As the founding president of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW), Madge Robertson Watt (1868–1948) turned imperialism on its head. During the First World War, Watt imported the “made-in-Canada” concept of Women’s Institutes – voluntary associations of rural women – to the British countryside. In the interwar years, she capitalized on the success of the Institutes to help create the ACWW, a global organization of rural women. A feminist imperialist and a liberal internationalist, Watt was central to the establishment of two organizations which remain active around the world today.

In A Great Rural Sisterhood, Linda M. Ambrose uses a wealth of archival materials from both sides of the Atlantic to tell the story of Watt’s remarkable life, from her early years as a Toronto journalist to her retirement and memorialization after the Second World War.

Linda M. Ambrose is a professor in the Department of History at Laurentian University.

Linda M. Ambrose's profile page

‘Ambrose has put together a rich and detailed portrait of Margaret "Madge" Robertson Watt that highlights her contributions to early twentieth-century rural and international women’s activism…She offers a fascinating portrait of what it meant to build an international movement of women.’

BC Studies issue number 195

"Ambrose’s study will command a broad audience; it is not only a valuable scholarly text about significant themes and topics in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it is also an accessible read that provides a complex portrait of a key figure in the history of women’s movements who had a vision of "a great rural sisterhood" and worked tirelessly to realize that vision."

The Canadian Historical Review Vol 99:2: June 2018