmakers at rural immigrant settlements and Indian reserves. Teaching experience gave Phillips an excellent eye for select-

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Formal picture of May Phillips, published in the Montreal Daily Star at the time of her death in April 1937. Source: Montreal Daily Star, April 19, 1937 (late edition) and April 20, 1937

ing crafts to be encouraged. Over the years, she frequently chose the prizewinners at exhibitions and judged at county fairs. In 1921, as the chair of the Guild's Education Committee, she began handicraft classes for immigrant children, supervising them until 1928. For the Montreal Local Council of Women, Phillips worked on the 1911 pure milk campaign to prevent high infant mortality,84 and she was a busy committee worker at Christ Church Cathedral. At various times, she served on other philanthropic boards, including the Montreal Foundling Hospital, the Montreal Industrial Institute for Epileptics, and the Mental Hygiene Committee of Montreal. In many such organizations she promoted the therapeutic value of art and handicrafts. Like Alice Peck, May Phillips did her patriotic duty in wartime. She became active when the Red Cross began in Canada in 1909, and by the First World War, she was supervising all the Red Cross branches in Canada outside the city of Montreal. Moreover, in September 1914, at Greenfield Park, she founded the Junior Red Cross. In its first year, the children's branch made over fourteen hundred garments, packed over

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one hundred Christmas and Easter gifts for wounded soldiers, gave garments to the Queen Mary's Needlework Guild, and collected articles of comfort to be sent to the sick overseas.85 In 1922, May Phillips also organized Junior Red Cross groups from the Guild's handicraft classes of immigrant children. For her work, the Red Cross Society awarded May Phillips an Honorary Councillorship in 1931. A few years earlier, the American Red Cross had honoured her as the Junior Red Cross founder, and in 1935 she received the King's [George V] Jubilee Medal. These latter honours assumed greater prominence in her public obituaries than did her earlier career as an artist, educator, and cultural leader. At age 81, after a few years of poor health, May Phillips died at home on April 18, 1937. Her brother Edward survived her by just 18 months. Like Alice Peck, her funeral was held in Christ Church Cathedral, and she was buried in Mount Royal cemetery where her family grave can still be visited. MARY ELLA DIGNAM

Alice Peck and May Phillips were privileged, activist women, schooled and experienced in the arts, interested in playing a role in their society, and members of organizations of like-minded women. The two Montreal colleagues were influenced both positively and negatively by a formidable Ontario woman, Mary Ella Dignam. Dignam's role provides a foil to Peck and Phillips and another context for arts leadership in Canada. In 1898, Jean Grant, art writer for Saturday Night, called Mary Dignam "the most progressive woman in art in Canada."86 A contemporary of Peck and Phillips, Dignam moved in the same circles of privileged women in Canada with time to devote to volunteer activities. She probably met May before Alice. Like Phillips, Dignam was an artist and a teacher. They may have met in 1893 because both women exhibited artwork at the World's Fair in Chicago that year. In 1894, when Dignam wrote asking May Phillips to organize a Montreal branch of the WAAC, she did. The summer of 1895 found both women leading summer sketching tours in Europe for ladies from Toronto and Montreal.87 By 1899, they were working together to document Canadian women's artistic achievements. Phillips helped Dignam prepare the arts section of the National Council of Women of Canada's book, Women of Canada: Their Life and Work, produced for the 1900 Paris International Fair.88 As well as listing names of women

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miniature painters, professional ceramic artists, illustrators, designers, photographers, and writers on art, it also named many women engaged in the handicrafts of lacework, embroidery, woodcarving, bookbinding, and leatherwork. Brief notes were included on 34 professional women artists, art schools, and art societies. Dignam was born Mary Ella Williams in 185789 in the southwestern Ontario town of Port Burwell, on Lake Erie near St. Thomas. As a teenager, she took art lessons in London, along with fellow artist Paul Peel. In 1880, she married John Sifton Dignam who had a chinaware business in London. Five years later, in Toronto, he established a fuel business marketing coke screenings dumped by Consumers' Gas.90 In 1881, soon after their first child was born, Mary Ella Dignam set off for several years of intermittent art study and travel, leaving her husband and baby daughter probably in the care of John's unmarried sister, Mary. Four years ahead of May Phillips, Dignam briefly attended the NYASL in Manhattan, after which she went on to France, Italy, and Holland. In Paris, she studied in the atelier of Luc-Olivier Merson and Louis-Joseph-Raphael Collin. To support herself she organized European art tours for young ladies.91 Dignam eventually also had two sons, in 1887 and in 1897, but her freedom from the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood was certainly atypical of her generation. After returning to Canada in 1886, Dignam began teaching at Miss E.K. Westmacott's new art school in Toronto. Located on the second floor of the Yonge Street Arcade between Richmond and Adelaide Streets, the Associated Artists School of Art and Design (AAS) was founded with the intent to educate women in design. Dignam organized the school's first classes in drawing, painting, and modelling. When Westmacott took ill, Dignam assumed her duties, becoming head of the school in 1889. In the same year, Dignam organized the Art Studios of Moulton Ladies' College, a department of McMaster University, and in 1890, amalgamated it with the AAS under her own direction.92 In September 1898, Moulton College was enlarged to accommodate one hundred students. Classes in drawing, painting, modelling from life and casts, pastels, outdoor sketching, and china painting prepared students for further studies in New York, Paris, or London. Regular exhibitions of academic work were held in the studio building at 34 Bloor Street East, and some students showed at the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) as well.93 An artist known for flower studies, landscapes, and particularly her "Dutch scenes," Dignam exhibited frequently, including at commercial

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galleries abroad. In Canada, besides showing at the WAAC exhibits in various cities, she exhibited at the RCA shows (1883 to 1924), and at the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) (1884 to 1912). Disappointingly, but not surprising since women members could not vote, she was not elected a member of either the OSA or the RCA, despite having been nominated to the RCA three times.94 In 1924, she had a solo exhibition at the Carroll Gallery, a commercial gallery in Toronto. Mary Dignam early on recognized the need for artistic women to have an independent professional organization. In Toronto in September 1887, she formed an informal group of women artists who, by collectively renting a large studio, could meet and work together from live models, perhaps even the nude.95 Calling itself the Woman's Art Club, the group held art lectures and art exhibitions besides studio work. After an Ontario incorporation in 1892 as the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC), it encouraged women in other cities to form branches, with Winnipeg, London, and Montreal being the first. As soon as the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC) was founded in 1893, Dignam immediately became an active leader. The first affiliated national society to the NCWC was the WAAC, brought in by Dignam. She represented the arts on the NCWC executive for many years, and in 1927, the International Council of Women named her its first art convenor.96 As national WAAC president, Mary Dignam undoubtedly came from Toronto to attend the WAAC Montreal Branch's inaugural meeting in June 1894, when Alice Peck was elected president. Before long, Peck, Phillips, and Dignam had all become well acquainted through both the WAAC and the NCWC. Dignam attended the NCWC annual meeting in May 1896 in Montreal. At its sectional art conference, the Montreal WAAC showed lantern views of works by Canadian women who had exhibited at the Paris Salon, the Royal Academy in England, and the Chicago World's Fair. Alice Peck gave a short commentary on the artists, including both Dignam and Phillips. When the WAAC Montreal Branch began focusing its attention on handicrafts, Dignam may have felt it was neglecting the WAAC's more important agenda of supporting women in the fine arts. Nevertheless, in her president's report of 1899, she graciously presented the case for handicrafts, despite not being entirely convinced of their present value:

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The feeling has grown very strongly during the year that this Association should do more than heretofore in the encouragement of Handicrafts.... That attention should be given to these matters is imperative; even the most ordinary of our home industries should be encouraged and lifted up to a plane worthy of consideration from an artistic standpoint.9? Two years later in the WAAC Annual Report of 1901, Dignam was more enthusiastic, even claiming credit for the idea. "Following up the initiative taken by Head Association, the great achievement of the past year was the successful Art and Handicraft Exhibition held by the Montreal Branch."98 For their part, the Montreal women continued to mount exhibits of WAAC members' pictures, but Peck and Phillips' main interest lay elsewhere. Montreal's emphasis on handicrafts is revealed by the different exhibition venues: the March 1902 Canadian handicrafts exhibition was in the prestigious AAM Art Gallery, whereas the WAAC sketches exhibition in October 1902 was held in their own small members' studio. Strong personalities, different imperatives, city rivalries, and organizational politics dissolved a collegial partnership among the three women. It wasn't too long before Mary Dignam's attempts to control the agenda from Toronto conflicted with Peck and Phillips' desire that the handicrafts' leadership stay in Montreal. The competition over which group would be the national patron of handicrafts was not always private or subtle, and it continued to the late 1920s. Montreal's break from the Toronto WAAC head office in 1905 became inevitable, but the ongoing rivalry introduced a creative spur to all craft promotion in the country for many years after. In Montreal, Peck and Phillips founded the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, which was the primary national vehicle for promoting crafts in Canada until the 1930s. It did not totally monopolize the field, however. Crafts were also advanced through the efforts of Dignam and the WAAC Head Association. As soon as Mary Dignam realized the viability and status of the handicrafts movement, she took up craft patronage and promotion with vigour, as evidenced by her speeches and articles. The history of Canadian craft development has a human dimension of personal rivalry. Dignam also took a great interest in the representation of women's art at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), and as WAAC national president, she served on its Board. In 1898, after Jean Grant provoked discussion of improvements to the women's section at the Toronto Fair

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in a Saturday Night article, the WAAC under Dignam successfully lobbied for a new women's building at the CNE by 1903." Perhaps this involvement gave Dignam her long-standing influence in its administration, which proved contentious later on. In the 1920s, as will be seen in a later chapter, the Guild women believed that her control over exhibit positioning and size was not strictly impartial. Mary Dignam is remembered for many achievements in the art field. She forged international links among professional women artists both inside and outside Canada. In 1898, she founded the Women's International Art Club which opened centres in London, Paris, Philadelphia, Melbourne, and Toronto. Membership was restricted to those who had studied in Paris and had recently exhibited twice in the Paris Salon or other principal exhibitions.100 Dignam believed such an elitist membership reinforced the growing professionalism of women artists internationally. She also encouraged Canadians to experience international art through the the WAAC annual Foreign Picture Exhibition, which continued until the outbreak of World War I. Dignam was a strong proponent of Dutch art and Scottish pictures with Dutch influence, about which she wrote and exhibited at the WAAC.101 After an unbroken 25 years at the helm, Dignam stepped down as WAAC president in February 1913, but stayed on the executive as an advisory president. To maintain her international connections, she organized a WAAC International Relations Committee. For many years she continued as chief convenor of the handicraft clubs which, in 1911, encompassed woodcarving, bookbinding, art jewellery, metal work, ceramics, pottery, and leather tooling, but by 1928 included only laces, embroidery, and Quebec homespun.102 At the time of the WAAC's 50th anniversary in 1937, Dignam returned as president. After her death the following year, she was succeeded by Toronto sculptor Frances Loring. In honour of her contribution to the WAAC, Loring sculpted a bronze relief plaque of Mary Dignam which hangs in the front hall of the WAAC building on Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto.103 * These three remarkable women significantly influenced the early development of crafts revival in Canada, and indeed their interaction helped create the climate for Peck and Phillips to found the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. Yet the success of other women's involvement in arts and crafts in Britain and the United States surely also motivated them. In these women's lifetime, far more than in today's "global village,"

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the perspective in Canada was dominated by what was happening in Britain and the United States. Before 1900, Canada was still a young, sparsely settled country with most of its population in the eastern and central provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, Ontario, and Quebec. The city of Winnipeg in Manitoba was separated from Victoria in the far western province of British Columbia by the largely unsettled districts of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Athabaska. Like others of their generation who had witnessed Canada's Confederation in 1867, these women grew up as patriotic Canadians. Being simultaneously Queen Victoria's subjects and citizens of the largest Dominion in the British Empire, their sympathies were both imperialist and Canadian nationalist. Habitually, they looked across the Atlantic to the mother country, even as they felt pride in being New World North Americans. Across the border, as the great Englishspeaking neighbour brightly beckoned, they also heeded American ideas and developments. These women often visited both countries on either short or extended stays, and followed examples set in London, Glasgow, and Dublin, as well as New York, Boston, and Chicago. They would have relished reading Canadian newspaper accounts by "Sama" (Emily Cummings) or Kathleen "Kit" Coleman about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 or Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, whether or not they attended.104 Alternating between their two "family members," they continually canvassed Britain and the United States as models for Canada's cultural identity. From travel, new art journals, and personal contacts, Dignam, Peck, and Phillips knew of the British and American renaissance in arts and crafts, and of women's roles as artists and patrons. In Canada, they all gravitated toward a public role in the arts, although it was Peck and Phillips who seized on the importance of crafts. Their early exposure to the rural arts in Quebec alerted them to an untapped Canadian resource. Acting on this realization and on British and American precedents, Alice Peck and May Phillips led a Canadian movement to revive and develop arts and crafts, including the handicrafts of women. NOTES 1. Alice s mother Mary Anne was 19 when her Ulster Scot father (Alice's grandfather), Leslie Gault, facing grave financial difficulties in 1842, emigrated to Canada from Ireland with his wife and ten children. The

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2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

family was devastated when Leslie Gault died of cholera in 1843, several sons drowned, and his widow's illness forced her to return to Ireland. See Jeffery Williams, First in the Field: Gault of the Patricias (St. Catharines, ON: Vanwell Publishing, 1996), 1-3. The remaining three brothers and four sisters including Mary Anne all stayed, married, and had families. From a difficult beginning in Canada, the survivors rose to some stature. Alice's grandmother, Mary Hamilton Gault, who returned to live in Montreal until her death in 1875, was no doubt a strong influence in Alice's childhood. A.R.C. [?], "Canadian Celebrities: Andrew F. Gault," The Canadian Magazine 21, No. 3 (July 1903): 201. Andrew Hamilton Gault was Alices first cousin. A statue dedicated to him in 1992 by the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry stands in downtown Ottawa on Elgin Street, opposite the War Memorial (near the sidewalk just to the north of the National Arts Centre). Memories of her youth are taken from an informal typed manuscript she wrote for her family. M.A. Peck, "Things that I Remember" (ca. 1929). [Richard Peck Collection] Peck, "Remember," 11. Peck, "Remember," 13. Peck, "Remember," 14. Peck, "Remember," 14. After studying art in Paris under MJ. Ilwill, Skelton exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1901, at the Royal Academy in London in 1904, in Chicago, New York, and at the AAM and RCA in Canada. He became vice-principal of the Colorado College of Art in Colorado. After his death in 1929, Alice Peck held a posthumous solo exhibition in Montreal for which she asked to borrow "Storm Cloud" (purchased by the National Gallery in 1913). Her request came too late for the exhibit. H.O. McCurry to M.A. Peck, Nov. 21, 1929. [Skelton Artist File, NGC]. Besides the NGC, Skelton's work is also represented in the MMFA and the Colorado College of Art. J. Russell Harper, Early Painters and Engravers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 289; Globe and Mail, Jan. 11, 1929, 3 (Obit.). M.A. Peck, "Seascape No. 2" [Richard Peck Collection]. Lady Dufferin wrote about this same voyage. G.C. Walker, ed., Lady Dufferin: My Canadian Journal, 1872-1878 (Don Mills, ON: Longmans, 1969), 167-68. Thomas Peck & Co. was organized in 1837 and its Quebec Charter granted in 1838. Thomas Peck Sr. and Margaret Benny (married ca. 1837) were the parents of Alice Peck's husband, James H. Peck. The company name was changed to Peck, Benny & Co. when Thomas Peck's father-in-law, Walter Benny, exchanged capital for shares in the

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

company before he died in 1870. Letter from Esmond Hastings Peck to Richard Peck, Feb. 11, 1987. [Richard Peck Collection] Thomas Peck and Hugh Allan purchased burial plots side by side in the Mount Royal cemetery, and together ordered the stone monuments from Scotland. They can be seen today in the cemetery (Peck plot is "G6"). "The Countess of Aberdeen. A Grand Reception Given in the Windsor Hall Last Evening, National Council of Women," Montreal Witness, May 12, 1896, 12. Early in their marriage, Alice and James lived at 107 MacKay, but in 1891, James Peck moved his growing young family into his parents' stately old home, "Undermount." The property lay at the base of Mount Royal at the southeast corner of Durocher Street at Pine Avenue. It was a few blocks east of "Ravenscrag," the home built by Sir Hugh Allan, now occupied by Montagu and Marguerite Allen. The artist, Robert Harris, president of the Royal Canadian Academy, rented at 89 Durocher and in 1894 purchased a house at 11 Durocher Street. Moncrieff Williamson, Robert Harris 1849-1919: An Unconventional Biography (Toronto and Montreal: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 145, 160. Harris painted a portrait of Alice's uncle, Andrew Frederick Gault (154). By 1926, however, the old residence stood surrounded by modern apartment houses, with one or two equally old houses scattered among them. "Peck Homestead Changes Hands; Pine Avenue Property for Apartment Houses—Sale Price $150,000," unknown newspaper article (1926). [Barbara Carter Collection] Hugh A. Peck (b. 1888) became an architect, and was president of the Arts Club of Montreal in 1927. Alice Peck kept two accounts of the event. Le Prix Courant, April 1899, and Moniteur de Commerce, April, 1899. [Barbara Carter Collection] Veronica Strong-Boag, The Parliament of Women: The National Council of Women of Canada, 1893-1929 (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1976), 42, 55. The Company was renamed Peck Rolling Mills, Limited, in 1903. In 1917, after Thomas Peck, Jr.'s death, T. Esmond Peck became president and owner of the company. However, Esmond died in 1920. In April 1928, the company was sold to DOSCO. Letter Esmond Hastings Peck to Richard Peck, Feb. 11, 1987. [Richard Peck Collection] Alice Peck reportedly had 70 looms [Interview with Barbara Carter, Nov. 10, 1996]. She sometimes gave them away. In 1926, she planned to send one of her little looms to England for the blind husband of a friend, Maud Wellesley Frizell. M.A. Peck, "Part of my Diary during 1926 Trip," 18. [Barbara Carter Collection]

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IN GOOD HANDS

22. She sent a picture of one of these looms to Marius Barbeau because they had a reed like Indian looms in the Museum. M.A. Peck to Marius Barbeau, Dec. 20 (1926 or 1927), Barbeau Correspondence, Box B227, File #85. 23. The Lachute Watchman, Nov. 11, 1943. A magazine cover woven by the "Undermount Industries for Veterans," was presented to Edward Prince of Wales on October 31, 1919 in Canada (photograph in Barbara Carter Collection). In 1922, Alice Peck gave the McCord Museum a loom used by "Undermount Industries" with samples of its weaving. 24. Esmond H. Peck to Ellen McLeod, Dec. 10, 1993. 25. In reply to her request for information on the Labor Museum and the shops, Jane Addams sent Alice Peck a copy of the Hull House Year Book. ]. Addams to Mrs. James H. Peck, April 1, 1909. The quotation is a notation on the letter Peck received from Addams as a record for her family. [Barbara Carter Collection] 26. M.A. Peck, "From Chicago to California on the Sante Fe, A Snapshot in Prose," 1911, 1. [Barbara Carter Collection] 27. Peck, "Chicago," 5-6. This respect for Navajo weaving resembled the enthusiasts in the American arts and crafts movement such as the Roycrofters who covered the floors in their homes with Navajo rugs. 28. It was sold to a developer and torn down. A photo of the house was published in the Montreal Star, October 6, 1926. 29. The Lachute Watchman, Nov. 11, 1943, 7. 30. M.A. Peck, "Handicrafts from Coast to Coast," Canadian Geographical Journal9, No. 4 (Oct. 1934): 201-16. 31. "Resolution of Sympathy," Montreal Women's Art Society, November, 1943. Women's Art Society of Montreal Files (WASMF), Box 8. [McC] 32. The first signature was M.A. Peck. Also signing the first page were [Lady] Grace Julia Drummond, Anna Leonowens (former royal governess in Siam) and Mary Dudley Muir (D.R. McCord's secretary). "Illuminated address presented to Miss Mary M. [May] Phillips on her retirement from the Presidency of the Montreal Branch of the Woman's [sic-often used] Art Association of Canada, 1906; signed by members." Women's Art Society of Montreal Files (WASMF). [McC] 33. M.M. Phillips (MMP) to Mrs. WA. Phillips, Files #627, #635, Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection. [McC] 34. A newspaper obituary of her brother attributed the name "Phillips Square" to their family: "His family had been connected with Montreal affairs since 1803 when Thomas Phillips came here from England. Mr. Phillips purchased the Beaver Hall Hill property which was a large estate. In later years the family gave part of the property to the City of Montreal for the opening of Beaver Hall Hill and for the creation of the square on St. Catherine Street which bears the family name."

