A Great Rural Sisterhood: Madge Robertson Watt and the ACWW

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.