The Women of
Frontier College

The history of women in Frontier College mirrors the history of women in the field of education in Canada. In itself, this is not surprising. What is surprising is that women played as innovative and exciting a leadership role in the early days of Frontier College as they do today.

A unique Canadian institution, Frontier College is often known more to the "outside" education community than to Canadians. The College is not a college in the traditional sense. It awards no degrees and has no campus other than a head office in Toronto. Its "classrooms" are wherever people meet from coast to coast in Canada. There are no fees or qualifying examinations required to become a student of Frontier College. The only prerequisites are a desire to learn and have contact with a college program or staff member.

The College's mandate is to work with people generally passed over by the education system. The central curriculum is literacy, which we interpret broadly to mean full participation in the day to day life of the country; that is, full citizenship. The central learning tool is called SCIL student centered individualized learning. Based on sound research and practice, our experience with SCIL shows that all people can learn. Indeed, given the proper environments and learning conditions, those once labelled as unable, are capable of great things. In operation since 1899, Frontier College changed over the years, but it has always stayed within the philosophy outlined by the founder, Alfred Fitzpatrick. He believed fervently that we should take education to the people and never force people to accommodate themselves to formal institutional education structures. Today "taking education to the people" means working on the streets, in prisons, in hospitals and other institutions as well as in the factories and homes that provided the College's early classrooms.

"Go North, young woman," Alfred Fitzpatrick urged in his book The University in Overalls. He believed, even then, that women should also work in the settlements and camps of the Canadian frontier.

As early as 1902, women went into the reading rooms as instructors. By 1903, ten camp schools and fourteen Reading Camps were in existence; some used portable canvas tents, others, permanent log structures. Reading Camp instructors taught the workers in the evening. The concept of the labourer teacher was born in the winter of 1902-03 when a bored instructor near Nairn Center, Ontario decided that rather than wait for the labourers to finish their work and come to the camp in the evening, he would work alongside the workers as a labourer during the day and a teacher at night. The Reading Camp Association thus established a basic tenet of adult education - the Labourer Teacher was to be an active participant in the camp and be a part of the life of the student. In 1920, women worked in fish plants and mills as labourer teachers.

In 1929, the courageous Dr. Margaret Strang worked as a teacher, visitor and social influence among families in the Cochrane district of Ontario. An itinerant doctor, she visited settlements on horseback any hour of the day or night .

Some of the other women Frontier workers of the 1920s included Miriam Chisholme, a mill worker in Bear River, Nova Scotia; Isabel MacKey Kelly [see interview on p. 24], an education worker from Toronto who went to Stalwart, Saskatchewan; and Marjorie Wickwire, another mill worker, who made clothes pins and taught in Bear River with Miriam Chisholme. Jessie Lucas retired from Frontier College in 1963 after over four decades of dedication and hard work as the registrar and as the secretary/treasurer.