REMARKABLE WOMEN

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Montreal Gazette, Oct. 18, 1938, 4. This link is not confirmed elsewhere. Borthwick states that Phillips Square and Beaver Hall Hill were ceded to the City in 1842 by Alfred Phillips. J.Douglas Borthwick, History of Montreal including the Streets of Montreal (Montreal: D. Gallagher, 1897), 62. She attended Mrs. G.W. Simpson's school and later the school conducted by the Misses Symmers and Smith. "Junior Red Cross Founder is Dead," Montreal Daily Star, April 19, 1937 (late edition). M.M. Phillips (MMP) to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Aug. 6, 1880. File #624, Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection. [McC] Richard Halliday, "Brief outline of historical events in the [AAM] school's development Late 1860s to 1938," 1977; "History of the Art Classes of the Art Association of Montreal," April 3, 1978, [MMFA]; NCWC, Yearbook, 1896, 570. Robert Harris taught at the AAM from 1883 to 1886, when he left to go to England. For an analysis of how women artists in the nineteenth century "were located in asymmetrical and unequal relations to art education, art administration and professional status," see Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 53-64. It had just moved to 38 West 14th Street. In 1887, it moved to the Sohmer Building on East 23rd Street, while its 14th Street premises were remodelled. Carroll Beckwith was one of May's instructors. Interview with Lawrence Campbell, NYASL Archivist, New York, May 9, 1994. The NYASL moved north to its present location at 215 West 57th Street in 1892. Letters from MMP to Mrs. W.A. Phillips. Files #625-#630, Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection. [McC] MMP to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Jan. 30, 1887. File #628, Phillips. Minnie was Canadian artist Mary Bell. She wrote May Phillips from Pont Aven, France in Feb. 1889. File #630, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Mar. 13, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Dec. 9, 1888. File #629, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Feb. 3, 1889. File #630, Phillips. [McC] Delie Phillips to Mrs. W.A. Phillips, Nov. 19, 1884. File #625, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 8, 1885. File #626, Phillips. [McC] Miss A.V.V. Brown, presumably Annie, was one of three on the School Committee in the NYASL List of Officers for the season 1885-86. Frank Waller, First Report of the Art Students' League of New York (New York: 1886). [NYASL Archives] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Nov. 3, 1884. File #625, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 11, 1885. File #626, Phillips. [McC]

45

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IN GOOD HANDS

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Nov. 3, 1884. File #625, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Dec. 4, 1886. File #627, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 6, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Oct. 10, 1886. File #627, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Feb. 2, 1885. File #626; Jan. 2 and 3, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] The original west facade of this Ruskian, Gothic-style building is still visible inside the museum's Lehman Wing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide (New York: 1983), 8. MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Apr. 16, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 17, 1888. File #629, Phillips. [McC] Files #625-#630, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Nov. 30, 1884. File #626, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 3, 1885. File #626, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Mar. 10, 1889. File #630, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, May 8, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] MMP to Mrs. Phillips, Jan. 30, 1887. File #628, Phillips. [McC] Cherry, Painting Women, 9. Evelyn de R. McMann, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 326. Two works by Phillips in a Toronto WAAC show received favourable comment in a newspaper review: No. 41, Montreal Harbour, was a "simple but excellent water-colour study," and No. 43, Lake St. Louis, showed "Miss Phillips again as a clever delineator of seafaring things, and a lover of pearly grey effects." Unidentified newspaper clipping, May 1895. File #658, Phillips. [McC] Alexander Black, "Women Artists in Canada," The Quarterly Illustrator (New York: Apr.-June 1894): 178-82. The article included a work by Mary Dignam as well. Phillips' school was featured. Photographs of Mary Dignam and Alice Peck were also published here. Montreal Daily Herald, Apr. 12, 1895 (4 pages). H.J. Morgan, The Canadian Men and Women of the Time (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), 902. A list of the works in this exhibition is found in File #658, Phillips. [McC] The Mill at St. Andrews, P.Q. (#1950), Jacques Cartier Square, Bonsecours Market (#16098), and 3 untitled: #278, #11509, #3353. [McC] MacDonnell also taught drawing at the Trafalgar Institute in Montreal. She exhibited watercolours, oil paintings, and china painting at the AAM spring exhibitions from 1888-1908, 1921-1922, and at the RCA from 1882-1907. Harper, Early, 206-07; Evelyn de R. McMann, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, formerly Art Association of Montreal Spring Exhibitions, 1880-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

REMARKABLE WOMEN

72. 73.

74.

75.

76. 77.

78.

79.

80.

1988), 237-39. She also exhibited with the WAAC. One of her paintings is shown in Montreal Daily Herald, Apr. 12, 1895, 4. At her death in 1944 she bequeathed money to the AAM for the purchase of Canadian paintings. Evan H. Turner, "Introduction," Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal: 1960). Arcadia 1, No. 13 (Nov. 1, 1892): 260; No. 15 (Dec. 1, 1892): vii. Whitney (active 1876-98) exhibited at Philadelphia in 1876, at the RCA in 1893, and at the AAM from 1895 to 1898. Harper, Early, 330. A bowl by Whitney, and a photo of her firing the kiln at the School of Art and Applied Design are shown in Montreal Daily Herald, Apr. 12, 1895, 4. In 1896, Whitney was chosen to paint 12 game plates and 12 salad plates for the WAAC Canadian historical dinner service. By 1917, she was a missionary in Ceylon. Lovell's Montreal Directory, 1895-96, Vol. 1, 336. The teachers listed were Misses Phillips, Henderson, Simpson, and L. McLaren, and Messrs. H. Helsby and G.A. Simpson. Lovell's, 1896-97, 890; and The National Council of Women of Canada, ed., Women of Canada: Their Life and Work (Ottawa: Minister of Agriculture, 1900, NCWC reprint 1975), 218-19. "List of Classes," School of Art and Applied Design, undated brochure (1900-01?). File #662, Phillips. [McC]; Lovell's, 1900-1901. NCWC, Women of Canada, 218-19. In 1906, Phillips stated that she had been "interested practically & otherwise in the applied and industrial arts since 1884 and had written, taught and worked along these lines." Phillips, "History of the Handicrafts Movement in Montreal etc.," Jan. 23, 1906. WASMF, Box 6. [McC] Two original copies are in the collection of the National Library of Canada. Each verse page has line drawings, and there are eight watercolour paintings. Born in Brantford, Ontario in 1861, Sara Jeannette Duncan had been a journalist since 1884 when she wrote newspaper reports from the New Orleans Cotton Centennial World's Fair. She then wrote for the Washington Post, the Globe, the Montreal Star, and as a reporter for Parliament in Ottawa, before taking her world trip in 1889 with a Montreal friend, Lily Lewis. The articles on her trip, which she wrote for the Montreal Star and other newspapers, became the basis of her first book, A Social Departure (London: Chatto and Windus, 1890). T.E. Tausky, ed., Sara Jeannette Duncan: Selected Journalism (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978), 1. M.M. Phillips, "Diary of Trip Around the World" (1903-1904), File #700, Phillips. [McC] The friend/relative accompanying May is not known. Phillips was clearly not running her school, and there is no listing for it in Lovell's after 1903-04.

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81. This analysis of tourism, which is discussed in Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, and Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), was outlined in her lecture, "Hybrid/ Purebred: Native Tourist Art and the Making of Difference," The Marston LaFrance Research Fellowship Lecture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Feb. 7, 1994. 82. This impulse, or "energizing motive," has been noted in similar wellintentioned women who had a sense of "rescue and rejuvenation" toward the folk traditions of other cultures. See David E. Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 44-45. 83. "The Sherbrooke," designed by Roswell Fisher, uncle of Sydney Fisher, was built in the 1890s along the lines of New York residences. It was demolished in 1983. In 1990, Moshe Safdie's addition to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was built on the site (betweeen Bishop and Crescent). Two facades of the 1905 wing were integrated into the MMFA addition as a result of support by local heritage preservation groups. 84. Lynn S. Lavery, "Infant Mortality and the 'Gouttes de Lait': The Montreal Local Council of Women's Campaign for a Comprehensive Preventative Public Health Programme," unpublished paper for M.S.W. degree (Carleton University, 1989), 38-39. 85. The Junior Red Cross spread internationally to 52 countries. M.M. Moore, The Maple Leafs Red Cross (London: Skeffington, 1919), 15; Montreal Gazette, and Montreal Daily Star, April 19, 1937. (MMP obituaries) 86. Jean Grant, "Studio and Gallery," Saturday Night 11 (Feb. 5, 1898): 9. 87. Montreal Daily Herald, April 12,1895. 88. NCWC, Women of Canada, 216-28. 89. Her birthdate has been variously reported as 1860, 1859, and 1857. I rely on her son's date of 1857. Hugh M. Dignam, A Chronicle of the Dignam Family (Toronto: 1962). Mary Dignam s surviving papers were lost in a fire in the 1960s. Allison Thompson, "A Worthy Place in the Art of Our Country: The Women's Art Association of Canada 18871987," unpublished M.A. thesis (Carleton University, 1989), 81. 90. Thompson, "Worthy," 80. 91. Thompson, "Worthy," 53-54. She continued leading these European art tours for many years to finance further study abroad, such as her 1896 study of the Hague School artists in Holland (122). 92. Mrs. Dignam, "Art," in Women of Canada, 221. 93. Jean Grant, "Studio and Gallery," Saturday Night 11, No. 21 (Apr. 9, 1898): 9; and No. 45 (Sept. 24, 1898): 9.

REMARKABLE WOMEN

94. Thompson, "Worthy," 59. In her own biographical notes at the NGC, Dignam commented that she had much recognition from women's art societies. M.E. Dignam Artist File. [NGC] 95. Thompson, "Worthy," 60. Victorian morality, which frowned on women sketching from live nude models, unfairly discriminated against women artists. 96. The Globe, April 3, 1935. M.E. Dignam Artist File. [NGC] 97. M.E. Dignam, "President's Memoranda of the Year's Work and Progress," in WAAC, Annual Report, 1899, 6-7. WASMF, Box 1. [McC] 98. M.E. Dignam, "President's Memoranda," WAAC, Annual Report, 1901, 7. WASMF, Box 1. [McC]

99. Jean Grant, "Studio and Gallery," Saturday Night 11 (Sept. 10, 1898); (Oct. 8, 1898). Women exhibitors acquired their own space in a separate Woman's Building in 1903. Emily Cummings, "A Woman's Building," The Canadian Magazine 21, No. 6 (Oct. 1903): 567-68. 100. Thompson, "Worthy," 117. 101. See "People and Affairs," The Canadian Magazine 18, No. 6 (Apr. 1902): 576. 102. WAAC, Annual Report, 1911 to 1928. [WAAC] 103. In 1916, the WAAC purchased a permanent home at 23 Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto. Previously the WAAC had been located at the Yonge Street Arcade, the Canada Life Building, and the Confederation Life Building. In 1923, the WAAC purchased the adjoining building at 21 Prince Arthur. Thompson, "Worthy," 129, 133. 104. "Sama," who was Emily Cummings (Mrs. Willoughby), wrote about the Chicago Fair for The Globe m 1893. From 1889, Canada's first women's page editor, Kathleen "Kit" Coleman wrote the "Woman's Kingdom" in the Toronto Mail, and after 1895, in the Mail and Empire. Her Jubilee columns were collectively published in K. Coleman, To Lo ndon for the Jubilee (Toronto: Morang Press, 1897).

49

II ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENTS AND WOMEN IN BRITAIN, THE U.S., AND CANADA

THE REVIVAL OF CRAFTS

AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, crafts were known by various descriptive names. One of the most common terms was "handicrafts." Today, the term seems old-fashioned and trite. Unfortunately, it does not convey the artistic connotation it once did. Other terms like "applied arts" and "decorative arts" have retained more of their meaning. These terms and others such as "minor arts" and "lesser arts" were associated with urban arts and crafts societies, and they usually assumed some formal education or apprenticeship by the craft workers. Terms such as "home arts," "home industries," and "cottage industries" were more often associated with philanthropic social reformers and usually implied traditional skills informally acquired within the home. These terms, which all had currency, co-existed with subtle variations. The nineteenth-century phrase "arts and crafts" is still used loosely to refer to the products of craftsmanship. For purposes of description here, the simple term "crafts" can encompass them all.1 Original objects created with care, skill, and technique, crafts require a specialized knowledge of tools and materials. They are usually functional and/or ornamental, and aesthetically pleasing. Their design is often unique,

ARTS AND CRAFTS M O V E M E N T S

but can be informed by tradition, iconography, or a particular style. Reverence for materials is key. The visual and tactile senses are paramount. Crafts are personal, involving hands, minds, hearts, and real time. They imply love for the creative processes of planning, designing, and making, and they impart pride of workmanship, and the joy of doing something well. Crafts began to gain artistic status during the last third of the nineteenth century, partly because the industrial revolution in Britain had kindled a yearning for an earlier time when things were made by hand. The separation between hand and machine manufacture was not the result of industrialization alone, since it actually occurred gradually over time. In The Story of Craft, Edward Lucie-Smith examined the gradual introduction of machinery into the production of many crafts since the Middle Ages, and largely debunked the myth of "an innocent preindustrial age followed by a corrupt industrial one."2 However, the British Arts and Crafts Movement, in its homage to quality handmade objects, emphasized this distinction. In Britain, the artistic development which became known as the British Arts and Crafts Movement was inspired by John Ruskin's writings on social reform. Ruskin influenced a group of Oxford student artist/designers including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who embraced his socialist philosophy. Believing that the material and moral fabric of society were connected,3 they wanted to reform production, educate the public, enhance the quality of life, and improve aesthetic taste. The movement's leader, William Morris, wrote and lectured on his beliefs even as he put his ideas into practice. These reformers believed the Great Exhibition of 1851 had exposed the poor taste and workmanship of Britain's manufactured goods. They attributed the philistinism they saw in Victorian England to an uneducated populace and "design debauchery." Machine products were cheaply made to satisfy the demand for greater ornamentation at lower prices. In contrast, the British Arts and Crafts theorists preached Morris's idealistic dictum that artistic production must be "made by the people and for the people, as a happiness for the maker and the user."4 Acting on these beliefs, the British Arts and Crafts reformers produced well designed crafts in workshops that aimed to fulfill rather than alienate the worker. In the 1860s, they became entrepreneurs of finely crafted furniture, stained glass, ceramics, wallpaper, carpets, tapestries, embroideries, and other textiles. The original firm, Morris, Marshall and Faulkner, became William Morris and Co. when Morris took it

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over in 1875. The business and its arts and crafts philosophy encouraged many other artists such as Walter Crane, Charles R. Ashbee, William De Morgan, TJ. Cobden-Sanderson, C.F.A. Voysey, and W.R. Lethaby to devote much of their lives to craft. They would have international influence as artists, designers, architects, and teachers. Morris gradually realized that art alone could not remedy all the ills of industrial society.5 However, his teachings and his company, which symbolized the British Arts and Crafts Movement, were very influential. In England alone, between 1882 and 1888, five societies were founded to promote arts and crafts, beginning with Arthur H. Mackmurdo's Century Guild in 1882. The Art Workers' Guild organized itself in 1884, deliberately choosing the term "art workers" rather than "artists." That same year, women started the Home Arts and Industries Association to revive the country crafts in Britain. In 1888, Charles R. Ashbee founded a School and Guild of Handicraft in East London, which later moved to Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was established in 1888 by art workers who chose their title only after rejecting other names such as "Combined Arts," "Decorative Arts," "Applied Decorative Arts," and "Arts and Handicrafts."6 The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society sponsored many successful exhibits in London where guilds, societies, companies, and individual artists involved in the arts and crafts, including women, participated. Its broad spectrum and good reputation helped raise the status of craft internationally. By the mid-1890s, art societies in Europe also began to include sections for the decorative arts in their annual exhibitions. Cities such as Paris (1900),7 Vienna (1900),8 and Turin (1902) held important shows featuring applied art and design. As in Britain, this interest in arts and crafts continued into the 1920s. WOMEN AND CRAFTS IN BRITAIN

Male designers and craftsmen's reputations were primarily enhanced by the revival of crafts in the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Most women worked in gender ghettos doing needlework and embroidery without credit.9 Women craftworkers did not benefit at first because the Movement's goal was the "fusion of the designer and maker."10 Women were rarely encouraged to design, nor were they given artistic recognition as "makers." For example, Rozsika Parker cites how women's expertise in embroidery was regarded as a natural aptitude, rather than art. Embroidery played an important role in maintaining and creating

ARTS AND CRAFTS M O V E M E N T S

the feminine ideal. By the nineteenth century, women's ability to do embroidery was assumed to be part of a feminine identity, and the connection was seen as entirely "natural."11 Nevertheless, there was significant skill involved in fine needlework. This skill was recognized by female philanthropists and put to good use. They organized self-help agencies for gentlewomen who were uncomfortable working for money except anonymously. The Royal School of Art Needlework, founded in 1872 by Lady Marion Alford and Helen Welby, trained and employed poor gentlewomen in workshops restricted to their own kind.12 The art needlework was done by women, but the designs were supplied by male artists. There were exceptions—for women with family connections. At Morris's company, William Morris's wife Jane, his sister-in-law Bessie Burden, and his daughter May, Edward Burne-Jones's wife Georgiana, and Kate and Lucy Faulkner, sisters of Morris's business partner Charles Faulkner, designed, painted, and/or embroidered as professionals.13 Among these women, May Morris became the best known. Having learned embroidery at home at a young age, she did further training at the South Kensington School of Design. She frequently exhibited her work at arts and crafts exhibitions in Britain. A designer, artist, teacher, writer, and international speaker, May Morris was an important role model for other women. She wrote articles and a book, Decorative Needlework (1893) on the technique and history of embroidery. She taught other women at various art schools and at Kelmscott House. Women benefitted when educational opportunities opened new professions in the arts and crafts. Following May Morris's example, women like Jessie Rowat Newbery, a Glasgow School of Art embroidery teacher from 1894 to 1908, treated embroidery as an art form and trained women as professional embroiderers. After 1888, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society gave women access to exhibitions and sales. At the same time, other women developed public roles as patrons of arts and crafts. Upper- and middle-class women helped revive crafts in rural areas. In England, the women of the Home Arts and Industries Association (1884) recruited over five hundred volunteer and professional teachers, particularly in rural areas with no access to art societies or technical instruction.14 Its standards were sometimes criticized, but the Home Arts and Industries Association was referred to frequently in art journals such as The Studio.1^ Whether it was criticized because women's work was automatically considered amateur, or the work was not high quality, it is impossible to know. We do know that as

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IN GOOD H A N D S

a women's grass roots organization, the Home Arts and Industries Association effectively reached the ordinary worker and helped revive lost industries and crafts in the villages. In Scotland, crafts and applied arts enjoyed a strong revival, stimulated by an important gathering held in Edinburgh in 1889. The second congress of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry attracted many British leaders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, including William Morris, T.J. CobdenSanderson, and Walter Crane, who all gave workshops. Scottish leaders, Francis (Fra) Newbery and Gerald Baldwin Brown, both stressed the value of the applied arts and the need to break down the hierarchy of "high artistic craft and lowly cottage arts."16 Women in Scotland took up the challenge. That same year, the Duchess of Sutherland established a Scottish Home Industries Association to revive the arts and crafts of rural women. Phoebe Traquair completed mural decorations for several Edinburgh public buildings. A versatile artist in many media, including illumination, bookbinding, jewellery, and enamel, Traquair was most highly regarded for her embroidery which was exhibited at Turin in 1902, London in 1903, and St. Louis in 1904.1? In 1905, a lavishly illustrated article on Traquair appeared in The Studio.191 The Glasgow Society of Lady Artists welcomed applied arts such as tapestry, embroidery, jewellery, metalwork, bookbinding, illumination, glasswork, wood engraving, and ceramics in their exhibitions.19 The Glasgow Style of interior design, which emerged from the turn-of-the-century success of architect-designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, was considerably enriched by the design work of his wife, Margaret Macdonald, and her sister, Frances Macdonald McNair. The Macdonald sisters, Margaret and Frances, and other women decorative artists such as Jessie Rowat Newbery, Ann Macbeth, and Jessie M. King exhibited widely and had a high profile. Several were featured in The Studio.2® In Ireland, handicraft revival was part of a cultural renaissance involving music, literature, and the restoration of Gaelic. It was led by women who promoted local arts and crafts as a basis for Irish national art. In 1874, Countess Cowper began the Royal Irish School of Art Needlework in Dublin to produce antique and original designs for domestic and costume embroidery. Set up under the supervision of Baroness Pauline Prochazka, it thrived until her departure 12 years later. In 1894, Lady Geraldine Mayo reorganized and revived the Royal Irish School of Art Needlework; at the same time her husband, the Earl

ARTS AND CRAFTS M O V E M E N T S

of Mayo, founded the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland which held seven exhibitions from 1895 to 1925. In 1886, Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, while her husband was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, founded the Irish Home Industries. Numerous other women in Ireland organized their own ventures to preserve Irish cottage industries. Mary Montgomery in Fivemiletown began Art Metal Industry. Florence Vere O'Brien, who founded Clare Embroidery at Ennis in 1892, took on the revitalization of Limerick lace. Kenmare Convent fostered Celtic-design lace and embroidery in County Kerry. Kell's Embroidery, Harriet Bagwell's Marfield Industry, and Mrs. W.M. Vesey's Dunleckney Cottage Embroidery were among the numerous small embroidery enterprises started by women. Many of these products became known in North America. Alice Hart established the Donegal Industrial Fund in 1884 and competed abroad with Lady Aberdeen by showcasing Irish lace, embroidery, jewellery, and woodcarving in a rival Irish Village at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.21 Donegal Carpets' handwoven carpets of Celtic, Persian, Turkish, and contemporary design received favourable Canadian publicity.22 In 1902, the Dun Emer Guild in Dublin founded by Evelyn Gleeson with Lily and Lolly Yeats to design original Irish carpets, tapestries, books, and embroidery, still carried on even after the Yeats sisters left in 1908 to form Cuala Industries. In Canada, CPR furnished their offices with Dun Emer Guild carpets.23 Irish arts and crafts also boasted superb stained glass. In 1916, artist Wilhelmina Geddes was commissioned by Canada's Governor General, Arthur, Duke of Connaught, to create an ambitious World War One memorial window at St. Bartholomew's Church in Ottawa.24 WOMEN AND CRAFTS IN THE UNITED STATES

In the United States too, the British Arts and Crafts Movement was instrumental in stimulating crafts and decorative arts. Several American crafts communities based on Morris ideals had grown up by the turn of the century. These included Elbert Hubbard's Roycrofters in East Aurora, NY, Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Workshops in Syracuse, NY, and William L. Price's Rose Valley community near Philadelphia. At an earlier date, however, American women had already become accomplished at innovative craft promotion. Americans became aware of their handicrafts in the early 1860s when the Civil War Sanitary Commission developed into a national

