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In honor of International Women's Day, McGill-Queen's University Press salutes Margaret Scott: "The Angel of Poverty Row."
On 28 July 1856, Margaret Ruttan Boucher (1856-1931) was born into a wealthy family in the town of Colbourne, Ontario. At the age of twenty-two, she met and married William Hepburn Scott, a lawyer and member of the Ontario Legislature, and settled into a predictable and respectable life as a middle-class wife. However, after the untimely death of her husband in 1881, Margaret Scott's life would adopt a radically different course, earning her the moniker "the angel of poverty row." Widowed and in need of employment to support herself, Scott obtained a clerical position with Midland Railways in Peterborough, Ontario. Five years later, in 1886, she took up employment with the Dominion Land Office in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she met the Reverend C.C. Owen of Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Arriving only six years after the incorporation of Manitoba as a province, Scott was struck by the plight of the immigrant poor in Winnipeg's North End and volunteered her services for Reverend Owen's relief work. By 1898, she had given up her position in the Land Commissioner's Office to devote all her time to the work of the Winnipeg Lodging and Coffee House, a hostel for the destitute and transient.
While district nursing had been undertaken in the city of Winnipeg by the Winnipeg General Hospital in 1895, the hospital was unable to incur the continued expense of such a far-reaching program, and by 1901 it had ceased sponsoring district nursing. Through her missionary work with women prisoners, Scott became aware of the plight of sick women who could not afford medical attendance. Without any nursing training and in response to the closure of the Winnipeg General nursing program, she began to care for bedridden women in their homes. Hearing of her endeavors, Ernest Taylor, a local businessman and close associate of Owen's, agreed to pay the salary of a trained nurse for three months. Upon Taylor's death in 1903, the city assumed the full cost of Scott's trained assistant.
In 1904 a group of middle-class reformers, spurred by Scott's charity work, met to organize the Margaret Scott Nursing Mission. After hiring a full-time nurse and securing quarters in the city's immigrant district, Scott moved into the mission house where she would begin her life's work managing one of the most comprehensive home-nursing programs in western Canada. The mission became such an established part of the health-care community that, by 1912, its regular staff had increased to eight trained nurses and it was providing training to both nurses and physicians from the Winnipeg General Hospital.
In addition to nursing attendance, Margaret Scott nurses provided relief supplies, hygiene instruction, and whatever assistance was needed in the homes of their patients, including child care and cooking. Under Scott's direction, the programs initiated by the mission closely paralleled those of well-known social work organizations such as Hull House. Many of the mission's initiatives, such as the child hygiene department and the Little Nurses' League, were adopted and, ultimately, taken over by civic departments. By the time of its incorporation into the Victorian Order of Nurses in 1942 the Margaret Scott Nursing Mission had operated for thirty-seven years, establishing some of the most valuable social welfare programs in the community and contributing to the development of health-care delivery in one of Canada's largest cities.
Excerpted from Fraiming Our Past: Constructing Canadian Women's History in the Twentieth Century edited by Sharon Anne Cook, Lorna McLean, and Kate O'Rourke.
For more Women's Day reading:
Thanks for this post! Another amazing women and nurse was Lillian Ward who founded the Visiting Nurse Service of New York. VNSNY blogger Amy Dixon Drouin wrote a great piece about her and the position of nurses for International Women’s Day. Check it out at http://blogs.vnsny.org/2011/03/08/international-womens-day/
I’m so proud of these women. They showed such courage act to face great responsibility like this. Kudos to you guys!