Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 20

Popular Culture Review

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their success in catering school lunches gave them the collective political confidence
to elect one of their own as an official to speak for them in the arena of municipal
politics.
At one level, minute book entries of an organisation like the Women’s
Institutes are tedious because of the repe titive way in which they record the meetings’
proceedings. What those entries cryptically disguise however, are the multiple social
meanings which members of women’s organisations attached to food in the first
half of this century. Careful analyses of the records reveal that while it was invariably
the ladies who provided the foods, those foods represented various meanings for
the ladies. Why were women forever lunching? Perhaps it was a simple social
gesture, but in many cases it was clearly their first step toward gaining access to
education, community activism, or political power.
Laurentian University

Linda M. Ambrose

Notes
1. This paper is based on material that was collected as part o f the project to research the

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centennial history book o f the Women’s Institutes in Ontario. Funding for that research
was provided by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council o f Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, the Federated
Women’s Institutes o f Ontario, and the Laurentian University Research Fund. Earlier
versions o f this paper were presented to the Ontario Historical Society in Ottawa, May
1996 and the Culinary Historians o f Ontario, April 1997.
‘‘Mainly for Women.” Sudbury Star June 8, 1942 p. 10.
Roszika Parker. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making o f the Feminine.
(N ew York: Routledge, 1984), p. vi.
Ibid., p. 215.
Ontario. Department o f Agriculture. Annual Report o f the Women's Institutes. 1918 p.
122. Hereafter cited as AR date. See also my article “The Women’s Institutes in Northern
Ontario, 1905-1930: Imitators or Innovators?” in Margaret Kechnie and Marge ReitsmaStreet (eds) Changing Lives: Women in Northern Ontario., (Toronto: Dundum Press,
1996) p. 354 note 5.
A R 1 9 1 2 p . 90.
Question Box, AR 1912. p. 42.
Mrs. A. Brown, Sr., Winterbourne, North Waterloo. AR 1911, p. 33.
AR 1907. Mrs.E. Richmond. “Lonely Women” p. 128.
Ambrose. “The Women’s Institutes o f Northern Ontario” pp. 270-74.
AR 1928,p. 39.
Terry Crowley. “The Origins o f Continuing Education for Women: The Ontario
Women’s Institutes.” Canadian Woman Studies 7,3 (Fall 1986): 78-81.
Author Correspondence with the Canfield WI, printed material enclosed with survey
response.