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women's organization that sold crafts at fundraising fairs.25 Middleclass consumer interest in applied arts was further stimulated by the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. As a showcase of both American and foreign exhibitors, the Exposition helped consolidate a "new cosmopolitanism"26 and stimulated American interest in the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Pamphlets, magazines, and journals were another source of influence, as were later speaking tours on decorative arts by Oscar Wilde in 1882, Walter Crane in 1891-92, Charles Ashbee in 1896, and much later, May Morris in 1909. Morris's sister-in-law, Bessie Burden, who taught in the 1870s at the Royal School of Art Needlework in South Kensington, organized its exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.27 This awardwinning exhibit of embroideries directly inspired Candace Wheeler, a wealthy New Yorker, to form an American organization for handicrafts to support needy women. She astutely discerned, in the South Kensington Design School's needlework exhibit, an art form that could permit working women to become self-supporting. By 1877, Wheeler founded the New York Society for Decorative Art to encourage profitable industries among women with artistic talent. Its mandate was to teach courses in needlework and crafts, elevate taste in household decoration through exhibitions and educational programs, and market quality handicrafts. The decorative arts sponsored by the Society included sculpture, painting, woodcarving, porcelain and pottery, lacework, art and ecclesiastical needlework, and tapestries.28 Success spawned other chapters across the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, attracting women members for varying reasons, including social reform, aesthetic interest, and philanthropy. Here, women were involved in setting standards, providing instruction, and organizing outlets for other women to sell their work.29 Candace Wheelers decorative arts movement continued to flourish, although in 1879 she left to form a professional design company with Louis Comfort Tiffany. By the mid-1880s, Wheeler branched out again and headed her own design company known as Associated Artists. Othe women in the U.S. provided leadership as artists and as promoter of arts and crafts, especially "art potteries." In 1879, Mary Louise McLaughlin founded the Women's Pottery Club, a pioneer pottery association in Cincin ti, Ohio, and here also Maria Longworth Nichols began her Rookwood Pottery in 1880. In New Orleans in 1886, Newcombe Pottery was founded by Mary G. Sheerer at Sophie Newcombe College, Tulane University. Adelaide Alsop Robineau, an

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1892 founder of the New York Society of Keramic Art, which organized exhibitions for ceramics, later published the respected journal Keramic Studio (1899 to 1924). New York boasted several applied art schools. Since 1887, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn gave women training in crafts. The Cooper Union in New York had long provided daytime courses to women in fields such as advertising, costume design, and architectural design. A very practical alternative was the New York School of Applied Design for Women, founded in 1892 by Mrs. Dunlap Hopkins. The school, which gave instruction to women in stained glass, wallpaper design, illustration, painting, and architecture, also had a salesroom to provide women artists with an income. In 1893, American women artists were sufficiently well organized and self-confident to negotiate, design, and build an impressive Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair to exhibit international women's arts.30 In Chicago in 1897, a new Society of Arts and Crafts began to sponsor arts and crafts exhibits at the Chicago Art Institute. The Home Art Publishing Co. of Chicago began to issue popular booklets called Home Art. A socialist organization, the Industrial Art League (1899-1904), sponsored manual training in public schools, and briefly ran the Bohemia Guild School of Industrial Art and Handicraft, whose teaching staff included sculptor Julia Bracken and bookbinder Gertrude Stiles. Chicago women broadened the scope of arts and crafts to include immigrant handicrafts. In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, Chicago's first social settlement house. Inspired by their visit in England to Charles Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft, and by Ellen Starr's bookbinding apprenticeship with TJ. CobdenSanderson, they organized craft classes and handicraft exhibits in Chicago as early as 1897. By 1900, they opened the Hull House Labor Museum as a living museum to demonstrate ethnic crafts. Hiring immigrant women to teach handicrafts to Hull House residents and society women was a progressive practice31 at a time "when cultural pluralism was a radical idea."32 In Massachusetts, historical textiles were revived by Ellen Miller and Margaret Whiting. They began the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework in 1896 to teach local women traditional needlecraft. Three years later, their initiative led to the founding of a Deerfield Society of Arts and Crafts to foster other crafts such as basketry, weaving, rug making, wrought ironwork, furniture making, and

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jewellery. The Boston Society of Arts and Crafts was founded in 1897 to stimulate good design and to counteract the popularity of "overornamentation and specious originality."33 In 1901, with help from artists Mary Ware Dennett and Mary Catherine Knight, it opened a handicraft sales room to provide craftworkers with an income. It also briefly published a journal called Handicraft. The Boston Society organized major arts and crafts exhibitions in America for the next 30 years. Many Canadians were cognizant of the renaissance of crafts in Britain, and of the subsequent crafts movement in the United States. By the turn of the century, the fields of applied arts, crafts, and traditional handicrafts were an artistic arena in which privileged British and American women had been able to participate and, in some cases, even lead. Their example undoubtedly influenced women of similar interests in Canada.

WOMEN'S EXPANDING ROLES IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY Women only began to claim a public role in the 1890s. The last third of the nineteenth century must have been an exhilarating time for privileged Canadians. Confident in the new Dominion, leaders emerged to found new institutions worthy of the nation. But, until almost the end of the century, these leaders invariably had been male. By law, women had few official rights in Canada, and by the dictates of society, their lives belonged to the private sphere. They were regarded as daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers, but not as public persons in their own right. That step would have to be won gradually. With its Napoleonic Code, circumstances were most restricted in the province of Quebec. Married women could not legally sign papers, rent property, control their own earnings, or pursue advanced education. Law, finance, business, politics, and higher education belonged to the male domain. In Montreal, where Alice Peck and May Phillips became cultural leaders, the timing of their "entrance" was fortuitous. An older generation of women had prepared the ground for them by establishing the right to higher education. It was a necessary step toward enlarging women's position in society.34 McGill University had offered advanced education to boys since 1821, but girls had not been allowed to pursue a university education. However, in the 1870s in Montreal, this role was renegotiated when well-connected, Protestant women seized the chance to offer young women higher education. By 1870, educa-

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tors in Montreal were debating this right, based on how a woman was defined: as "lady" or as "person." McGill's principal, William Dawson, initially defined a woman as "lady" (housewife and mother), whereas philosophy professor J. Clark Murray saw a woman as "person" (independent and potentially employed). Only the latter view held that women should be given access to higher education.35 That same year, the "Wilkes resolution" recommended that McGill begin college classes for young women. Principal Dawson, after visiting Britain with his wife Margaret, softened his negative stance. Based on an Edinburgh model, he proposed a curriculum of literary, scientific, and historical subjects for women, and drafted a budget. He then secured a measure of co-operation from McGill that initiated the university's commitment to women's education.36 As a direct result, in 1871, the Montreal Ladies' Educational Association (MLEA) was formed with immediate plans to offer four university courses to women during the winter.37 One of the founders of the MLEA was Lucy Stanynought Simpson, an experienced Montreal educator who believed avidly in higher education for women. Lucy Simpson's conviction in "woman" as "person with potential" influenced a younger generation of women to adopt leadership roles. May Phillips, who had attended Lucy Simpson's private school as a young girl, encountered Mrs. Simpson again in 1872 and 1873 when she took classes at the MLEA in English history, literature, and logic.38 Alice Peck's mother and sister-in-law (Leslie Skelton's wife) both later served on the MLEA General Committee in the early 1880s.39 Yet, co-education at university was limited. Even by 1885, the number of women taking regular arts courses at universities was relatively small: seven at University College, Toronto; eight at Queen's University, Kingston; two, plus three occasional students, at Victoria University in Cobourg; and fourteen, with sixteen occasional students, at McGill in Montreal.40 However, in 1886 Montreal women gained an advantage. Influenced by Lucy Simpson,41 Sir Donald Smith (later Lord Strathcona) donated a $50,000 Donalda Endowment to found the Royal Victoria College for women at McGill. Clearly, this encouraged more women to pursue a university education and, as a corollary, increased women's status in society. Women soon began to create their own associations. The major shift occurred in the 1890s. In this decade, a number of individual women proved themselves extraordinarily capable. The most celebrated example was Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, a gifted and energetic leader, wife of Lord Aberdeen who was Canada's Governor General

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from 1893 to 1898. Lady Aberdeen was elected president of the International Council of Women, formally established in May 1893 at the Chicago World s Fair. In Canada, she became a dynamic first president of the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC). She also founded the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) in 1897. She represented an elite new movement that recognized "the right of women not only to an increased public role, but also to define themselves autonomously."42 In the 1890s, upper- and middle-class women began to form organizations in which they carved out new roles for themselves. By the turn of the century, a critical mass of educated, privileged women, armed with greater self-confidence, became leaders because their "special position in history" carried with it "a duty to posterity."43 Opportunities in higher education and position in society gave women from prominent families access to power. Their status, although still below men of the same class, was elevated relative to the working, farming, and fisher classes, the Indian population, and many new settlers to Canada. Institutional and societal discrimination was greatest towards both men and women in these other groups. More advantaged by their class than disadvantaged by their gender, many of these women endeavoured to create harmonious relationships among the various classes and cultural groups in Canada. With a strong sense of noblesse oblige—of how their privilege entailed responsibility—they chose to use their education, talents, and time to benefit their country. CLUB WOMEN

Their vision was ambitious, but their role was still circumscribed. Society dictated that women's place was "in the home." Although higher education and some limited employment meant women were becoming visible in the public sphere, women with paying jobs outside the home were frequently frowned upon.44 On the other hand, female voluntarism was welcomed in civic roles of nurturing. Many privileged women joined purposeful groups to aid their society as a whole. They believed that voluntary work, for self-betterment or societal benefit, was an extension of their role "in the home." By forming separate voluntary organizations, these women were able to assume public positions without threatening the male status quo. While many of these women were relatives and friends of progressive men, they understood the often unspoken rules of their public life. Belief in the societal advantages of women's partnership with men tempered their accep-

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tance of male dominance. In this relationship of mutual trust and responsibility, Alice Peck, May Phillips, and Mary Dignam typified women of their position, as articulated by Lady Aberdeen in 1900: The Canadian Women's Council [NCWC] has had the great advantage of working from the outset with the sympathy of many of the men of most weight in the country, who have treated the representations made to them by the Council with that consideration which has given an added sense of responsibility to our members. When people feel they possess a real influence in affairs, they have little temptation to be aggressive, and the policy and fixed principle of our Council has been to trust the men, and to endeavour ever to work in co-operation with them towards the aims we have in view; we have found this policy to be the truest, and we have found our confidence rewarded (emphasis mine) .4!>

Canadian women had soon formed quite a number of large organizations: the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC), the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC), the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire (lODE), the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Girls' Friendly Society of Canada, the Dominion Woman's Enfranchisement Association, Women's Institutes,46 and the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Leaders in these national organizations were exceptional women who often served on many committees, worked long hours, and travelled among various cities for meetings. Such women, although not all upper class, obviously had sufficient "spare time" to engage in voluntary pursuits. While some of their contemporaries may have criticized club women and their "problem of leisure,"47 their contribution was significant. The women's club movement was the starting ground for numerous female accomplishments. Networks of volunteer organizations involved women in the nation's life, broadening their horizons and their contacts. The NCWC, which was non-partisan, non-denominational, and generalist, represented many different women's societies. Some associations, like the WAAC, were affiliated to the NCWC at the national level. Individual city branches and various other societies joined at the level of the local council. The Montreal Local Council of Women (MLCW), founded on November 30, 1893, became the third NCWC city council, after Toronto and Hamilton. Soon the NCWC attracted more than 20 affiliated local city councils, each having its own executive elected from representatives of its city's federated women's societies. MLCW women

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came from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish groups.48 In 1900, when Alice Peck and May Phillips were both active members, the MLCW represented 31 women's societies with interests ranging from philanthropy, hygiene, education, music, and art.49 Apart from a few organizations like the WCTU which objected to its non-denominational stance and did not affiliate, the NCWC acted as a national umbrella council to deliberate and work for a wide range of women's concerns. Considerable cross-fertilization of ideas took place. A woman who was an officer in one organization might also belong concurrently to two or three other groups. The societal benefits of female co-operation were set out by speakers at the NCWC's first annual meeting in Ottawa in April 1894. Julia Drummond, the MLCW president, spoke on the subject of the Associated Charities Organization. She cited its founding in England in 1868, and praised one of its first promoters, Octavia Hill, the model for Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch.^ Octavia Hill, whose enterprise helped provide affordable housing for the poor in London, was the woman reformer who had inspired Alice Peck years earlier in England (see Chapter I). NCWC women treated the wider world as extensions of their own homes,51 and came to regard the identification of issues, study, and concerted reform as their rightful sphere of influence.52 One typical early initiative was the MLCWs Social Study Club, whose convenor, Carrie Derick, was an 1890 McGill graduate in botany who became the university's first woman professor. Women in the Social Study Club investigated local social problems, using pertinent reading materials at the McGill library. Papers were presented on such subjects as "Causes of Poverty," "Children of the State," "Distribution of Wealth," "The Family," "Housing of the Poor," "Women as Wage-Earners," and "Domestic Service."53 Their aim was to equip women volunteers to help in the local council's social work. Issues such as infant mortality and factory working conditions for women became NCWC priorities for reform. Alice Peck and May Phillips, who belonged to this world of activist volunteer women, chose to become involved in the arts: music, literature, history, and art. Yet, in the nineteenth century, even the arts were seen as the property of men. The city's most important art institution was the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) . The AAM was not an artistrun association like the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy, although it had an art gallery which they did

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not. Both the AAM and its art gallery were controlled by men. Wealthy art collectors such as George A. Drummond, William Van Home, Richard B. Angus, and James Ross, who all sat on the AAM's governing council, provided the direction and funding for the Art Associations programs. Montreal's European art collections were recognized by the art establishment in North America and abroad.54 They included a nineteenth-century miscellany from French Academic work, the Hague School, and various Realist, Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist paintings. Works from these collections were featured in loan exhibitions in the art gallery every year. Only men served on the AAM's hanging and acquisition committees. Both Alice Peck and May Phillips were AAM members by the 1890s, and as women members, had access to the collection, the reading room, and annual meetings, although they could not vote. For a brief period at the turn of the century, a few well-connected women members served on the AAM's industrial and decorative committee,55 but a reorganization in 1903 eliminated this committee and left out women completely. On the other hand, as May Phillips proved, the AAM allowed women to enrol in its art classes and to enter its national art exhibition every spring. Women artists, while not totally excluded from the AAM, nevertheless chafed that this male environment did not offer women full participation rights. For all practical purposes, history, science, arts, and letters were scholarly pursuits only for men. The Geological and Natural History Survey of Canada, founded in 1842, was originally located in Montreal. The Survey sent male scholars across Canada to collect geological, archaeological, and biological specimens. By 1881, when the Survey moved its headquarters to Ottawa, its mandate had expanded to include an Ethnological Survey which collected Indian arts and crafts on the west coast.56 Building up the ethnology collections was a personal interest of George Mercer Dawson, son of McGill principal William Dawson. George Dawson joined the Geological Survey in 1875, was its assistant director in 1883, and became its director in 1895. Both he and his father were also charter members of the Royal Society of Canada, established by Governor General, the Marquis of Lome in 1882. The Royal Society comprised both French- and English-speaking men prominent in fields from geology to literature. Montreal's organization promoting historical consciousness was the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society (ANS). Founded in 1862 and led by prominent anglophone and francophone men from business, law,

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university, and government circles, the ANSs mandate was to preserve and present historical knowledge and artifacts. It published a bilingual journal, The Canadian Antiquarian, in which male scholars wrote about historical coinage and medals, military events, early government, and recent discoveries reflecting on the past. The ANS mounted historical plaques throughout Montreal, and had an impressive collection of Indian artifacts, military antiquities, old coins, painted portraits, early French- and English-Canadian objects, as well as maps and photographs of historic Montreal. In 1895, the ANS acquired the Chateau Ramezay, a building dating back to 1705, as a museum to display its collection. Only male artists and writers could belong to the Pen and Pencil Club. It was an informal group founded in 1890 by six Montrealers including artists William Brymner and Robert Harris. Roughly 30 members regularly met on Saturday evenings for the "social enjoyment and promotion of the Arts and Letters"57 in artists' studios, or at such masculine bastions as the Royal Montreal Golf Club, or the Royal Montreal Racquet Club. Each member brought his contribution on a set subject in "brush or pen" for appraisal and criticism. One member's proud boast that "women have been rigidly excluded from the Club,"58 confirmed the prevailing assumption that art, literature, and history were male preserves. Reading, discussing, and writing about folk cultures was a fashionable pursuit among many elites in the late nineteenth century. The scholarly Folk-Lore Society, founded in Britain in 1878, spurred the formation of similar folklore societies in the United States and Canada. In 1892, the Montreal Branch of the American Folklore Society was founded to collect folklore myths, legends, and race traditions, especially those relevant to early Montreal. Like the collection of historical artifacts and Indian objects, folklore captured the imagination of many women as well as men. A decidedly romantic perspective seems to have been acceptable. In 1894, an NCWC women's group was asked to contribute accounts of "Indian Romance" for a planned new "History of Canada."59 The near male exclusivity of so many interesting organizations roused women to found their own cultural associations. Some were primarily for their personal edification and pleasure. The Montreal Shakespeare Club was a popular women's club formally established in 1885 for readings, theatricals, and discussions. Given that in the 1870s she hosted an informal Shakespeare group in her own home, Alice Peck

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was no doubt a member in 1894 when, under Mrs. Clark Murray's presidency, it was said there was never an empty seat at meetings. The Montreal Ladies' Morning Musical Club, still active today, was founded in 1892 by women who met weekly to perform music in one another's homes. Alice Peck and her sister, Emma Skelton, were among the earliest to join in concerts and lectures about music sponsored by the club. Other women's groups met to accomplish some constructive aim. May Phillips was a charter member of Montreal's earliest general women's club. Initiated by several Chicago representatives from the American General Federation of Women's Clubs, a group of 34 Montreal women formed the first Women's Club in Canada in December 1892. Its cultural and political agenda covered three areas: Home and Education, Social Science, and Art and Literature.60 In its 1893-94 program, Phillips gave a talk on "Manual Training,"61 a subject dear to her heart. She also joined in the club's protests over discrimination against women who were excluded from school and hospital boards, from medical schools, and from the free tuition given men at the city-funded School of Art and Design. In 1895-96, the club's petition to the city resulted in "the [Montreal City] Council resolving to establish classes for women" in either domestic science or applied design.62 Domestic science won. One can imagine May Phillips' disappointment that applied design was rejected. As of 1902, the only classes provided for women were in cooking and dressmaking.63 However, in 1894, women interested in the arts had already founded the Montreal Branch of the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC). It became the direct precursor of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, and its main protagonists are the same. When Alice Peck and May Phillips started the WAAC Montreal Branch in 1894, they were almost 40. Peck's seventh child, Brian, was only two years old, and Phillips was co-principal of the Victoria School of Art on St. Catherine Street. Despite important individual responsibilities, both women possessed the motivation and freedom to commit to this initiative. Within the year, the Montreal WAAC had firmly established itself with lecture courses, sketching classes, studio tours, and an exhibition roster. In 1896, these same WAAC leaders also began a ladies' auxiliary to the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society (ANS). Inspired by its recently opened Chateau Ramezay Museum, Peck, Phillips, and others such as Mrs. de Bellefeuille Macdonald, Mme Josephine Dandurand, and

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Mme Marguerite Thibaudeau64 formed an ANS Women's Branch.65 Here, as in the Montreal Local Council of the NCWC, there was no great division between anglophones and francophones. Working together, these volunteer women catalogued the museum's collection and restored the Louis XIV Room and the Habitant Room,66 after first mounting an historical costume ball to raise the necessary funds.67 In the ANS Women's Branch, the women operated in their own separate sphere, not as policy makers, but as intelligent clerks, decorators, and fundraisers. This "separatist strategy," which frequently enabled women to play a significant part in established cultural organizations,68 provided Peck and Phillips a common ground with men who would later support their new handicrafts organization.69 They were already beginning to launch their movement to develop and promote Canadian crafts. Just as women leaders had done elsewhere, they would become committed supporters of craftspeople and patrons of the crafts. NOTES 1. For another discussion of craft, especially regarding crafts collected by museums, see Kardon, Ideal Home, 24-25. 2. Edward Lucie-Smith, The Story of Craft: The Craftsman's Role in Society (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981), 13. 3. Steven Adams, The Arts and Crafts Movement (London: Quintet Publishing, 1987), 9. 4. Quoted in N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 23. Largely a mythical ideal, it was nevertheless very influential. 5. From 1883-90, Morris was active as a socialist writer, speaker and political organizer. See Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 462-589. 6. Gillian Naylor, "The Morris Legacy: An Art Made by the People for the People," in The Earthly Paradise: William Morris Yesterday and Today (Toronto: William Morris Society of Canada; The Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre, 1996), 105. 7. The Pavilion de 1'Art Nouveau Bing at the Exposition Universelle showcased the luxurious decorative art interiors of Siegfried Ring's art nouveau workshops. Bing's influences included Louis C. Tiffany in America and the Maison d'Art in Brussels. See Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts, 7-47. 8. Decorative arts by Charles Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft and Glasgow artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's circle were shown at Vienna's eighth Secession exhibition in 1900. Peter Vergo, Vienna 1900: Vienna,

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

Scotland, and the European Avant-Garde (Edinburgh: National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, 1983), 27-28. Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 180. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 225. Parker, Subversive, 11. Callen, Angel in the Studio, 8. See Linda Parry, ed., William Morris (London: Philip Wilson, 1996), 178-79, 181-82, 194, 204, 214, 227, 230, 236-37, 258. Highly regarded women teachers included the Hon. Mrs. Mabel de Grey, the Hon. Mrs. Carpenter, and the Hon. Mrs. Hodgson for wood inlay work, Mrs. Elizabeth Wardle for embroidery, Mrs. Joseph King and Mrs. Godfrey Blount for textiles, Mrs. G.E Watts for terracotta and decorative reliefs, and Mrs. Waterhouse for metalwork. See for example: "The Home Arts and Industries Association at the Royal Albert Hall," The Studio 11 (1897): 109-16. Less critical were articles written by Esther Wood: "The Home Arts and Industries Association," The Studio 20 (1900): 78-88; and "The Home Arts and Industries Association," The Studio 26 (1902): 129-34. Nicola Gordon Bowe and Elizabeth Gumming, The Arts and Crafts Movements in Dublin and Edinburgh, 1885-1925 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), 19. Fra Newbery was principal of the Glasgow School of Art; Gerald Baldwin Brown was Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh. Irish-born Phoebe Moss Traquair (1852-1936) studied art at the Royal Dublin Society before moving to Edinburgh on her marriage in 1873. Embroidery work was her prime focus, but in the 1880s she took up manuscript illumination, and then mural decoration. She did murals for the mortuary chapel of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children, the Song School at St. Mary's Cathedral, and the Catholic Apostolic Church in Mansfield Place. She studied enamel work with Lady Gibson Carmichael in 1900 and 1901. Bowe and Gumming, Dublin and Edinburgh, 29, 33, 64-68. Her Edinburgh-trained architect son, Ramsay Traquair, succeeded Percy Nobbs as third Macdonald Professor at McGill's School of Architecture (1914-38). A.F. Morris, "Mrs. Traquair: A Versatile Art Worker," The Studio 34 (1905): 339-43. Glasgow Society of Women Artists, A Centenary Exhibition to celebrate the founding of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists in 1882 (Glasgow, 1982). For example: Gleeson White, "Some Glasgow Designers and Their Work: Part I," The Studio 11 (1897) describes the metalwork and design work of Margaret and Frances Macdonald; G, White, "Some

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21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

Glasgow Designers and Their Work: III," The Studio 12 (1898) discusses Jessie R. Newbery's philosophy of design and her embroidery; Fra H. Newbery, "An Appreciation of the Work of Ann Macbeth," The Studio 27 (1903) describes Macbeths embroidery and draughtsmanship. For scholarship on some of these artists, see Burkhauser, Glasgow Girls; Janice Helland, "Frances Macdonald: The Self as Fin-de-Siecle Woman," Woman's Art Journal14, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1993): 15-22; and Janice Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Larmour, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Ireland, 21, 50-52. Articles were written about a handwoven Donegal carpet installed in Government House, Ottawa. Larmour, Ireland, 125. Alice Peck enquired about the firm. Letter from Lewis Beatty of Millar & Beatty Ltd., Dublin, to M.A. Peck, March 9, 1902, enclosing information on Donegal Carpets of Ireland. [Cll Dl 019 1902, CHGA] Larmour, Ireland, 151-53. Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955) joined the Irish arts and crafts guild An Tur Gloine in 1911. The Ottawa window, which was An Tur's and Geddes's first really prestigious international commission, received favourable notice by critics like Roger Fry and Herbert Read. Bowe and Gumming, Dublin and Edinburgh, 134-39. Kathleen McCarthy, Women's Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 40-41. McCarthy, Culture, 41. Parry, William Morris, 241. Candace Wheeler, The Development of Embroidery in America (New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1921), 112-13. Anscombe, A Woman's Touch, 36. Canadian women artists, including May Phillips and Mary Dignam, exhibited at the Chicago Fair with the Canadian exhibition. Canadian women artists did not exhibit in the Woman's Building, it was alleged, because both the Canadian government and Lord Stanley neglected to inform the appropriate Canadian women organizers of the American invitation. "From a Woman's Standpoint, Sama at the World's Fair," The Globe, June 3, 1893. McCarthy, Culture, 69. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 133. Quoted from "Boston Society of Arts and Crafts Papers, 1897-1924," in The Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston Exhibition Record, 1897-1927, K.E. Ulehla, ed. (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1981), 5. The education a society granted girls was indicative, historically, of the role it permitted women. The Clio Collective, Quebec Women: A History (Toronto: Women's Press, 1987), 241.

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35. Margaret Gillett, We Walked Very Warily.-A History of Women at McGill (Montreal: Eden Press Women's Publications, 1981), 2. 36. Gillett, Warily, 54. 37. Gillett, Warily, 55-56. 38. Montreal Daily Star, April 19, 1937 (late edition); Mrs. W.A. Phillips Papers, File #650, Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham Collection. [McC] 39. Report of the Montreal Ladies' Educational Association, 1882-83. 40. T.M. Maclntyre, "Our Ladies' Colleges in Relation to our Educational System," The Canada Educational Monthly and School Magazine, 7 (Feb. 1885): 41-46, in The Proper Sphere: Woman's Place in Canadian Society, ed. Ramsay Cook and Wendy Mitchinson (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 140-41. 41. Gillett, Warily, 156-59. 42. Linda Kealey, "Introduction," A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s-1920s (Toronto: Women's Press, 1979), 7. 43. Jill [Ker] Conway, "Jane Addams: An American Heroine," Daedalus 93, No. 2 (Spring 1964): 761. 44. In 1901, when 16 percent of Canadian women were working for wages, this relatively low number was nonetheless viewed with alarm. Sandra D. Burt, Lorraine Code, and Lindsay Dorney, Changing Patterns: Women in Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), 14. 45. Ishbel Aberdeen, "The National Council of Women: What it Means and What it Does," in NCWC, Women of Canada, 254. 46. Women's Institutes were founded in 1897 by Adelaide Hoodless (1857-1910) at Stoney Creek, Ontario. As an outgrowth of Farmers' Institutes in rural Ontario, Women's Institutes spread across the country, supporting rural women in home economics, hygiene, and other household arts. 47. N.E.S. Griffiths, The Splendid Vision: Centennial History of the National Council of Women of Canada, 1893-1993 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1993), 4-5. 48. Lady Aberdeen's astute decision to permit only silent rather than spoken prayer at NCWC meetings prevented a schism among religious groups in Quebec. 49. NCWC, Yearbook, 1900, xviii-xix. [NLC] 50. NCWC, Yearbook, 1894, 55. [NLC] 51. Julia Drummond, "President's Address," in MLCW, Annual Report, 1896, 8. [NLC] 52. The desire for reform was advocated in varying degrees. See Griffiths, The Splendid Vision. The first three chapters describe the interplay between the conservative and progressive reform mindset of the first 20 years of the NCWC.

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53. "Report of the Social Study Club," in MLCW, Annual Report, 1899, 12. 54. See Janet M. Brooke, Discerning Tastes: Montreal Collectors, 1880-1920 (Montreal: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1989) for background and examples of the wealth of art in Montreal collections in this period. 55. The women committee members were Mrs. M.E. David, Mrs. G.A. Drummond, Mrs. W.R. Miller, Mrs. Fayette Brown, Mrs. G.W. Stephens, and Mrs. Wheeler. AAM, Annual Reports, 1898-1903. [MMFA] 56. Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1985), 79-80. Edward Sapir headed a new Anthropology Division established in 1910. The next year, the Geological Survey moved into Ottawa's new Victoria Memorial Museum Building. 57. Leo Cox, "Fifty Years of Brush and Pen: A Historical Sketch of the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal" (unpublished ms., 1939), 3. 58. Cox, "Fifty Years," 6. 59. Mrs. Shenick, "Women's Clubs," in NCWC, Yearbook, 1894, 67-68. The very title, "Indian Romance," bespeaks the superficial simplification of the Aboriginal "Other." 60. Montreal Women's Club, Annual Report, 1893-94, 17. By 1921, the club had numerous subcommittees active in improving social conditions and general culture. Sights and Shrines: An Illustrated Guide to Montreal (Montreal: A.T. Chapman, 1921), 109. 61. Montreal Women's Club, Annual Report, 1893-94, 12. 62. Montreal Women's Club, Annual Report, 1893-94, 5-6; 1895-96, 7. 63. Emily Cummings, "A Woman's Club," The Canadian Magazine 18, No. 4 (Feb. 1902): 382. 64. Wife of Senator Raoul Dandurand, Josephine Dandurand edited her own paper, Le Coin de Feu (1893-96). Marguerite La Mothe Thibaudeau (b. 1853), wife of Senator Joseph Rosaire Thibaudeau, was president of the Notre Dame Hospital, and worked for the Parks and Playgrounds Association of Montreal. Both women were active members of the Montreal Local Council of the NCWC. 65. WAAC, Annual Report, 1896, 15. They designed early Canadian costumes for the planned Cabot Historical Ball in 1897. WAAC, Annual Report, 1898, 22. The ANS Women's Branch became affiliated with the Montreal Local Council in 1909. 66. Catalogue of the Chateau Ramezay Museum and Portrait Gallery (Montreal: Numismatic and Antiquarian [sic] Society, 1901), 123, 124. 67. See Cynthia Cooper, Magnificent Entertainments: Fancy Dress Balls of Canada's Governors General, 1876-1898 (Fredericton, NB and Hull, QC: Goose Lane Editions and CMC, 1997), 131-54. 68. McCarthy, Culture, 70-79.

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69. W.D. Lighthall, Louis Wilfred Sicotte, George A. Drummond, and Charles Auguste Harwood all became sponsors of the Guild's incorporation. Catalogue of the Chateau Ramezay, and the Constitution and By-Laws of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (see Appendix A, this volume).

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Ill ATTEMPTS TO PROMOTE CRAFTS IN CANADA: 1880-1902

PHILANTHROPY VERSUS DESIGN

WOMEN HAD LONG BEEN INVOLVED in certain handicrafts. In the midnineteenth century, arts and crafts in Canada had been regularly exhibited side by side with fine arts in provincial agricultural fairs. In Ontario, at the Kingston Agricultural Fair in September 1849, prizes were awarded not only for oil painting and watercolours, but for embroidery, crochet work, worsted work, quilts, woollen carpets, woollen blankets, handmade flannel, shawls, flax and linen goods, furniture, bookbinding, writing paper, stained glass, and wood engraving.1 After 1879, a permanent central headquarters for the new Ontario Industrial Exhibition Association, forerunner of the Canadian National Exhibition, was located in Toronto. In 1895, art and handicraft exhibitions were both still held in one room. Gradually, crafts were separated, with embroidery, china painting, textiles, woodwork, brass chasing, and repousse solicited by the Ladies' Committee for the "Ladies' Department" of the Exhibition.2 Men were eligible to submit work but few did so. In 1903, crowded facilities led women to lobby for a separate Woman's Building to better exhibit handicrafts.3 Many women saw the separation as natural, and officially, women's handicrafts were accepted most readily as separate from art.

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Identifying handicrafts with the home made their exhibition and sale more accessible to women. As elsewhere, Canadians realized handicrafts could be a means of survival for poor women. In Montreal, privileged women formed the Montreal Society of Decorative Art, which paid impoverished gentlewomen for needlework done in the home. The Society, founded by Harriet Wheeler,4 in 1879 had a mandate to give opportunities for individuals who are forced by adverse circumstances to employ their skill, and who shunning publicity, seek a channel for the disposal of articles, whether of their own workmanship or not, at a fair price, to afford facilities for instruction in decorative art, and in the several branches of art where skill and ornamentation are employed, and to encourage tasteful manufactures in this Province.5

The Montreal Society of Decorative Art was interested more in philanthropy than in original design or in reviving traditional rural handicrafts. The Society encouraged women to use patterns and designs imported from Boston and New York; it provided, if necessary, partially done specimens for finishing.6 Philanthropy was a higher priority than art because women's public role still relied considerably on nurturing. The Needlework Guild of Canada followed the same benevolent model. Based on the British organization founded in 1883 by Lady Wolverton, and its American counterpart (1885), it was organized in Montreal in 1902. The Canadian Needlework Guild's objective was to oversee the distribution of handmade garments to different hospitals and charities.7 Members were expected to contribute a set number of finished garments a year; busy well-off women often paid a seamstress to make the garments for their monthly donations. In Montreal, philanthropic women maintained other depositories such as the Industrial Rooms and the Women's Exchange, where plain sewing, mending, knitting, and darning could be ordered from women who needed money. The National Council of Women of Canada (NCwe) actively supported these efforts in Montreal and at similar depositories in Toronto, Kingston, Halifax, and Saint John,8 but did so to support needy women, rather than for artistic value. In fact, there were innumerable cases where women's handwork was definitely not artistic. Its inferiority was so pronounced that in 1886, Sara Jeannette Duncan's satirical column in The Globe, entitled "Ladies' Work at the Exhibition," publicly expressed disdain for the poor work-

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manship, lack of taste, and useless articles seen in that "most sacred precinct of woman's sphere."9 The popularity of ornamentation sometimes led to excessive Victorian embellishment, where women took decoration to undesirable, gaudy extremes. Artificial flowers, cut paper, shellwork, and coloured wax models flourished, while worthless household objects were hand-painted "with festoons and wreaths of flowers, or with figures, landscapes, birds, butterflies and all manner of things that crawl and creep."10 To raise the standards and increase the employability of women doing handwork, women needed training in good design. For a time, there were a handful of private schools run by women which attempted to teach women applied art skills. These institutions evolved through different incarnations, but rarely survived very long as they received no outside support. In Toronto as early as 1884, pioneer Esther K. Westmacott11 had founded the Associated Artists' School of Art and Design (AAS). It taught interior decoration and design for carpets, wallpapers, textiles, oilcloths, and stained glass, all intended for manufacture, as well as individual crafts such as embroidery, carving, metal beating, and ceramics.12 The applied arts curriculum was ambitious, but by the late 1880s, the school was in trouble. It was surviving "only by the self-sacrifice of those connected with the school of time, means and strength, without remuneration" because its instruction was "not popular with the Chromo-loving plaque-painting public."13 When Miss Westmacott became ill in 1887, Mary Dignam, the future WAAC president, stepped in and changed the curriculum to the more traditional art instruction of painting, sketching, and modelling. When the AAS was amalgamated with the Art Department at Moulton Ladies' College in 1890 under Mary Dignam's directorship, classes steered students more toward further high art education abroad,14 than for employment in applied design. In other cities, a few female leaders helped provide art education to other women. The former governess for the King of Siam, Anna Leonowens, who lived in Halifax from 1878 to 1897, was familiar with many American schools of art and design. She believed that Halifax artists should have a similar school of their own.15 In 1887, along with Mrs. Jeremiah Kenny and Ella Almon Ritchie, Leonowens established the Victoria School of Art and Design with a mandate to open up "new and remunerative employment for women," including teacher training.16 Several women graduates later taught there, such as Marion Kate "Minnie" Graham, Kate Foss Hill, and china painter/ceramist Alice Egan Hagen who, after studying in 1896 with Adelaide Robineau in

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New York, also graduated from the Victoria School of Art and Design and taught there in 1899. Hagen's independent china-painting instructor, Bessie Brown, subsequently joined the school's faculty as well. In 1892, May Phillips and partner Harriette J. MacDonnell had become new co-principals of Montreal's Victoria School of Art17 which taught design, china painting, ceramics, and kiln firing to both women and children. By 1895, Phillips was principal on her own of the School of Art and Applied Design, with a broader curriculum intended to enable students to design for architects and manufacturers. Successful for seven or eight years only, there is no evidence that this school continued past 1904. In Ottawa in 1898, Marion A. Living founded the short-lived First Technical School of Ottawa to cater to arts and crafts skills required by employers such as architects, manufacturers, book illustrators, and machinists.18 Rosina J. Barrett's Ottawa School of Art Needlework also trained women for the workforce.19 Barrett, who held a diploma in art needlework from the Chicago World's Fair, also taught "Kensington Embroidery" at Miss Harmon's Home and Day School for Young Ladies and Little Girls. Incorporated in 1892, Miss Harmon's School added china painting to the curriculum for 1903 and 1904, but seems to have folded soon after. In convents, however, nuns provided practical training for girls. Since the Ursulines arrived in Quebec in 1639, they had taught fine needlework, beginning under Mother Marie de 1'Incarnation. By the end of the nineteenth century, convents such as Loretto Abbey and the Sisters of St. Joseph in Toronto, the Ursulines, the Sisters of Charity, and the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Montreal, the Convent of the Holy Name in Hochelaga, the Sillery Convent near Quebec, as well as many orphanages offered instruction to women and girls in embroidery, lace and, sometimes, china painting. The opportunities for women to receive practical art training in Canada were limited, except in convents, because the small private schools did not have financial stability. Early attempts to establish art education in applied design and crafts in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto20 had come from women's initiatives, but most had little lasting success. Because fine handwork was viewed as a "natural" female attribute, Canadian decision makers felt there was little need to provide this art education to women. When lobbied, the response was negative. The prevailing bias was to direct art and manual training toward either the high arts or employment for men.

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The attitude against practical art and design held sway even in the art societies. Despite the fact that Governor General, the Marquis of Lome's original idea for the Royal Canadian Academy had been to include designers and to teach classes in both art and design, the RCA decided that there was no interest in training designers. A young country could absorb only a limited number of them.21 The Art Association of Montreal's (AAM) art school reflects the high-art domination of art education, despite early intentions here also to the contrary. The AAM had initially been expected to offer instruction to support the country's manufacturers, along the lines of the South Kensington Design Schools.22 We know that Governor General Lome, who officially opened the AAM in 1879, favoured schools of art and design. Although the first classes in the fall of 1880 were taught by painters William Raphael and A. Allan Edson, plans were made to add applied design instruction. On the advice of AAM Council members Warren Gray and Frederic Marlett Bell-Smith, who had trained at the South Kensington Design Schools, John Popham was sent to Kensington to find out how to set up such a school in Montreal. By the time of the 1883 annual meeting, the attitude had changed. The AAM Council was persuaded to hire instead only one instructor, Robert Harris, a Canadian artist trained in the French Academy.23 Almost immediately, the AAM succumbed to a high-art curriculum taught by Robert Harris, then William Brymner and their successors. Public schools catered mostly to job opportunities for male students. In Quebec, the Council of Arts and Manufactures established public schools in nine centres for artisans and apprentices. In Montreal, Quebec City, and Levis, courses were given in freehand and mechanical drawing, architecture, stair building, decorative painting, lithography, boot- and shoemaking, and dressmaking.24 Only the latter was aimed at women. Its Montreal school did not admit female students until after women's protests were acknowledged in 1895. In Toronto, the Central Ontario School of Art and Industrial Design, which succeeded the Associated Artists' School, emphasized mechanical and industrial art, painting, and drawing, but not interior decoration or individual crafts such as embroidery and ceramics. Briefly, it offered woodcarving and embossed leatherwork taught by Louise Beresford Tully, who also trained at South Kensington Design Schools. However, the public schools' applied arts curriculum was rarely adapted to women's interests.

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Yet, privileged men and women in Canada, as scholars, collectors, and practitioners, were knowledgeable in the arts and crafts. Through their reading, travel, and art education in the United States, Britain, and Europe, many were connoisseurs. Canadians with position, purchasing power, and connections to British and American arts and crafts appreciated fine craftsmanship. The men are better known, but undoubtedly, their wives, sisters, daughters, and women friends were equally au courant. THE INFLUENCE OF WILLIAM MORRIS

In Toronto's university and artistic circles, William Morris's life, work, and teachings were known and admired. Glasgow-born James Mavor, a University of Toronto political economy professor who was greatly interested in the arts, liked to write and speak about William Morris whom he had known in Britain.25 In architecture, Eden Smith had introduced British arts and crafts to Toronto in the 1890s with buildings like St. Thomas Church, Huron Street, and his own home on Indian Road near High Park.26 George A. Reid, artist, educator, and leader in this community, was a Morris disciple who promoted design reform and the union of all arts.27 In the 1890s, George Reid had joined a summer artists' colony founded by Candace Wheeler in the Catskill Mountains at Onteora, NY. There he designed and built arts and crafts homes for himself and other summer residents, often decorating them with painted murals.28 Through a long impressive career, in which Reid was president of the Ontario Society of Artists (18971901) and of the Royal Canadian Academy (1906-07), he kept his ideal of uniting the fine and decorative arts, and in 1903 helped form the Morris-inspired Arts and Crafts Society of Canada.29 In 1905, he built himself an arts and crafts home with murals and inglenook in Wychwood Park, the Toronto artists' colony he helped establish.30 Still another Toronto connection to the British Arts and Crafts Movement was through J.E.H. MacDonald. A pupil of Reid's, who later trained at Carlton Studios in London along with Walter Crane, MacDonald also practised Morrisian principles in his commercial graphic design back in Toronto.31 The philosophy and decorative arts of William Morris were similarly known and practised in Montreal. Montrealers, too, read The Studio, and the American and Canadian periodicals which published Morris excerpts, his work, and that of his followers.32 Oscar Wilde's

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Montreal lectures on the decorative arts in 1882 prompted a letter by William Douw Lighthall to the Montreal Witness, which criticized Wilde for his "calm plagiarism of the principles, thoughts and language of great men."33 The letter writer was a young McGill graduate and future associate of Alice Peck and May Phillips, who revealed his respect for the British Arts and Crafts Movement in the letter written for a knowledgeable audience. Montreal, Canada's largest city, boasted many patrons with sufficient wealth to purchase fine craftsmanship. Like Liberty's of London, William Scott and Son sold British, European, and American decorative arts, and often exhibited the latest in textiles, china, and other furnishings, including De Morgan tiles, Art Nouveau objects, and Tiffany's favrile glass.34 William Scott's also imported William Morris decorative arts to furnish Montreal clubs, churches, and mansions.35 In 1885 and 1903, the Andrew Allan family commissioned stained glass windows from Morris and Co. for St. Paul's Church, and Christ Church Cathedral had Morris memorial windows installed in 1902 and 1911.36 Charles Hosmer, among others, imported Morris furnishings for his stately home, although the most dedicated patron was surely David Allan Poe Watt, a wealthy grain merchant and long-time AAM member. Watt adorned his home at 285 Stanley Street with all manner of Morris wallpapers, stained glass windows, tapestries, carpets, and decorative murals. His daughter Edith Watt, a Guild charter member, grew up appreciating Morris's work. The Art Association of Montreal exhibited the work of British artists closely associated with Morris: Edward Burne-Jones in 1889 and Walter Crane in 1892. The year William Morris died (1896), the AAM held an arts and crafts architectural show to demonstrate his influence. Scottish-trained architect Percy E. Nobbs, who became Macdonald Professor of Architecture at McGill in 1903, brought arts and crafts ideas to his teaching and private practice in Montreal. Montreal architects, Edward and William S. Maxwell, frequently commissioned woodwork, metalwork, furniture, and decorative plaster from the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts, an 1897 Birmingham firm founded on British Arts and Crafts Movement ideals to integrate the decorative arts with architecture and fine arts.37 Prosperous Montrealers kept local manufacturers Owen McGarvey and William Coysh in business custom making all styles of finely crafted woodwork and furniture. Metalsmith and jewellery firms such as Hendery & Leslie, Henry Birks & Sons, Rice Sharpely & Sons, and H.R. Ives &

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Company were happy to adopt the current decorative art styles to sell to wealthy Montreal clientele.38 Montreal metalworker Paul Beau, who is one of the few known independent craftsmen from this era, was born in Montreal in 1871. At age 14 he apprenticed with a watchmaker, before moving on to a watch and antiques business. When he began to make artistic metalwork of his own design, he came to the attention of William Maxwell. Impressed by Beau's technique, fine patinas, and taste,39 Maxwell's firm first hired Beau to make special hardware and electric fixtures, including those for the Morris-decorated Mount Royal Club (burned down in 1904), and later commissioned him for larger-scale architectural work. Beau also made brass and copper desk sets, letter holders, book ends, vases, trays, and jugs, often with repousse decoration, which he sold through his own shop at 291 Mountain Street or the Canadian Handicrafts Guild.40 EDUCATION IN DESIGN

Inherent in the vogue for good design was the elitist view that the educated taste of the well-to-do would filter down and improve the inferior taste of the mass population.41 Many believed that the Industrial Revolution's cheap, machine-made goods, coupled with the Victorian fad for unnecessary ornamentation had resulted in a sad diminution of artistic form and function. The difficulty in Canada was that circumstances were not very hospitable for design reform. On the one hand, fine craftsmanship was valued by those in a position to afford it, but on the other hand, professional education and employment opportunities were not well supported. Industrial workers were trained in mechanical drawing and manual arts to raise their skill levels, but manual training rarely extended to the decorative arts, applied design, or crafts. Canada was seen as too immature a country to sustain her own design schools. Except for male-dominated architectural craftsmanship and commercial graphic design, little opportunity existed for studying or selling applied arts and craftwork. Canadian women had to seek training in Britain or the United States, if they had the means. Even when they were trained, it was difficult for women to work in the applied arts, such as art needlework, jewellery, metalwork, carving, ceramics, leatherwork, textiles, or glass. No exhibition or marketing strategy had been developed to help them survive by selling their work.

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Educated artistic women like Alice Peck and May Phillips were convinced that applied design should be taught to women in schools. They did surveys and lobbied for curriculum changes, but it was an uphill campaign. Canadian artists themselves were conservative, and governments were not cognizant of or committed to funding arts instruction. The lack of a sustained infrastructure in education and professional societies meant most people could not get training. Students with the necessary funds travelled outside the country, after which they aspired to the high-art world, particularly painting.42 This lack of public training in Canada for women in the applied arts troubled groups such as the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC) and the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC). As early as 1894, the Montreal Local Council of Women (MLCW) began discussing the idea of applied design as a potential work source for women. In 1895, May Phillips spoke out in favour of technical and manual arts training in schools to reduce unemployment and raise artistic taste. In 1896, at an NCWC session in Montreal on industrial exhibitions, both Mary Dignam and May Phillips described the need for improvements in the calibre of art at provincial exhibitions. Phillips applauded Dignam's efforts on the Ontario Industrial Exhibition Association board at reclassifying the arts categories. She argued that women should also be represented on Quebec exhibition boards, lamenting the "sad spectacle presented to us at our exhibition here, both in women's work and in everything which calls itself artistic. Prize lists need revising, primarily because they encourage a very false idea of what is good."43 Phillips reiterated her plea for educational art training and support for the applied arts, while Dignam too recommended art industries and applied-art fields to women. The applied-art issue was strongly felt by Lady Aberdeen. She and Julia Drummond had invited Mrs. Dunlap Hopkins of the New York School of Applied Design for Women to come to the NCWC annual meeting in 1896 in Montreal. Hopkins had to decline,44 but she subsequently came two years later to speak to the annual meeting in Ottawa. May Phillips attended the 1898 meeting as a delegate, although Alice Peck could not. Lady Aberdeen presided at the evening session whose subject was "Instruction in Applied Design Applicable to Manufacturers and Industries." In introducing Hopkins, Lady Aberdeen, who had visited her New York school, stressed the importance of design, citing her own experience with the Irish Home Industries. She noted with regret "that Mrs. Peck is not able to be with

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us tonight," but invited May Phillips to speak later about her own Montreal school.45 Mrs. Dunlap Hopkins told Canadian women how the school began in 1892. She outlined the curriculum of technical instruction by experienced design men from factories, and the systematic study of historic ornament.46 Mrs. Hopkins and Lady Aberdeen together advocated similar opportunities for women in Canada. Disappointingly, the male education administrators who were present offered little concrete encouragement.47 However, Lady Aberdeen read a supportive letter from a Montreal wallpaper firm, the Watson Foster Company. It lauded NCWC initiatives, criticized the lack of industrial instruction in Canada, and offered a $ 100 prize at a future exhibition of student design work.48 Mary Dignam's WAAC report to this annual meeting claimed passable progress in these arts: "in the field of decorative and commercial work much has been done to advance both ceramic art, artist poster-making and illustration. In design some little beginning has been made."49 The dearth of educational opportunities was publicly deplored. Writing in late 1899 for the NCWC Women's Handbook for the Paris Exposition, Adelaide Hoodless complained that "up to the present time, little effort has been made towards developing a distinctly Canadian character in the various arts and crafts."50 Canada did not adequately provide the education, exhibition, and marketing facilities for its own artists in arts and crafts. Jean Grant's articles in Saturday Night held up British and American models as examples for Canada. In her "Studio and Gallery" column, Grant reported on the British Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society's 1899 exhibition, praising its attention to cabinet work, embroidery design, illumination, stained glass, and jewellery design.51 Grant later commended the Glasgow School of Art for its excellent craft workshops and instruction, and applauded the Paris Exposition for its strong exhibits of American women's enterprises, such as the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework and Candace Wheeler's Associated Artists.52 In 1899, the MLCW attempted to take on the issue of women's applied-art education in publicly funded design schools. First, it struck a committee to consult personnel at the the AAM, the Architectural Department of McGill, the Montreal High School, the School of Art and Applied Design, and the provincial government classes at the Monument National school. The committee also canvassed various Montreal artists. Of those surveyed, only Edmond Dyonnet of the

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Monument National and May Phillips were encouraging. Cold water was thrown on the proposal everywhere else. Artists Robert Harris and William Brymner, among others, advised that there was little to justify a public school in applied design in Montreal because the city was not yet mature enough. [T]he balance of experienced opinion ... seemed to be that Schools of Design and Decorative Art, to be of any value, could only exist in close touch with large manufacturing centres in towns possessed of good museums. Canada has as yet neither the fine museums, nor the abundant manufacturing life to inform and stimulate designers, and so in spite of the higher standard of skilled labor which would ensue on the establishment of such a school, in spite of discoveries of latent local talent, it would be hopeless for us to expect to compete with schools of other countries where both resource and demand exceed our own.53

The women seemed to be in a losing campaign with established artists and art educators. Arrogant, colonial attitudes like this dismissed the aspirations of those who could not afford to go outside the country for art education. They also virtually halted the MLCW initiative in its tracks. Nevertheless, the example of British and American women's involvement in reviving craftwork provided external inspiration. As arts representative for the NCWC, Mary Dignam attended the International Congress of Women in England in July 1899. She reported her positive experience to the NCWC at the annual meeting in Hamilton in a paper entitled "Handicrafts and Art." Dignam had been impressed by American and British participants, including W.R. Lethaby, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, and May Morris, who spoke encouragingly about embroidery, art jewellery, enamelling, stained glass, woodcarving, photography, bookbinding, and cabinetmaking.54 More encouraging was the fact that members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, whom she met, offered the WAAC assistance in crafts promotion.55 Dignam demonstrated her own commitment early in the next year. The WAACs Toronto headquarters included a small crafts section in its February-March 1900 exhibition of paintings. Proudly listing the examples of bookbinding, fan and book cover designs, leatherwork, Canadian and English pottery, lace, woodcarving, embroidery, metalwork, painting, and silk, Dignam noted that there were also what she called the "more prosaic arts of weaving and rugmaking."56

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In May 1900, the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA) in Toronto finally held its first exhibition featuring the applied and decorative arts. The work of many women artists such as Mary H. Reid, Marion Living, Harriet Ford, Elizabeth Wyn Wood, Henrietta M. Vickers, and Louise B. Tully were included in the exhibits of carpet design, lace design, woodcarving, leatherwork, ceramics, and bookbinding.57 Soon after this OSA exhibition, the WAAC followed with successful fall exhibits in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal, all of which included applied design. Buoyed by the reception of the OSA and WAAC exhibits, the NCWC tried again to address the applied-art issue. At the May 1901 NCWC annual meeting in London, Ontario, Josephine Dandurand launched another appeal. An articulate, bilingual Montreal journalist, who in 1900 had been appointed by the federal government as a Commissioner to the Paris Exposition, Dandurand marshalled her fellow women for an increase in public support for the arts.58 She proposed a motion to appoint a NCWC standing committee for the practical promotion of industrial and fine arts. May Phillips supported the motion. Using the occasion to demonstrate the value of rural handicrafts as well, Phillips gave an impassioned paper on "Home Arts and Handicrafts." She spoke of the advantages, to family life, personal prosperity, and national pride, if action was taken now to encourage the home industries. Invoking the example of the five hundred teachers employed in the Home Arts and [Industries Association] in England, she called for trained supervisors here to prevent the introduction of imitations and incongruous work and to help develop the "artistic spirit" in these arts.59 Dandurand's motion carried, and Phillips became one of seven members from across the country on the NCWC Standing Committee for the Promotion of Industrial and Fine Arts in Canada.60 The next year, Mme Dandurand and her NCWC committee lobbied the federal government to establish courses, scholarships, and a Department of Art in Ottawa, optimistically hoping for a budget of $50,000.61 However, the government rejected the hoped-for art department and courses. Several years later this inaction was endorsed by McGill professor and architect Percy Nobbs. In his 1907 report to the Hon. Sydney Fisher on "State Aid to Art Education in Canada," Nobbs argued that art teaching was "no part of a Government's business," and that art schools were "best left to care for themselves."62 The opinion echoed the OSAs view that artists should control art education.63 This failed to take into account that artist-run art schools for women were

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precarious. The assumption was that art education for men would continue, with or without government support. That attitude left most women wanting. Nevertheless, this lack of support gave women leaders the opportunity to make a difference. They could provide a practical solution by encouraging and promoting women's work in applied arts, home arts, and handicrafts. In March 1902, the WAAC Montreal Branch eagerly took up the challenge, staging the first of many arts and crafts exhibitions in the AAM art gallery. Along with applied arts, the Montreal women had solicited home arts and handicrafts from across the country. A few months later, the WAAC Montreal Branch opened the first permanent sales depot for crafts in Canada.64 Called rather sentimentally "Our Handicraft Shop," it would show a ground-breaking commitment to crafts and craftspeople. More than a local retail outlet, it was the real beginning of Montreal's national program for developing Canada's arts and crafts. NOTES 1. Ontario Board of Agriculture, Canadian Agriculturalist 1, No. 9 (Sept. 1, 1849), 281-82. I thank Angela Carr for suggesting this reference. 2. This seems to have been general practice. In 1894, handicrafts were also shown in the "Ladies' work" department at the Willows Agriculture Fair on Cadboro Bay Road in Victoria, BC. Christina Betts Johnson-Dean, "The Crease Family and the Arts in Victoria," unpublished M.A. thesis (University of Victoria, 1980), 123. 3. Jean Grant, "Women at the Fair," Saturday Night (Sept. 10, 1898); Emily Cummings, "A Woman's Building," The Canadian Magazine 21, No. 6 (Oct. 1903): 567-68. The Exhibition erected a separate, new Woman's Building in 1908. 4. Daughter of Andrew Shaw of Montreal, in 1854, Harriet married Dr. T.B. Wheeler of New York and raised six children. In Montreal she was also active in the Ladies' Benevolent Society. HJ. Morgan, Types of Canadian Women Vol. 1 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1903), 350. 5. The Montreal Society of Decorative Art, Annual Report, 1881. 6. A disclaimer noted it would sell "any work of ordinary merit, excepting wax work and feather flowers," although such sale "may not be construed as a mark of the Society's entire approval." The Montreal Society of Decorative Art, Annual Report, 1899-1900, 27. 7. Montreal Herald, Nov. 24, 1905, 10. Officers in Montreal included Mrs. Learmont, Lady Drummond, Mrs. J.R. Thibaudeau, Mrs. W.S. Paterson, Lady Hickson, and Lady Hingston.

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8. NCWC, Yearbook 1900, 139-41. [NLC] 9. SJ. Duncan, "Ladies' Work at the Exhibition," quoted in Tausky, Sara Jeannette Duncan, 24-26. 10. Dignam, "Art," in NCWC, Women of Canada, 214-15. 11. Daughter of Toronto artist and teacher Stewart Westmacott, Esther Westmacott did art training in New York in 1884. She sent woodcarving to the Guild to be included in the Canadian exhibit of the Australian Exhibition, Women's Work, in 1907. 12. NCWC, Women of Canada, 218-20. 13. "Art and Artists," Saturday Night 1, No. 6 (Jan. 7, 1888): 3. 14. Thompson, "A Worthy Place," 54-56. 15. Anna H. Leonowens, ed., "Preface," The art movement in America: Three articles from the Century Magazine for the benefit of the Victoria School of Art and Design of Halifax, N.S. (New York: 1887). Mrs. Leonowens also organized a women's book club, a Shakespearean Society, and was active in the Halifax Local Council of the NCWC. 16. Donald Soucy and Harold Pearse, The First Hundred Years: A History of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Fredericton and Halifax: University of New Brunswick Faculty of Education and NSCAD, 1993), 15. Today the Victoria School of Art and Design survives as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). 17. See Chapter I for detailed discussion of May Phillips' schools. 18. She and/or her students exhibited in an OSA exhibition in 1900 under the name "Marion Living designs." OSA, Applied Art Exhibition Catalogue 1900 (Toronto: OSA, 1900), 5. Marion Living's flower paintings in watercolour and oil had been exhibited at the AAM in 1894-97 and at the RCA exhibitions from 1894 to 1898. Harper, Early Painters and Engravers, 198. 19. NCWC, Women of Canada, 219, 227. Twenty-four of Rosina Barrett's pupils won prizes for their needlework at the Chicago World's Fair. 20. As in the United States, the roots of the craft movement were first established in the east and central parts of the country. 21. Rebecca Sisler, Passionate Spirits: A History of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1880-1980 (Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin, 1980), 40, 84. Interestingly, the first RCA exhibition in 1880 had 47 exhibits by designers, including woodcarving and lace (33). 22. "History of the Art Classes of the Art Association of Montreal," (Montreal: 1978), 3-4. [MMFA] 23. The man responsible for persuading them to make this choice was reputedly J.S. McLennan, son of Senator Hugh McLennan. "History,' 4. [MMFA] 24. Annual Reports, Council of Arts and Manufactures, 1890-1909. [NGC] Millinery was added much later, in 1909. 25. E. Lisa Panayotidis, "James Mavor: Cultural Ambassador and Aesthetic Educator to Toronto's Elite," in Scarlet Hunters: Pre-Raphaelitism in

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Canada, ed. David Latham (Toronto: Archives of Canadian Art and Design and the Journal of Pre-Raphaelitism Studies, 1998), 161-73. James Mavor spoke about William Morris to the WAAC in Toronto in 1897. Kelly Grossman, Architecture in Transition: From Art to Practice, 1885-1906 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), 90-91; W. Douglas Brown, "The Arts and Crafts Architecture of Eden Smith," in Latham, Scarlet Hunters, 144-60. Reid attributed his interest in surface decoration to European travel, William Morris, and Puvis de Chavannes. G.A. Reid, "Mural Decoration," The Canadian Magazine 5, No. 6 (Apr. 1898): 501-08. Chris Dickman, G.A. Reid: Toward a Union of the Arts (Durham, ON: Durham Art Gallery, 1985); Rosalind Pepall, "Architect and Muralist: The Painter George Reid in Onteora,New York," The Canadian Collector 19, No. 4 (July Aug. 1984): 44-47. One of May Phillips' NYASL art instructors, Carroll Beckwith, was a regular at Onteora, NY. Rosalind Pepall, "Under the Spell of Morris: A Canadian Perspective," in The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris and his Circle from Canadian Collections, ed. Katharine A. Lochnan, Douglas E. Schoenherr, and Carole Silver (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario and Key Porter, 1993), 26-30. A teacher at the Central Ontario School of Art, he later became principal of its successor, the Ontario College of Art, from 1912 to 1918. Reid helped found the Society of Mural Decorators; he was a director of the Toronto Art Museum and served on the board of the Toronto Guild of Civic Art. Pepall, "Under the Spell," 28-29. Reid's home, 81 (85) Wychwood Park, the third built in the Park, probably prompted architect Eden Smith to build his home there at 5 Wychwood Park, the fourth home built in the Park. Both homes are said to be inspired by the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Wychwood Park Heritage Conservation District Plan (Toronto: Historical Board, 1985), 47, 69. MacDonald preached rhythm, balance, and harmony. Robert Stacey, "Harmonizing 'Means and Purpose': The Influence of Ruskin, Morris, and Crane on J.E.H. MacDonald," in Latham, Scarlet Hunters, 102-05. J.E.H. MacDonald was an original member of the Group of Seven painters. Pepall, "Under the Spell," 19-20. Kevin O'Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada (Toronto: Personal Library, 1982), 68-69. Elizabeth Collard, "The Decorative Arts," in The End of an Era: Montreal, 1880-1914 (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1977), 16. See D2, D3, El 1, E15, Fl, F4, F5, F19, F21, F22, F24 in Lochnan et al., Earthly Paradise.

CRAFTS IN CANADA

36. Pepall, "Under the Spell," 26, 34, 122. Today the two St. Paul's Allan memorial windows are installed in the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul on Sherbrooke Street, where the combined congregations of St. Andrew's and St. Paul's constructed a new church building in 1931-32. 37. Rosalind M. Pepall, Building a Beaux-Arts Museum: Montreal, 1912 (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), 75-82. The Bromsgrove Guild opened a Montreal office in 1911. Still to be seen are the carved oak surrounds for the doors and entrances of the exhibition galleries in the AAM'S 1912 building (now MMFA), which were carried out by the Bromsgrove Guild. 38. See examples shown in the catalogue, The End of an Era: Montreal 1880-1914 (Montreal: McCord Museum and McGill University, 1977). For the background of Hendery & Leslie (1887-99) and its takeover by Henry Birks & Sons, see Graham Conrad, Sarah Ivory, and Robert Derome, Eclectic Tastes: Fine and Decorative Arts from the McCord (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1992), 124. 39. On Maxwell's advice, Beau trained with an experienced blacksmith. He also studied technique at museums in France, London, Belgium, and New York (Paul Beau to Marius Barbeau, July 3, 1941). In 1939, Maxwell wrote that "Beau is the best metal craftsman we have in Quebec province.... His ability to design and execute in a masterly way, using technique of a purist, is unusual and highly developed." (W.S. Maxwell to Charles Maillard, Director, Ecole des Beaux Arts, Sept. 8, 1939), Barbeau Correspondence, Box B168, File #30. [CMC] 40. Rosalind Pepall, "Montreal Metalsmith Paul Beau," The Canadian Collector 14, No. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1979): 34-35. Beau later did interior wrought ironwork for the Ottawa Parliament Buildings. See also, Rosalind Pepall, Paul Beau (1871-1949) (Montreal: Musee des beauxarts de Montreal, 1982); Percy E. Nobbs, "Metal Crafts in Canada," Canadian Geographical Journal 28, No. 5 (May 1944): 212-2 5. This article includes many photographs, but no dates, of many Canadian metalworkers, both architectural and small scale. 41. Comments by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., in their book The Decoration of Houses are cited by Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste (New York: Dover, 1980), 165-67. 42. In the 1890s, some new associations which called themselves "arts and crafts societies" had exhibition mandates, although it is unlikely that crafts by women were strongly represented. The president and three vice-presidents of the Arts and Crafts Association of Hamilton were men. Canadian Architect and Builder(Feb. 1894): 22; Vancouver's Arts and Crafts Association's first exhibition in 1900 was mainly pictorial. Canadian Architect and Builder (Dec. 1900): 234-36.

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43. NCWC, Yearbook, 1896, 244-45. [NIC] 44. She was summoned to England by Princess Christian to set up a similar school for women to complement the Institute of Needlework, where women were making copies only, rather than original work which she wished them to do. NCWC, Yearbook, 1898, 239. 45. NCWC, Yearbook, 1898, 225. 46. NCWC, Yearbook, 1898. [NLC]; NCWC Papers, MG28 125, Vol. 151, File 16. [NAG] 47. Those present were the Rev. Mr. Herridge, president of the Ottawa School of Art, Dr. May, superintendent of Arts Schools in Ontario, and Major Ellis, vice-president of the [Central Ontario] School of Art in Toronto. 48. NCWC, Yearbook, 1898, 226. [NLC] Marion Living of the First Technical School in Ottawa attempted to pursue this offer. She received encouragement from the Watson Foster Company, but not from the headquarters of the WAAC as of Nov. 1899. NCWC Papers, MG28 125, Vol. 166, File 11. [NAG] 49. NCWC, Yearbook, 1898, 62. [NLC] "Ceramic art" probably refers to china painting, rather than hand-thrown pots. 50. Adelaide Hoodless, "Trades and Industries," in NCWC, Women of Canada, 91. 51. Jean Grant, "Studio and Gallery," Saturday Night (Jan. 20, 1900): 9. 52. Jean Grant, "Studio and Gallery," Saturday Night (Apr. 21, 1900): 9. 53. "Report of the Sub-Committee to Inquire into the Desirability of Establishing a Public School of Design in Montreal," MLCW, Annual Report, 1899, 13. [NAG] 54. NCWC, Yearbook, 1899, 142-44. [NLC] Other speakers were Mrs. Emily Sartain of Philadelphia, Mrs. Newman, Miss Lowndes, Miss Julie Hillian, Miss Kate Pragnell, and Mr. Karslake. In her talk, Dignam also referred glowingly to Walter Crane, with whom she had been in correspondence. 55. WAAC, Annual Report, 1899, 10. 56. M.E. Dignam, "Report of the WAAC," NCWC, Yearbook, 1900, xxii-iii. [NLC] 57. OSA, Applied Art Exhibition Catalogue 1900. The exhibition also had the male preserves of architectural designs and naval architecture. See also, description by Jean Grant in Saturday Night (May 5, 1900). 58. In 1898, she was the first Canadian woman created an Officier d'Academic by the Government of France. In 1899, she compiled a deluxe booklet illustrated by Canadian artists to be sent to the Paris International Fair in 1900. Laurier Lacroix, Ozias Leduc the Draughtsman (Montreal: Concordia University, 1978), 42. 59. NCWC, Yearbook, 1901, 138-40. [NLC]

CRAFTS IN CANADA

60. The members were Josephine Dandurand and May Phillips (Montreal), Mrs. Torrington and Mrs. J. Paterson (Toronto), Mrs. R. Rogers (Winnipeg), Miss Perrin (Victoria), and Miss Annie Fraser (Charlottetown). "NCWC Annual Meeting Minutes July 1900-July 1902," May 21, 1901, 95. NCWC Papers, MG28 125, Vol. 7. [NAG]; NCWC, Yearbook, 1901-02, xxx, and 134-40. [NLC] 61. NCWC, Yearbook, 1901, 175. 62. Quoted in Tippett, Making Culture, 37. 63. L.A.C. Panton, "The O.S.A.," in Ontario Society of Artists: 75th Annual Spring Exhibition (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1947), 18-19. 64. Since they had received Handicraft, the journal of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, they no doubt knew the example of the Boston Society's sale room, which opened in 1901. [Cll Dl 016 1902, CHGA]

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IV

MONTREAL STAKES ITS CLAIM FOR HANDICRAFTS

WAAC MONTREAL BRANCH

ALTHOUGH NONE OF THOSE PRESENT knew it then, the first step toward a national crafts movement in Canada was a meeting on April 16, 1894 in the St. Catherine Street studio of May Phillips. The 21 women who met to form a Montreal society of women artists included Sarah Holden, Margaret Houghton, Fannie Plimsoll, Margaret Sanborn, Mary Godfrey, Elizabeth Whitney, and probably, Alice Peck. These women had already studied art either abroad or in the United States, so their priority was not art instruction. Rather, they sought the regular stimulation of exchanging ideas and seeing one another's work. The meeting had before it the written request of Mary Dignam, president of the Women's Art Association of Canada (WAAC), asking the women to form a Montreal Branch of the WAAC, which, after due consideration, they chose to do.1 Seven weeks later, they held the inaugural public meeting in the YMCA on Dominion Square, electing Alice Peck as president and May Phillips as vice-president of the new Montreal Branch. The initial statement of the WAAC Montreal Branch did not mention handicrafts. It talked of opening a clubroom for meetings, collecting art literature and reproductions, and providing a studio for

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

those who found it difficult to work at home. These activities were deliberately modest, based on a political sense of women's true position. It will do for women artists what the "Pen and Pencil Club" is already doing for men artists in Montreal; and it will do for women artists what the two well-known musical clubs in this city are doing for musicians.... [There is] no thought of superseding or entering into rivalry with existing unions for the encouragement of art.2 These women couched their goals in careful terms: to encourage higher artistic standards and greater public interest in art, and to give women artists a forum for informal art discussions. From the beginning, they were aware of some misgivings, as Alice Peck noted at the end of the first year. [M]any people thought that the [women's art] movement was a decided mistake, and that our association would only tend to draw a line of demarkation [sic] between the work of the two sexes, which would be a most deplorable result. Not only this but they thought that the work that we could attempt was already being done. However after much consideration it was decided that we might help in the great work of advancing Art, and that with care we might be able to work without interfering with other valuable associations.3 The WAAC Montreal Branch quickly became a going concern. Its program included art reading classes, occasional ceramics workshops, travelling exhibitions of pictures and china, sketching classes where members posed as models, and lecture courses. However, crafts and applied design were of interest from the beginning. In the 1895-96 season, Phillips gave a talk on "Processes of Illustration," and Peck gave one on "Glass Making." The subject of another season was "Distinguished Modern Decorators," which featured talks on Gabriel Dante Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Walter Crane, Puvis de Chavannes, J.P. Laurens, John LaFarge, and Japanese Decorative Art. Early on, the WAAC women arranged for members to visit studios of artists in Montreal—including William Brymner, Edmond Dyonnet, Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote, and Robert Harris—on Saturday afternoons from November to April. These studio visits were very well attended, although the WAAC women's enthusiasm was not necessarily reciprocated. At least one artist was privately patronizing in his corre-

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spondence. In a letter to his mother, Robert Harris wrote about the WAAC initiative. They are bustling about at a great rate. They want all the artists to open their studios once a month to the public, as the Americans do. However, I don't feel inclined at present to let a whole mob of people invade my place once a month for motives of idle curiosity, so I have held out against repeated invasion so far.^ Nevertheless, Harris relented and such studio sessions in Montreal were continued for several years. Annual art and loan exhibitions were held by the WAAC throughout the 1890s. Their published catalogues record the paintings exhibited by Dignam, Phillips, and other WAAC members (although not Peck), as well as occasionally by American and European women artists. The WAAC Montreal Branch received exhibitions of paintings from Toronto, which were often sent on to other WAAC city branches, including Saint John, New Brunswick. This travelling itinerary exposed each artist to a wider public and enabled her to see the work of her peers. May Phillips was later to claim that in Montreal, the WAAC women had felt some resistance to having regular exhibitions of paintings: "We were never very keen on having large picture exhibitions, feeling that the Art Association [of Montreal] here and the Royal Canadian Academy meeting covered the need."5 They were aware that, in comparison, the WAAC painting exhibitions did not give women artists the same status, and worse, attracted the designation of "amateur." This happened as early as May 1896 at the NCWC's Sectional Art Conference. After inspecting the WAAC pictures, AAM president George Drummond, a collector of European art, made disparaging comparisons between professional and amateur work.6 In this instance, Mary Dignam valiantly defended the WAAC artists, citing their American and European training and exhibition records. Yet, it was obvious that women were regarded less seriously as artists when their work was shown in segregated exhibits. This bias never applied to men. The WAAC also held annual ceramic exhibitions of hand-painted china (on purchased undecorated ware), with exhibit exchanges among city branches. A very fashionable art form, hand-painted china sold well at these exhibits. Montreal's first picture and china exhibition in December 1894 was visited by four hundred people, including Lady Aberdeen. In 1895, the WAAC in Toronto, London, and Montreal held

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

combined applied-art exhibitions of ceramics, design, and woodcarving. Subsequently, Mary Dignam organized a unique ceramics project. In 1897, in commemoration of the John Cabot "discovery" of Canada and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the WAAC sponsored the creation of an historical state dinner service for Government House to be purchased by the government. The result was seventeen dozen pieces, handpainted with Canadian historical landscapes, flora, fruit, fish, or fauna and individually signed by artists from Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia. When the Laurier Government did not buy it, the dinner service, valued at $ 1OOO,7 was purchased by private subscription by Members of the Senate and House of Commons, and presented as the goodbye gift for Lady Aberdeen.8 During 1897, the WAAC exhibited selections from the set at its exhibitions in various cities, including in Montreal.9 Interest was very strong in Montreal in 1898, when the WAAC ceramic exhibition at the AAM Gallery garnered far more sales than the parallel exhibit in Toronto.10 Two years later, after the Ontario Society of Artists' arts and crafts exhibit in Toronto in May 1900, the WAAC also solicited works of applied design and asked manufacturers to offer prizes for its upcoming fall exhibitions in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.11 The WAAC Montreal women took the initiative further by producing competition pamphlets for poster designs, portieres, friezes, vases, carving, and wallpaper design.12 Even as a book of samples of members' work was being prepared for advertisers, the WAAC Montreal women had begun reading and assembling British and American literature pertinent to handicrafts.13 They became captivated by the possibilities of encouraging home arts as well. While advocating education for women in the applied arts through the MLCW, and soliciting good design work for their WAAC exhibitions, Alice Peck and May Phillips became equally committed to reviving the rural home arts. As Montreal women who summered on the lower St. Lawrence, they were accustomed to seeing handwork they admired in the many small villages nearby. But they realized that rural women, who preferred the convenience of ready-made goods from general stores and Eaton's catalogue,14 were putting away looms and spinning wheels. They thought fair payment might revive the handicrafts tradition with these women, many of whom were poverty stricken. If the Montrealers could provide an outlet for sales, perhaps they could preserve the handwork and, at the same time, foster social well-being. They concluded that all the arts and crafts in Canada needed encouragement.

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HANDICRAFTS COMMITTEE

This realization spurred Alice Peck and May Phillips to form a new Home Arts and Handicrafts Committee within the WAAC Montreal Branch. The committee began meeting every Saturday morning planning its strategy in the Alexander Rooms studio on St. Catherine Street. In naming their committee, the Montreal women deliberately chose the then-popular term "handicrafts." It emphasized the attention to handcraftedness and, as an accepted Morrisian term,15 its connotations were artistic. It was also comprehensive enough to include home arts, particularly by women, and the applied arts and all the hand craft traditions in Canada or newly brought to Canadian shores. Peck and Phillips intended to promote good design work and give moral and material support to craftspeople who deserved recognition for their art. They planned to seek out craftspeople among professional artists, artisans, and those working with their hands for pleasure or necessity, often part-time, for extra income. They would solicit work from studios or individual artists who did applied arts such as bookbinding, ceramics, painted china, jewellery, stained glass, textiles, metalwork, woodwork, graphic design, and decorative murals. They would also invite artisans trained in applied design who were working for architects, jewellers, commercial printers, or manufacturers of wallpaper and household furnishings. However, the women were equally interested in the arts and crafts produced anonymously: domestic arts of spinning, weaving, dyeing, sewing, embroidery, lace making, knitting, quilting, rug making, potting, and carving. Although these handicrafts were shown in agricultural fairs, they had not usually been featured as art. The same was true of traditional folk crafts made by Canada's newest immigrants. Indian basketry, embroidery, and work in leather, fur, beads and quills, bark and wood, moose hair, bone, horn, shell, ivory, stone, and metal had been collected but not exhibited as art. The Montreal women accepted the inherent value of all categories of craft. They gave significance to the crafts associated with women, immigrants, and Indians, which had often had a lower status. They regarded most highly those designed and created by one person or one family. Often, these crafts might be made from local or handmade materials, using individualized recipes or techniques. Yet, because the Montreal women valued both the design and the execution,16 they also esteemed crafts created from the designs of others. Whichever model,

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they believed the hands and minds of the creators lived in these crafts. In one of her speeches, May Phillips described handicrafts as "thoughts wrought into form by the skilled hand." She elaborated: "And what a wonderful medium for the transmission of thoughts or feeling is the hand, so responsive, so at one with the brain that the character of the individual is stamped involuntarily upon all his handiwork."17 All original crafts had authenticity, and Peck and Phillips believed they should encourage them as part of the country's artistic heritage. WAAC MONTREAL BRANCH'S 1900 EXHIBITION

The Montreal women's ambitions for Canadian handicrafts began to take shape in 1900. The WAAC Montreal Branch had already agreed to mount an exhibition including applied arts for the fall. They decided it should also include home arts and handicrafts. The Montreal women wanted to make this a major exhibition to attract significant interest, but they had no funds to finance it. A really large Montreal exhibition seemed impossible until a chance summer meeting occurred with James Morgan of Morgan's Department Store. Since he planned to open a new fifth floor art gallery, he offered its premises for the WAAC exhibition. His proposal was not totally altruistic since as an inaugural event the exhibition would generate positive publicity for his store. Nevertheless, the offer was eagerly accepted by the women, who began preparations right away. The exhibition, planned for October 22, 1900, would be the first of its kind in Montreal. Lord Strathcona, Principal Peterson of McGill, and Canon Racicot of Laval officially opened the exhibition in Morgan's Colonial House Art Galleries. Morgan's wife, Anna, wrote about it to their son, Cleveland: There is an exhibition now going on of the "Ladies' Association of Arts and Handicrafts" [sic], Dad having loaned the large new Art Gallery of the Colonial House to them for it. This afternoon Lady Minto was there and Dad gave her and about twenty other ladies tea in the new Dining Room.... They say there was a great crowd last evening & likely to be tonight.18

During the interval before October, the Handicrafts Committee organizers had procured loans for exhibits from their own members and from many prominent Montrealers. The exhibition included English, French, and Irish decorative arts as well as examples of carving, metalwork, pottery, ceramics, weaving, laces and embroideries, basketry,

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fans, miniatures, bookbinding, leatherwork, illustration, and designs for industry made in Canada. The impressive list of donors and items,19 including some from the WAAC in Toronto, is striking for what it reveals about the Montreal WAAC women's ability to attract support. Lace was loaned by AAM officers, the Hon. George A. Drummond and David Allan Poe Watt, as well as Sir William Van Home along with Mrs. Hugh Allan, Mrs. Fitz-Gibbon of Toronto, Lady Hingston, Mrs. WD. Lighthall, and Miss Edith I. Watt. The lenders of wood and metalwork on exhibit included Mrs. Hugh Allan, metalsmith artist Paul Beau, Mrs. A.D. Durnford, the Hon. G.A. Drummond, Miss Lighthall, David Ross McCord, W. Markland Molson, Dr. Grace Ritchie England, and D.A.P. Watt. China exhibit donors included Mrs. Ames, Prof. J.G. Adani, Miss E. Watt, Miss Jane L. Bertram of Toronto, Paul Beau, H. Birks & Sons, the Learmont family, David Ross McCord, and W. Markland Molson. Bookbinding and leatherwork attracted donors such as the Hon. G.A. Drummond, Mrs. W.D. Lighthall and artist Miss L.B. Tully of Toronto. American arts and crafts were represented by a hand-made Roycroft book. Fans, miniatures, and old jewellery were loaned by others including Mrs. Andrew Allan, Mr. G.B. Burland, Dr. Ritchie England, Lady Hingston, Mrs. Lighthall, and Mrs. Murray Ogilvy. Photographers Notman & Son loaned examples of design and illustration, as did artist William Brymner. Basketwork was loaned by the Lorette Indians, Mrs. Robert Savage, Sir William Van Home, and by Mrs. W.M. Molson, who displayed two hundred baskets from her collection.20 Several convents such as the Congregation of Notre Dame, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Sisters of Jesus Mary loaned samples of lace. The Women's Institute from London, England also sent sale items of lace and needlework, as did the Industrial Committee for the Doukhobor women in western Canada. The loaned applied arts and crafts, often historical, made up well over 50 percent of the exhibition. The rest of the exhibition consisted of contemporary handicrafts and home arts, which the Montreal women wanted to promote and sell. Their genuine interest in the aesthetic value was offset in their advance publicity by an emphasis on the benevolent motives. The notice somewhat patronizingly stated that they hoped to improve the lot of isolated women, to relieve their monotony and bring them in touch with a wider world.21 While it exemplifies the noblesse oblige attitude inherent in the class difference betweeen the privileged Montreal organizers and their rural contributors, the philanthropic purpose

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made the women's role in organizing a large art exhibition more acceptable.22 The Montreal WAAC was motivated even more by the artistic benefits. They particularly wanted to include Indian arts and crafts to illustrate their artistry. Indian objects had been collected by other organizations such as the Antiquarian and Numismatic Society, the Canadian Geological Survey, the Natural History Society of Montreal (founded 1827), and by individuals like David Ross McCord, but they had not been presented in an art exhibition with other decorative arts and crafts. Alice Peck wrote pioneer ethnologist George Mercer Dawson, director of the Geological Survey, asking to borrow examples of Indian crafts from the Survey's collection for the exhibition. Although Dawson declined an official loan, probably because neither the venue nor the organization was considered suitable, he sent from his own collection "one very good specimen of Thompson River basketwork," and an 1878 glass transparency of the carved totem poles on Queen Charlotte Islands.23 Many other examples of Indian work were shown, including Vera Molson's immense basket collection. In the case of Indian crafts, there were few contemporary contributors, but Peck and Phillips, again with some noblesse oblige, invited women from Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) to see the exhibit of loaned basket work. Hoping to inspire a revival of the best Indian crafts, the Montrealers must have been gratified to report the Caughnawaga women's reaction. They "evinced great pleasure in examining specimens of basket work made by their ancestors, acknowledging at the same time the inferiority of their work at the present time."24 In the WAAC Annual Report of 1901, the Montreal women drew attention to their leadership in targeting Indian work as well as rural arts and crafts. The WAAC Montreal Branch claimed its 1900 exhibition had inaugurated the good work of "improving the arts and handicrafts of our Indians and the residents of country districts," which it "behoves [sic] our branches to carry forward."25 Montreal gave notice that it placed these handicrafts high on the WAAC agenda. The Montreal exhibition attracted eight thousand visitors, a large number considering the city's population was about two hundred and fifty thousand. It was also a financial success. The accounts were a complicated affair, but when the exhibition closed, the WAAC women were able to send out $900 to the contemporary craftspeople, pay the expenses ($588) and retain a $777 credit with the bank.26 The organizers saw that the exhibition aroused an appreciation for artistic

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handwork, including the modern weaving by Quebec women, shown here for the first time.27 Newspapers also mentioned the ceinture flechee, quilts by Tadoussac women, and the "national work of Doukhobors," but most press coverage was social, focusing on the prominent lenders and the valuable loaned items,28 rather than the artistic and educational purpose behind the exhibition. To be taken more seriously, in 1901, Alice Peck wrote a "Scheme for the Promotion of Home Arts and Handicrafts." A seminal, if idealistic, statement of the goals of the future Canadian Handicrafts Guild, it praised the revival of interest in handicrafts which would result in higher "standards of taste" and increased employment. Although not saying how it would do so, Peck's promotion scheme recommended training workers to use "good design, good material and good workmanship" in home arts. It then went on to name the crafts of "Spinning, Weaving, Dyeing, Carving on Metal, Bone and Wood; ... fine Needle-work, Pillow Lace, Hand-wrought Furniture, Pottery [and] the various Indian Industries."29 The Montreal women also sought help abroad for their fledgling handicrafts movement. May Phillips wrote the Home Arts and Industries Association in England for advice on reviving rural handicrafts.30 During that 1901 summer, individual WAAC members sought out talented craftspeople. Operations were set up in five districts to collect and sell local crafts, including porcupine quillwork in Muskoka, and woven textiles in the lower St. Lawrence and Gaspe regions.31 Alice Peck and a volunteer committee held a pioneering exhibition of handicrafts at Metis Beach in 1901. After making contacts with many men and women doing such craftwork in their homes, the WAAC Handicrafts Committee planned to hold another Montreal exhibition the next year. The Handicrafts Committee women were conscious of how their own role would be perceived. Publicity around their artistic agenda was usually associated with references to how society would benefit. When they solicited craftwork for their next Montreal exhibit, their publicity stressed the potential philanthropic and national dividend. The Montreal Herald noted that "parish priests, reeves, councillors, mayors and leading members of each locality" were canvassed to attract the best home industries and handicrafts for the "benefit of citizens and the promotion of this patriotic enterprise."32

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

DOUKHOBOR PROJECT The Montreal women's philanthropic and patriotic interest in handicrafts was genuine; already it had acquired a national dimension through the NCWCs Doukhobor project. Almost immediately, their WAAC Handicrafts Committee began working with the NCWC to help Doukhobor refugee women in western Canada. The plight of the Doukhobors, a pacifist Russian religious sect, became a cause celebre in elite circles. Many Doukhobors, including their leader, Peter Verigin, Jr., had been exiled to Siberia. In 1896, Leo Tolstoy took up the Doukhobor cause, issuing an international appeal on their behalf. Subsequently, University of Toronto political economist, James Mavor, made arrangements with the Canadian government to bring seventy-five hundred Doukhobors to Canada in 1899-1900.33 When these Doukhobor refugees, most of whom were women and children, settled on the Canadian Prairies, the NCWC got involved. One Toronto NCWC member, Mrs. May Fitz-Gibbon,34 visited 26 Doukhobor villages in Manitoba in the autumn of 1899. Reporting back to the NCWC on their situation, she recommended that the NCWC provide markets to sell the handwork of the Doukhobor women. Mrs. Fitz-Gibbon spoke at meetings in Toronto and Montreal where she exhibited Doukhobor needlework, after which the WAAC and the MLCW gamely endorsed an NCWC capital loan fund of $1000 to promote Doukhobor village industries. Montreal agreed to raise $300 and give 12 looms, while Toronto would donate 50 spinning wheels, in addition to giving money for woodcarving and silver stamping tools.35 The new NCWC president, Lady Taylor, launched another practical plan in March 1900. She invited the NCWC local city councils to support a petition to Queen Victoria requesting that she ask her granddaughter, Alix, the Czarina of Russia, to help the Doukhobor men to leave Siberia to join their families in Canada. Not all NCWC members supported this initiative, as one British Columbian woman admitted. We are a good deal exercised about the petition to the Queen re the Doukhobor men ... whether they are generally considered desirable colonists or not—what their religion is—whether temperate, industrious, amenable to law etc. There is very strong feeling here against the introduction of foreigners in such large numbers into Canada—a feeling which has made our efforts on behalf of the women almost of no avail.36

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Regardless, the Doukhobor men, including Verigin, arrived in Canada to settle in 1902. In the meantime, the NCWC had formed committees to help the Doukhobor women. In Montreal, Edith Watt became a member of the NCWC Standing Committee for Raising of a Loan for Doukhobor Women, while Mary Dignam joined the Industrial Committee for the Encouragement of Doukhobor Home Industries. The NCWC began selling Doukhobor work around the country with mixed success. Some local councils balked at continuing such sales: "there has already been Doukhobor work selling in Winnipeg this year, and especially as Christmas is so near, we had better not try to sell any just now."37 Charlottetown's response was similar. "We have already had two exhibits of art needlework within the last ten days and there is a large bazaar going on with fancy work displayed."38 However, in Montreal, sales yielded good money for the Doukhobor Fund. Edith Watt held a very successful "drawing room sale" in her Morris-decorated home at 285 Stanley Street.39 The daughter of David Allan Poe Watt,40 Edith grew up in a home furnished with gilt and lacquer hand-block-printed wallpapers, embroidered curtains, silk and wool woven tapestries, and commissioned stained glass panels, all imported from Britain and made by Morris and Co.41 One can imagine the scene in this Montreal drawing room in 1900. A lush William Morris interior dotted with tall fringed plants. Cherry bread and tea served in delicate china cups. A collection of Doukhobor weaving, linens, embroideries, and lace set out around the room. Ladies in grand hats and high-necked dresses milling about, selecting their choices of the Doukhobor ware while the hostess carefully recorded the receipts. The spring sale at Edith Watt's home produced $163. A further sum was apparently raised when more Doukhobor handicrafts were sold in October 1900 at the Montreal WAAC handicrafts exhibit at Morgan's Colonial Art Gallery. Edith Watt observed what had sold well in the Montreal sales, and passed on the information at the request of the NCWC. [A] 11 the towels sold well last year, those in reds & blues & greens better than the pale green & pink ones; then came the sideboard scarves on grass linen worked in cross stitch in reds & blues also in yellows & black. There were also some strips of grass linen worked in satin stitch & cross stitch that were much admired. They were in reds & blues & greens. After these came the all white work. I hope there are some sheets and pillowcases this year, &

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

last but not least if there is any lace do please send it. Everyone here has been wanting Russian laces. Please don't send any white linen embroidered in silks. We had a terrible time getting rid of what we had last year.42

The Montreal Local Council of Women received and sold successive instalments of Doukhobor crafts. Within a few months, the Doukhobor work effort had merged with the WAAC Montreal Branch's growing interest in developing all handicrafts. In 1901, May Phillips, as the MLCW's representative on the NCWC Doukhobor Committee, reported that the committee, which had originated as a Relief Committee, had practically become an Art Group, now chiefly concerned with the development of Doukhobor home industries. Then Phillips argued the importance of supporting not only decorative and applied arts by trained artists, but the home arts of immigrants. Much is being said nowadays about what we might become, from an artistic point of view, had we better schools of art, were we better trained, yet here, at our very doors, are people whose eyes and hands are fast losing their cunning, because there is no sale for their handwoven fabrics, because we prefer second class factory goods imported from Europe.4^

As art teacher and school principal, Phillips supported professional art training, but she emphasized the value of ancestral art skills also. Furthermore, Phillips linked the efforts at helping Doukhobor women with the very strategy that she and Peck were developing in the WAAC to promote traditional handicrafts of habitants, Indians, and new settlers in Canada. Could some scheme for the exhibition and sale of Home Arts and Industries be devised, the Doukhobor work would stand a better chance of having a steady market. The Women's Art Association [Montreal Branch], encouraged by their successful exhibition, are trying to meet this need, and also to devise a scheme for the encouragement of the existing Village industries among the habitants, rush mats, baskets and leather work among the Indians, and any European handicrafts which may exist among the emigrants yearly flocking to our shores.44

By 1902, due to the strong commitment to handicrafts shown by Montreal women, the NCWC national executive turned its Doukhobor Loan Fund over to the Montreal Local Council, anticipating that it

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would eventually be transferred to "a body ready to develop a national scheme for the encouragement of Home Arts and Industries."45 Approximately $1800 in goods and money was handed over in May 1902,46 a ringing endorsement of Peck and Phillips for their handicrafts project. In 1903, the MLCW's Report boasted that the Montreal WAAC women had successfully sold Doukhobor work at Murray Bay, Tadoussac, Metis, and in their Montreal depot. Subsequently, Doukhobor work was avidly sponsored also by the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. WILLIAM MORRIS AND DYES

The Montreal women's perspective on developing handicrafts in Canada owed a good deal to their knowledge and acceptance of axioms of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Adopting many of its tenets, they believed that everyday objects should be beautiful as well as useful;47 that reforms were needed in basic design and workmanship; that educating public taste would raise the artistic standard of the nation; and that everyone would be healthier and happier by working creatively with their hands. An obvious tangible link to Morris was the Montreal women's unflagging devotion to natural dyes. With their British preference for soft, harmonious colouring, they advocated replacing chemical (aniline) dyestuffs with the old-fashioned natural dyes. Until the early nineteenth century, colour for fabrics had been obtained through vegetable and insect dyes culled from nature. After the bright artificial dyes such as Prussian blue, cochineal pink, alizarin red, antimony orange, manganese bronze, and later mauve, were introduced, the market gradually became dominated by aniline dyes.48 By 1870, as access became easier and cheaper, the dyeing and fabric-printing industries relied almost exclusively on them. Recipes for natural dyes were abandoned and often lost. William Morris had earlier concluded that the aniline dyes were both aesthetically and technically inferior: chemical colours were harsher, more fugitive, and prone to bleed into one another. While researching the natural dyes used in historical textiles, Morris realized how the chemical dyes had ruined the art of dyeing, the ancient roots of which he profoundly respected. "Anyone wanting to produce dyed textiles with any artistic quality in them must entirely forego the modern and commercial methods in favour of those which are at least as old as Pliny, who speaks of them as being old in his time."49 True to form, Morris immersed himself in the art and learned how to achieve

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

the natural dyes he preferred.50 Like Morris, the Montreal women were convinced the extra effort needed for vegetable dyes was worthwhile, and they too personally experimented to perfect the quality of natural dyes. One of their first concerns in reviving handicrafts was to recover recipes for plant dyes. They recommended women learn again to formulate colours from the leaves, berries, roots, or barks of plants and trees as their grandmothers had. From their earliest exhibitions, the art of dyeing was given real weight. WAAC MONTREAL BRANCH EXHIBITION, 1902 The Montreal WAAC held their next major exhibition in March 1902, and restricted it to Canadian-made crafts. Though not as large as the 1900 exhibition, it showed a range of contemporary crafts, including Indian work and weaving by Canadian women. By 1902, Peck and Phillips had persuaded the daily press of their commitment. The Montreal Daily Witness explained that the exhibition was intended to promote the beautiful, serviceable and inexpensive products of Canadian handicrafts [over] the shoddy, meretricious, machine-made articles ... turned out of European factories by the millions, and imported here to vitiate the taste and vulgarize the homes of the masses of our people.51 Newspapers had been used to disseminate exhibition rules for admission of work: passing a judging committee before acceptance, a commission often cents on all sales, a minimum price submitted with each entry, and prepaid freight charges. The WAAC Montreal Branch would pay the return freight on unsold items. The conditions stated by the Handicrafts Committee were "that there be good design, skilled workmanship, neatness, utility and harmony of colour."52 Its publicity was phrased in the ideology of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, linking good design with a moral benefit to society and the maker's dignity. Alice Peck and May Phillips were probably unconscious of how this ideology had an inherent classbased contradiction: when an upper-class woman embroidered, it was her "taste" which brought moral benefit, whereas in a lower-class home, it was the craft which ennobled that home.53 Handwork skills, neatness, and harmony were common attributes associated with the feminine stereotype. Thus, Peck and Phillips put women's handicrafts in the

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The Art Association of Montreal (AAM) on Phillips Square, the first permanent art gallery in Canada, was the site of the 1902 exhibition of Canadian crafts by the WAAC Montreal Branch. Source: View 2543.1, Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal public sphere without threatening the established idea of femininity. Their program was designed to reach potential candidates without challenging the societal view that a woman's place was in the home. Ironically, their privileged position allowed them to have public leadership roles. Through their connections, Peck and Phillips arranged with the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) to hold their 1902 handicrafts exhibition in its art gallery on Phillips Square. Previously the AAM had shown loan exhibits of decorative arts (1881), photographs (1882), architectural drawings and modern industrial art influenced by William Morris (1896), and several WAAC ceramics exhibits.54 However, never before had Indian arts or women's textile handicrafts been featured in Montreal's art gallery. The WAAC Handicrafts Committee published a handsome exhibition catalogue illustrated with linocuts and artist sketches by committee members. Serving as a handicraft manifesto, it reprinted Alice Peck's "Scheme for the Promotion of Home Arts and Handicrafts," and May Phillips' speech on "Home Arts and Handicrafts" at the 1901

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

NCWC meeting in London, Ontario.55 Several pages of recipes for dyes were included: "Yellow, Blue, Black Indigo for cotton, for wool, Red Dye, Carmine, Amaranth Tint, Chestnut Brown, Cinnamon Brown, Brown for Silk, Brown for Wools, [and] Black Dye used by Navajo for blankets."56 Fervent references to beauty, pleasure, usefulness, happiness, health, and simplicity drew on links to the British Arts and Crafts Movement and distanced the Handicrafts Committee's goals from the decorative craze and imitative handwork often associated with amateur women's work. The Handicrafts Committee was keen to attract shopgirls and women factory workers to the exhibit. As the Montreal Star noted, the committee lowered the admission charges from 25 cents to 10 cents on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, for the express purpose of giving those employed during the day an opportunity of visiting the exhibition... [It] hoped that young women and girls who are interested in work that can be done at home, and be made remunerative, will take the opportunity of seeing the excellent examples of needle-work, lace, homespun, carving.57

Showing that social goals existed side by side with the artistic agenda, the Handicrafts Committee stated it hoped to "give women paying employment in their own homes—thus preventing emigration to the cities and large manufacturing centres in the States."58 OUR HANDICRAFT SHOP

After the exhibition, the Committee women carried out their longheld intention of opening a permanent sales depot for Canadian handicrafts. Running a shop challenged the expectations of a "lady" by encroaching on the male preserve of commerce, but the Montreal women knew it was necessary to make crafts economically viable. As soon as the Handicrafts Committee opened a separate account for shop transactions, it "hired" Edith Watt as the volunteer "shopkeeper" in charge. Watt was 15 years younger than Peck and Phillips, single, and upper class, with an appreciation of art and design and experience in selling crafts. Her home had been the NCWC depository for the Doukhobor crafts,59 and she had helped sell Doukhobor goods during the previous two years. Running the handicraft shop kept her so involved that it is not surprising she became a charter member of the new Canadian Handicrafts Guild in 1905.60

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After the success of the 1902 exhibition, the WAAC (Montreal Branch) Handicrafts Committee opened a depot for selling crafts in downtown Montreal. A young Miss Edith Watt was engaged as the volunteer "shopkeeper." Source: Courtesy of Amy Parker and Louise Chesley Our Handicraft Shop (OHS) opened on June 1, 1902 in the WAAC studio on Phillips Square near the AAM. As well as WAAC members' sketches, it sold wood carving, china painting, Canadian homespuns, Doukhobor embroidery, Indian bead work "meriting special notice," and "dainty grass baskets made by the Abenakis and Montagnais Indians." OHS calling cards advertised its stock of rural home industries, immigrant, and Indian handicrafts.61 As goods sold, stock had to be replenished. During the summer of 1902, the Montreal women purchased crafts near Baie des Chaleurs and Murray Bay. Through Alice Peck, several exhibits were held on the lower St. Lawrence. By fall, the OHS was a full-fledged base of operations where the Committee brought its advance stock of crafts to price, prepare, and display for sale. It was also from the shop that exhibitions were sent out to places like the Sherbrooke Townships Exhibition, the London Ontario Fair, and the NCWCs Toronto Local Council.

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

Early in January 1903, when the WAAC national president, Mary Dignam, was in Montreal, the Handicrafts Committee women showed her through the shop, explaining its operations and the need for a special fund to purchase stock. Dignam appeared favourably impressed, and after returning to Toronto, sent May Phillips a letter offering a loan of $200 from the WAAC Head Association.62 Pleased, the Montreal Branch agreed to pay interest on the loan from the second year. Only later, after the break, was Phillips motivated to point out that this $200 loan in 1903 had not been nearly as generous as it seemed: "Up to April the O.H.S. had forwarded nearly $550 worth of goods and had only partial returns in either cash or goods."63 EXPANSION

Coincidentally, the Handicrafts Committee was having a positive impact in Ontario. During the summer of 1903, exhibitions of French-Canadian handwoven goods held at Gananoque and at the Ontario Industrial Exhibition in Toronto so impressed farmers' wives that "they too determined to put together the old looms stored away and recall some of the weaves and designs of their mothers and grandmothers."64 This was precisely what the Montreal women proposed would revive early Canadian handicrafts. Arising from a similar motivation to promote applied arts, a concerned arts community in Ontario founded a new organization called the Society of Arts and Crafts of Canada in 1903. The Society was headed by Mabel Cawthra Adamson,65 who had recently returned to Canada from studying at Charles Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft in England at Chipping Camden.66 Although the vice-president was artist George Reid, more than half the members were women, including Alice Peck.67 The Society had artistic and educational goals: the encouragement of original design and its individual expression, to promote this object by holding Exhibitions of original Canadian work, the names of the designer and executant being always given; by occasional loan exhibits; by lectures; and by rendering the literature on the subject of handicraft accessible to those who are interested.68

Intended to fill a void of support for the applied arts in Canada, there were high hopes that this group would provide additional opportunities to exhibit and sell.

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Meanwhile, the Handicrafts Committee in Montreal began doing remarkable outreach work. Two exhibits which were sent to the Women's Institute and the New Bond Street Society of Artists in London helped make the Handicrafts Committee's work known in Britain. The Montreal newspapers were informed that Princess Louise, the Duchess of Argyll, had ordered suits of Canadian homespun for herself and her husband. At the same time the Handicrafts Committee was in touch with the Duchess of Sutherland about her work in Scottish Home Industries.69 In October 1903, May Phillips again hosted Mary Dignam who arrived from Toronto in time to hear Anna Leonowens speak on the 21st to the WAAC Montreal Branch about Siamese tapestry and metalwork. Dignam's principal reason for the visit to Montreal was to consult with the Handicrafts Committee about several future national and international exhibitions which she wanted to arrange.70 Increasingly, she counted on the Montreal Committee's exhibition program. Other than running the shop, the Handicrafts Committee's main preoccupation was preparing its many out-of-town exhibits. It was exhilarating work. In 1902 and 1903, they did exhibits for Tadoussac, Cacouna, Metis Beach, Sherbrooke, London, Gananoque, Desbarats, the Toronto Local Council of the NCWC, the Ontario Industrial Exhibition, and the WAAC exhibitions in Toronto, Ottawa, and Winnipeg. Sometimes an exhibit could do "double duty," by being seen in Montreal first. In 1903, a handicrafts exhibit being sent to the Women's Institute in England, was shown first in the Montreal Stars windows on St. James Street.71 All exhibits were prepared by the Handicrafts Committee of the WAAC Montreal Branch, but it was Mary Dignam of Toronto as WAAC president who took charge of many of their exhibit arrangements. Not surprisingly, this situation became a source of discord later. It was particularly grating over the exhibition at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. Mary Dignam enjoyed her role as negotiator of Canadian exhibits of handicrafts. She liked heading the WAAC handicrafts movement and claimed its precedence over the new Society of Arts and Crafts in Toronto.72 Yet, the Montreal women believed they were the real leaders of the handicrafts movement. Eventually, they felt forced to confront Mrs. Dignam in order to claim the authority to lead their own handicrafts enterprise in Montreal.

MONTREAL STAKES ITS CLAIM

NOTES 1. Mary M. Phillips, "The Story of the Montreal Women's Art Society," Jan. 2, 1917. Women's Art Society of Montreal Files (WASMF), Box 7. [McC] 2. Mrs. Ashley Carus-Wilson, Address reported in "The Montreal Branch of Women's Art Association Inaugural Meeting, June 6, 1894." [Cl 1 Dl 007 1894, CHGA] 3. M.A. Peck, "Report by Mrs. James Peck, Pres. Montreal Branch, W.A.A.C., 1894/5." WASMF, Box 6. [McC] 4. M. Williamson, Robert Harris, 1849-1919: An Unconventional Biography (Toronto and Montreal: McClelland & Stewart, 1970), 162. 5. Phillips, "The Story," 3. The RCA sponsored annual exhibitions held in various cities, coming to the AAM every few years. 6. NCWC, Yearbook, 1896, 548-50. [NLC] 7. "To His Excellency the Governor-General-in Council" (typewritten petition of 3 pages), WASMF, Box 8. [McC] 8. Arrangements were made through a meeting jointly held by Mary Dignam and Lady Edgar, wife of the Speaker, Sir James Edgar. Florence Deeks, Historical Sketch on the Women's Art Association of Canada (Toronto: Women's Art Association of Canada, 1912), 5. The historical dinner set went to Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, Scotland where it remains. However, in 1997-98, 100 years later, curator Marie Elwood arranged for a selection of the original handpainted china to be brought to Canada for an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization entitled "The Splendid Gift." (no catalogue) 9. Fourteen dozen of the set were shown in Montreal which included the work of artists: Misses Irvine, Logan, Galbraith, Watson, Judd, McClung, Whitney, A. Egan, Adams, U.A.H[arrison], Roberts, H.M. Proctor, and Kelly. IVth Annual Ceramic Exhibition, Woman's Art Association of Canada (Montreal Branch), Studio Masonic Temple, Dec. 11-18, 1897. WASMF, Box 8. [McC] Miss Couen and Miss J. Bertram's china was not exhibited here. See Marie Elwood, "The State Dinner Service of Canada, 1898," Material History Bulletin 3 (Spring 1977), 48. 10. WAAC, Annual Report, 1898, 21. The Financial Statement shows Toronto's ceramic sales were $20.55, while Montreal's were $130.65. 11. Mrs. Willoughby Cummings, ed., "Woman's Sphere," The Canadian Magazine 16, No. 1 (Nov. 1900): 83. 12. WAAC Montreal Branch, "Competition pamphlet for Design, 19001901," and "Competition open to all Members of the Association," 1901. WASMF, Box 8. [McC] In 1901, prizes were not only offered by individual donors, but by companies such as Bovril and the Montreal Wall Paper Company.

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13. In their files were found: the Bow Bell's Ladies Supplementing an 1897 Irish Homestead Special on "Some Irish Industries" which featured Lady Cadogan's 1897 Textile Exhibition in Dublin; Home Art, a new Chicago journal dealing with subjects of design, stitchery, and the dye process; and Handicraft, the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts publication. Home Art, ed. Adelaide Heron (Dec. 1897, Mar., Sept., Dec. 1898, and Feb. 1899) [Cll Dl 010 CHGA] and Handicraft 1, No. 2 (Sept. 1902) [Cll Dl 016 CHGA]. 14. The success of Eaton's catalogue, a consumer ordering business in existence since 1884, was helped by the proliferation of post offices in Canada and the completion of the CPR in 1885. By 1896, Eaton's catalogue was 400 pages, published twice a year. Beginning in 1899, francophone shoppers were encouraged to order in French, assured they would be replied to in their own language. Rod McQueen, "Death of a Dynasty," The [Ottawa] Citizens Weekly, October 11, 1998, D3-4. 15. See Morris's 1877 lecture "The Lesser Arts," Hopes and Fears For Art: Five Lectures by William Morris (London: Longmans, 1903), 1-37. 16. Today, for example, Inuit prints generally give credit to both the designer and the executant. If it is not the same person, the graphic artist and the printmaker artist each sign the print. 17. M.M. Phillips, "Address used on afternoon talks and on Western Trip 1910," 2. [Cll Dl 051 1910, CHGA] 18. Anna Lyman Morgan to F. Cleveland Morgan, Oct. 23, 1900. Quoted in Norma Morgan, "F. Cleveland Morgan and the Decorative Arts Collection in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts," unpublished M.A. thesis (Concordia University, 1985), 125. Cleveland Morgan would later become president of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in 1917. 19. The donors' names, which are listed in a handwritten exercise book, also included personal friends and relations of Alice Peck and May Phillips. "List of Exhibitors at the Arts and Handicrafts Ex. 1900." WASMF.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

[McC]

Elaine Holowach-Amiot, The Women's Art Society of Montreal: A Century of Commitment to the Arts (Montreal: McCord Museum, 1993), 6. "Arts and Crafts Exhibition Notice," 1900. [Cll Dl 013 1900, CHGA] Women's ability to perfect their roles as volunteers often depended on emphasizing their charitable aims. McCarthy, Women's Culture, 78. G.M. Dawson to Mrs. Peck, Sept. 28, 1900. [Cll Dl 014 1900, CHGA] The photograph of the totem poles at a Haida village at Skidegate Inlet was published in P. Robertson and A. Rodger, "Photography and the Geological Survey of Canada," The Archivist 19, No. 3 (1992): 13. WAAC, Annual Report, 1901, 37. WAAC, Annual Report, 1901, 37-38.

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS C L A I M

26. Peck, "Address to the Women's Art Society, Montreal," Apr. 10, 1928. [CHGA] 27. Phillips, "The Story," 5. 28. Unknown newspaper clipping, October 23, 1900; and "Interesting Show," Montreal Gazette, Oct. 23, 1900. [Cll Dl 014 1900, CHGA] 29. M.A. Peck, "Scheme for the Promotion of Home Arts and Handicrafts," WAAC Montreal Branch, 1901. [Cll Dl 013 1900, CHGA] The pamphlet was available also in French translation. 30. A. Dymes, Secretary, Home Arts and Industries Association, to M.M. Phillips, June 30, 1901. Phillips Papers, File #647, Deligny Armstrong Phillips Bentham. [McC] The documents sent by the Home Arts and Industries Association have not survived. 31. Mrs. James Peck, "Address to the Women's Art Society, Montreal," Apr. 10, 1928, 4. 32. Montreal Herald, Jan. 25, 1902. 33. D.K. Burnham, Unlike the Lilies: Doukhobor Textile Traditions in Canada (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1986), 1-4. Mavor was known as an authority on Russian economics. David Latham, " 'Stepping Stones to Socialism': The Political Dissidence of Phillips Thompson," in Latham, Scarlet Hunters, 177. 34. Mary Agnes (May) Fitz-Gibbon (1862-1933) was the daughter of R.B. Bernard and Agnes E. Lally, and a niece of Sir John A. Macdonald's wife, Baroness Macdonald of Earnscliffe. In 1882, she married Clare Valentine Fitz-Gibbon. After living abroad for 14 years, she returned to Canada in 1896 and became a journalist under the pen name "Lally Bernard." She wrote a book about her contact with the Doukhobors: The Canadian Doukhobor Settlements (Toronto: 1899). 35. MLCW, Annual Report, 1900, 8. [NAG]; Canadian Home Journal!, No. 1 (Jan. 1900): 15. 36. Miss S.L. Crease, Victoria, to Miss [Teresa F] Wilson, Mar. 19, 1900, NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAG] 37. A.E. Parker, Winnipeg, to Miss Wilson, Dec. 12, 1900, NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAG] 38. Mrs. Coulson (Minnie) Gardiner, Charlottetown, to Miss Wilson, Dec. 13, 1900, NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAG] 39. MLCW, Annual Report, May 1900, 9. Edith Watt's neighbours, Margaret Allan (289 Stanley) and Charlotte Allan (287 Stanley) assisted her in the Doukhobor sale. Edith I. Watt to Miss Wilson, rec'd Dec. 17, 1900, NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAG] 40. Edith's relationship to D.A.P. Watt was confirmed by her great-niece, Mrs. Amy Parker. [A. Parker to E. McLeod, Dec. 20, 1993.] The Parkers loaned objects originating in Watt's Montreal home (285 Stanley) to the exhibition, The Earthly Paradise, 1993. 41. Lochnan et al., Earthly Paradise. #D:2, #D:3, #E: 11, #E: 15, #F: 1, #F:4, #F:5, #F:22, and #F:24 (Watt items in exhibition).

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42. Edith I. Watt to Miss Wilson, received Dec. 17, 1900. NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAC] The NCWC presumably gave out guidelines on the preferred styles and colours to the Doukhobor women. 43. [May Phillips], "Raising of Loan for Doukhobor Women Committee," MLCW, Annual Report, 1901, 11. [NAC] 44. [May Phillips], "Raising of Loan for Doukhobor Women Committee," 11. [NAC] 45. MLCW, Annual Report, 1902, 12. Presumably this meant the Montreal WAAC's Home Arts and Handicrafts Committee. This concept foreshadows the future mandate of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. 46. NCWC, Yearbook, 1902, 77-82. Mrs. Fitz-Gibbon reports that the money is now handed over to the Home Arts and Handicrafts [WAAC Committee] in Montreal and that since the MLCW is closely connected with the Home Arts and Handicrafts, it is the legitimate resting place of this file (79). [NLC] See also "Abstract of Minutes of Executive meeting held in Montreal April 29, 1902." NCWC Papers, MG28 125, Vol. 106, file 1. [NAC] 47. One of William Morris's golden rules: "Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful," was stated in his 1880 lecture. See William Morris, "The Beauty of Life," in Hopes and Fears For Art, 110. 48. Linda Parry, William Morris Textiles (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 38. 49. Parry, Textiles, 39. 50. In 1873, when he was dissatisfied with the his "Tulip and Willow" chintz printed in Prussian blue rather than natural indigo, Morris experimented with his own dyeing techniques. By 1875, he was collaborating with Thomas Wardle at the Staffordshire dye-works. Christine Poulson, William Morris (Secausus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1989), 67; MacCarthy, William Morris, 348-56. 51. Montreal Daily Witness, March 5, 1902. 52. Montreal Gazette, Jan. 27, 1902. 53. Parker, Subversive, 179. 54. Morgan, "F. Cleveland Morgan and the Decorative Arts," 6, 10. Communication from Eric Vanasse, MMFA, to Ellen McLeod, Sept. 12, 1994. 55. WAAC Montreal Branch, Exhibition of Home Arts (March 1902), 25, 27, and 31-37. [Cll Dl 017 1902, CHGA]; NCWC, Yearbook, 1901. 56. WAAC Montreal Branch, Exhibition of Home Arts (March 1902), 49-55. [Cll Dl 017 1902, CHGA] 57. Montreal Star, March 1902, n.d. [CHGA] 58. WAAC Montreal Branch, "Home Arts and Handicrafts Committee," 1902. [Cll Dl 016 1902, CHGA]

M O N T R E A L STAKES ITS CLAIM

59. The address of the Doukhobor Industrial Committee was given as the Watt home at 285 Stanley in Montreal. "List of Exhibitors at the Arts and Handicrafts Ex. 1900," WASMF. [McC]; Edith I. "Watt to Miss [Theresa R] Wilson, received Dec. 17, 1900. NCWC Papers, MG28 125 Vol. 66, file 10. [NAC] 60. Years later in 1925, as the Chairman of the Handicraft Program in the Montreal Parks and Playground Association, Edith Watt continued to promote good craftwork. E. Laird Wilson, "The Montreal Parks and Playgrounds Association Inc.: A Historical Study from the Year of its Founding in 1896 to 1949," unpublished M.S.W. thesis (McGill University, 1953), 47-49. 61. Calling Card, "Our Handicraft Shop" [Cl 1 Dl 017 1902, CHGA]. The shop name later became pluralized to "Our Handicrafts Shop." 62. M. Phillips, "History of the Handicrafts Movement in Montreal etc." (1906), 8-9. WASMF, Box 6. [McC] 63. Phillips, "History," 10. In 1903 the OHS sent exhibits to WAAC in Toronto, Ottawa, and Winnipeg. 64. "Report of the Handicrafts Committee," WAAC, Annual Report, 1904, 30. 65. Pepall, "Under the Spell," 28. Mabel Cawthra Adamson (1871-1943) lived briefly in Ottawa in 1903-05 before moving to Toronto where she also founded the Heliconian Club for women. Sandra Gwyn, Tapestry of War (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), 82. 66. Mabel Adamson had spent time there in 1902-03. She probably concentrated on silversmithing, jewellery, and enamelling, but the Guild of Handicraft workshops were also known for their woodcarving and cabinetmaking. 67. Constitution and Bylaws of the Society of Arts and Crafts of Canada (1905), n.p. [CHGA] 68. Constitution and Bylaws of the Society of Arts and Crafts of Canada (1905), Article II., n.p. [CHGA] 69. Montreal Witness, Sept. 21, 1903. [CHGA] 70. Toronto Star, October 19, 1903. [CHGA] 71. Montreal Star, Oct. 29, 1903. [CHGA] 72. "I was much amused to find that Miss [Sidney Strickland Tully or Louise Beresford] Tully claims all the work done by the WAA & its Branches is the result of her suggestions and the new Arts and Crafts Movement. Well it is a recognition at least." M.E. Dignam to M.M. Phillips, Dec. 10, 1904. WASMF. [McC]

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BREAKAWAY: 1904-1907

MOUNTING TENSIONS BY THE END OF 1903, the WAAC Montreal Branch's Handicrafts Committee had been leading the Canadian handicrafts movement for several years. The 1903 Handicrafts Committee Report proclaimed Montreal as "Headquarters of this [handicrafts] movement," asserting its pre-eminence not only by virtue of its early interest but also its geographical "advantage of controlling the Province of Quebec where characteristic work may still be found to such an extent that [development] would not be difficult."1 However, members of the Handicrafts Committee were becoming increasingly concerned about the financial implications of sending out so many exhibits of stock before they were paid for. As a means of raising capital for a pool of credit, the women discussed specialty funds, a popular choice at the time for women's groups.2 Their attempt at soliciting Lady Minto, the Governor General's wife, failed; she regretfully declined because of other funds bearing her name. Still, the Handicrafts Committee decided it must publicly solicit funds to continue its work. Alice Peck and May Phillips knew their affairs should be conducted in a businesslike manner to receive the good "opinion of men who are accustomed to look at the economic value of any movement." As women, however, they understood the necessity of having start-up

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funds for "encouraging a home industry, limited by the conditions of home life, with its artistic advantages and commercial disadvantages."3 In a 1903 appeal to members, they requested capital for the shop "to buy for cash, to buy at the right season, to place orders large enough to make it worthwhile for the workers to follow directions, and to take the extra trouble in using vegetable instead of crude and fugitive aniline dyes."4 They made a second attempt at establishing a capital fund by writing the Strathconas in London, where Lord Strathcona had been Canadian High Commissioner since 1896. Alice Peck's personal friendship would have helped secure a favourable hearing.5 When Lord Strathcona's reply affirmed that Lady Strathcona would immediately give $500, and he would add another $500 after the public had raised $4000, the WAAC Montreal Branch launched the "Lady Strathcona Capital Fund."6 To inscribe the donors' names, May Phillips made a book bound with leather prepared by the Crees of Labrador. The Committee secured the co-operation of Montreal newspapers to list the donors. Women vied with prominent men to meet the Strathcona challenge by hosting fundraising teas, receptions, and other events.7 Almost half of the donors were women.8 The WAAC Montreal Branch soon received an enticing request to exhibit in the U.S. The NCWC had been invited by the federal government to send an exhibit to the 1904 World Exposition at St. Louis, and its executive in turn offered the $ 1200 grant money to Mary Dignam, national president of the WAAC in Toronto. Judging correctly that the Montreal Branch would be willing to send a handicrafts exhibit, Dignam wrote Alice Peck her instructions of what not to include and how to prepare the exhibit: ... Indian things. I would not advise much of that sort of thing. It is the Home Industries. The weaves and your dyes—specimens of yarns etc. that are of the greatest importance and greatest interest. The Indian Exhibit at "Arts & Crafts" [Society Exhibit] held no interest whatever—but the fabrics are marvelled at always.... Now as all those goods are not perishable I believe it better to hang them up securely than to spend hundreds of dollars in cases. You will draw on the Treasurer for amount needed—according to your judgement and that of Miss Phillips.9

Since the federal government would look after the expenses of freight as well as labour for unpacking, setting it up, and repacking,

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Montreal was to use the grant money to pre-purchase all the stock and pay for a custodian at St. Louis. Embarrassingly, a NCWC executive officer objected to the Montreal WAAC women receiving this government grant money. When NCWC treasurer, Adelaide Hoodless of Hamilton, complained that the Montrealers' handicrafts exhibit would be "unsuitable" for an international exposition, Alice Peck vehemently protested to Exhibition Commissioner, the Hon. Sydney Fisher: She probably thinks of such an exhibit as she has seen at the Hamilton Branch of the WAAC where a heterogenious [sic] collection of art material was on view.... [W]hat we have ready to send is quite different, being more commercial while at the same time it is thoroughly artistic.... We can now place on view an exhibit of handsome hand-woven fabrics of which no Gov. would feel ashamed and which has been a surprise everywhere that we have already exhibited.... We have worked hard since we had word of the Grant of $1200.00.... We have engaged the services of a lady to take charge of our exhibit and we have purchased and ordered a quantity of goods, now daily coming in, and which will seriously overstock our Handicrafts Shop should the Grant be withdrawn, which I sincerely hope you will not contemplate doing.... Canadian cottage talent must be conservedand will be of inestimable benefit to the Dominion before long.10 The Handicrafts Committee prevailed, and the Montreal grant was not withdrawn, although Dignam and the WAAC headquarters in Toronto retained $200 of the grant. For the first time at an American world's fair, the Art Department at St. Louis was open to all the arts, including glass, pottery, metal, leather, wood, textiles, and bookbinding. However, Canada displayed only paintings in its section of the Art Department.l 1 Paintings by women were included, and indeed won several prizes,12 but the handicrafts sent by the WAAC Montreal women were instead exhibited in the general Canadian pavilion. Mildred Robertson and her mother accompanied the WAAC Montreal Branch's exhibition to St. Louis. The set up in the Canadian building went well, but despite the agreed arrangements, a misunderstanding occurred over whether sales were permitted. Alice Peck believed purchases were allowed, having previously discussed with the Exhibition Commissioner the WAAC Montreal Branch's willingness to pay duty on sales.13 The problem did not arise from American law, but

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Canadian crafts were exhibited in the Canadian Pavilion, not the Art Building, at the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904. Hundreds of people signed the guest book at the WAAC Montreal Branch crafts exhibit. Source: Gil Dl 023 1904, CHGA Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec perhaps because the handicrafts exhibit was assigned to the Canadian building, "the only state or foreign building on the Grounds which is accessible at all times and where visitors cannot spend a cent of money."14 Canadians enjoyed long opening hours on the understanding that they could not make money there. Despite the scores of people who visited the WAAC handicrafts exhibit and recorded their names on 186 pages of signatures,15 the commercial realities of the Montreal handicrafts enterprise had been neglected. It is not clear if sales were allowed in the Art Department building either. What mattered in light of later developments was that the Montreal Handicrafts Committee believed that Mary Dignam had mishandled the arrangements with the Canadian Exhibition Commissioner. Peck had written her, complaining of the restrictions: "It appears that not only are sales of goods on the spot not allowed, but that your representatives must not take orders for the goods to deliver them at the close of the exhibition, or supply goods from Canada the same as the goods shown, as suggested."16 Dignam, who was travelling to Berlin for

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the International Congress of Women, could not be reached. Forced to take the responsible decision alone, Peck gave instructions that no sales or orders be allowed.17 She did so, but "under protest," hoping later to get the restrictions removed; otherwise "instead of benefitting, [the Shop] will be at a considerable loss,"18 later calculated at $110.19 Meanwhile at home, the Montreal women had continued to mount other exhibitions. In 1904, Montreal sent out exhibitions to Halifax, Winnipeg, Toronto, Peterborough, Brockville, the Eastern Townships, and New Glasgow, as well as to Berlin and St. Louis. By the end of 1904, they had sent out over 30 exhibitions in Canada. While extremely interesting, the work was becoming more arduous, time consuming, and expensive. High freight expenses and occasional losses from misplaced or ruined articles made it impossible to cover the overhead costs.20 Attempting to operate in a businesslike manner, the Montreal group became frustrated at the lack of accountability by Dignam and the WAAC headquarters, which received and kept goods for too long without paying for them. One senses in the correspondence a measure of irritation on both sides. On April 5, 1904, May Phillips wrote Mary Dignam requesting again that headquarters in Toronto pay its outstanding bills and return the unsold goods to Montreal. After a further prod on April 8th, Dignam answered the request thus: The reason of delay in money was not because we couldn't pay but sales were very slow. I have done all the selling at odd times. People have to be told how to use the things. They are all packed now and Miss Lindsay is settling up the matters and will pay up at once. Re the Argyll bill [purchase in England by Princess Louise]. It was never sent to us, till a few weeks ago and we had no idea that it had not gone at the time the goods went. We will however assume the liability and pay Montreal.... Your telegram just came—will send off things first of week all unsold things—.21

Yet there were more delays. When Toronto had still not paid its debt of $520.88, the Montreal women took the aggressive step of placing the matter into an auditor's hands.22 Mary Dignam seemed aware of how the WAAC headquarters was resented by the Montreal Handicrafts Committee, and she argued for recognition. I hope you will not fail to show your Committee how much we have done from Toronto to exploit the work and give it prestige. We have sent you

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many customers direct from all parts of Canada east and west. Anyone who is going to Montreal we always tell them it is better to go to the Shop there. They will have a better choice. $200 has been spent here by the Head Ass'n on advertising and in expenses in connection with the work and our constant work of the last year & a half I should not like your Montreal Committee to undervalue—as I fear they do because they perhaps do not realize all that we have done here. 4 ex's here—2 in Winnipeg, 1 in Ottawa, 1 in London, Eng. Important sales to Royalties & prominent people—and a very large number of important people interested besides constant personal effort. This is but a slight sketch of our efforts to give publicity to the work which you have so splendidly started and which must have prestige to succeed—I think I must have sold over $1000.00 myself.23 To counteract the Head Association's presumption of initiative, the WAAC Montreal Branch stepped up its own publicity campaign. Alice Peck published an article in The Argus describing Our Handicraft Shop, its staff of women volunteers, its paid female shop manager, and its diverse stock of Scotch and French handwoven goods, Indian straw, quill and bead work, Irish lace from New Brunswick, and Doukhobor, Galician, Welsh, and Swedish arts from western Canada.24 In Winnipeg, at the September 1904 NCWC annual meeting, Alice Peck had been invited to speak on "The Canadian Handicraft Movement." Her enthusiasm revealed her commitment, and the description of her experiments with vegetable dyes demonstrated how personally involved she was in the "how to" of everything: Two members of the Montreal branch have spent much time experimenting, and I may say that we have now a really lovely range of colors, all culled from herbs, trees, flowers, roots, etc, which are practically unfadeable. Some time ago I had a piece of catalogne made in stripes, four of which were vegetable, the fifth aniline dye. This I hung up against a sunny window in my country house [Metis], where I left it for nine months. On my return the four vegetable colors were changed so little that I had to examine closely to discover the change at all. The aniline was completely faded. The country women, finding that goods dyed from our recipes sell much more rapidly than those for which aniline dye is used, are taking up the old dyes ... keenly, and are begging us to provide them with recipes, many of which their grandmothers used. The delightful part of vegetable dyes is that no two women get exactly the same results. We are constantly getting pleasant surprises in this way, and each bale of goods that is opened

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may prove to be the welcome bearer of some delicate new shade or variety of color. The variety is one of the advantages to hand-made goods. I hope that the Winnipeg branch may find some member who will experiment on prairie plants for dyes, of which I feel sure many could be found. Only let me warn such a member not to arrive at the dinner table with blue hands. They cause comment.2^ As a WAAC representative, Peck gave due credit to the WAAC national president, Mrs. Dignam, but she spent much of her talk explaining how Montreal had furthered the handicrafts movement. She described the rural Quebec handicrafts, the Doukhobor project, Indian arts, the 1900 and 1902 exhibitions, Our Handicraft Shop, the county fairs, and the St. Louis World's Fair. She claimed economic benefits to the craftspeople and the nation, and ended by requesting contributions to the Lady Strathcona Fund.26 In hindsight this speech might be seen as "propaganda," but Peck probably had no challengers present. Mary Dignam did not attend the Winnipeg meeting and her paper, "Value of Organization," which was later published in the 1904 NCWC Yearbook,27 did not reach Winnipeg in time to be read from the podium. Throughout 1904 tensions had escalated. Differences over financial obligations and control persisted between the WAAC headquarters in Toronto and Montreal's Handicrafts Committee, driving the Montreal women to seek advice from trusted men. On November 24, 1904, Alice Peck and May Phillips met privately with Chief Justice Sir Melbourne Tait,28 William Douw Lighthall,29 and May's brother Edward (a notary), to discuss how to manage their dual financial responsibilities to the WAAC and the Montreal Branch "in order to carry on the Shop in a businesslike way and to safe-guard our philanthropic efforts."30 On November 29th, the WAAC Montreal Branch executive and the Handicrafts Committee held a special evening meeting with William Lighthall and Edward Phillips to prepare for an encounter with Mrs. Dignam. In rough notes kept from this series of meetings, we learn that Lighthall suggested making the OHS into a separate corporation, and that the WAAC Charter, which was a Province of Ontario incorporation in 1892, was quite incomplete.31 MONTREAL VERSUS TORONTO

On December 1, 1904, Mary Dignam met in Montreal with the Handicrafts Committee who called on the authority of William

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Lighthall and Chief Justice Tait to explain the limitations of the current WAAC charter. Mr. L. said [the] present charter did not provide for the work carried on at OHS which tho' it is a philanthropic work has dealing of a commercial nature. Sir M. Tait said he thought the foundations of a considerable enterprise had been laid as we were fast nearing the $10,000 mark ... that we were doing a regular business but not for dividends or profits spent for individual members. The profits were not sufficient to carry on the business and that Toronto should know what obligations the Shop was incurring.32 The Handicrafts Committee's commercial focus was not accommodated under the present arrangement with the WAAC. Business relations with employees, hundreds of craftspeople, business firms, and government exhibition committees left Montreal members, and indeed the whole WAAC, open to potential litigation. In putting these issues before the WAAC president, the Montreal group signalled its intention to secure a separate corporate existence to carry on with its handicrafts work.33 Placed on the defensive, Mary Dignam asserted that Toronto as WAAC headquarters was the legitimate national leader of handicrafts. It had been the moving power in developing and encouraging the Home Art Industries throughout Canada, a) by exhibitions on which they always lost money; b) by Mrs. Dignam's great personal effort at home and abroad [given the] great difficulty in inducing people to buy; c) by [Mrs. Dignam's] writing and lecturing; [and] d) by making all arrangements for exhibitions.34 Systematically responding to Dignam's assertions, the Montreal women noted that the stock for all ten WAAC exhibitions had been collected and paid for in advance by the Montreal Branch. Moreover, the Montreal Branch had supplied 37 additional exhibitions without the help of the WAAC in Toronto. And while accepting that Mrs. Dignam had done a share of the work, they claimed that Montreal, unlike Toronto, had no difficulty in selling handicrafts. Presidents Peck and Phillips had each carried on international correspondence (with Britain and the U.S.), presented papers nationally, and published articles.

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They had also been working with the Department of Agriculture and the Indian Affairs Branch in Ottawa, getting in touch with craftspeople from coast to coast. And finally, some of Dignam's exhibition arrangements had been unsatisfactory. Montreal still complained of never having received from the Toronto WAAC the last $200 of the grant for their expenses at the St. Louis Fair. The sum of $200 in 1904 would probably have been worth over $3000 in today's dollars, a sizeable amount to forego.35 Montreal's exhibits at St. Louis and at the Women's Institute in London, both arranged by Dignam, had resulted in losses for the shop.36 In sum, the Committee resented Mrs. Dignam's control and what they called, the "interference, & power to interfere in work by those who know nothing of the conditions."37 Five days after the December 1st meeting, May Phillips wrote to the WAAC in Toronto38 reiterating the need for either an expanded charter recognizing Montreal as headquarters of the handicrafts movement,