As dean of residence at Victoria University, Margaret Addison had the habit of welcoming the incoming class of first-year women with a speech that began, “Women of the university.” For new students such as Gertrude Rutherford in 1917 and Esther Trewartha in 1920, it was an awesome moment – a gesture emphasizing their entry into a splendid intellectual community with all its challenges, privileges, and responsibilities. They and many of their classmates retained throughout their lives something of the vision of the socially committed and fruitful life of the educated woman that Addison had tried to impart. As Rutherford wrote...

Margaret Addison was not born into the urban and intellectual milieu she later inhabited. On the contrary, like many Canadians in the newly formed Dominion of Canada, she was a pioneer’s child: her birth on 21 October 1868 took place at Homing’s Mills, Ontario, a mere clearing in the woods. Her first impression was perhaps the sunlight filtered through the rustling boughs. Her mother was a warm presence, nurturing and soft, crooning hymns to her first-born. Her father was out on the trail when she was born, and he came and went, perceptible as the sudden wind in the trees,...

In 1885, Victoria University was a Methodist institution, open to all denominations, on the shores of Lake Ontario at Cobourg, Ontario. The college was a substantial, three-storey building with side wings and Grecian pillars, recently augmented by a separate science building known as Faraday Hall. Most of the students were studying for the Bachelor of Arts degree, though a sizeable group of theological students was in residence, and smaller contingents of students were in the science department and law school. In the arts faculty, nine professors supervised some 150 students. Many of these were housed in the college itself, on...

Addison spent eight years teaching in Stratford, followed, after a year’s absence, by two and one-half years at Lindsay Collegiate Institute. There is little biographical information about this period, during which she changed from a young woman of twenty-three to a mature one of thirty-four. It is tempting to imagine her developing, through teaching, the skills and knowledge that would prepare her for her life’s work as dean of residence and dean of women. Tempting, but perhaps overly teleological. At this time the position of dean of women did not exist. There was not even a women’s residence to require...

The telegram received in Oxford read simply, “Will you accept Lindsay?” After a split second of wondering who Lindsay was, Addison realized that she had been offered an appointment teaching modern languages at Lindsay Collegiate Institute (some one hundred kilometres northeast of Toronto), beginning in January 1901.¹ It was more than ever necessary to leave Oxford before Christmas - which she did with some reluctance, so enlightening had been her stay. “Oh that every woman I know might visit Oxford, might travel, might have money and leisure to drink in a little of the wealth of learning, scholarship, and character...

The first few years at Annesley Hall were not plain sailing. The residence was a pioneering venture; there was nothing else of its size and scope in Canada to provide a model. It is true that both the Royal Victoria College in Montreal and St. Hilda’s in Toronto predate Annesley Hall, but these were different in nature: they were small residential colleges for women that originally incorporated teaching functions, on the English pattern.¹ The tradition of the “college girl” and her “dorm” was American, stemming mainly from the private universities and exercising only an indirect influence across the border.² Addison...

With the establishment of student government in 1906, Addison had solved her most pressing administrative problem. The framework she had put in place left her freer to concentrate on what she considered her proper work: moulding the communal life of the Hall, and helping individual girls to grow in understanding and grace. Between 1906 and the First World War - or more precisely between 1906 and 1912, when another administrative change took place - she supervised the evolution of a distinctive pattern of residence life, initiating or encouraging activities that she considered beneficial and imposing standards of behaviour through the...

After the battles of 1911-12, Addison faced a fluid and uncertain situation in the 1913-14 school year. The Burwashes’s departure precipitated a drastic turnover, from top to bottom, in the staff and officials of her world. Victoria’s new principal and chancellor, Richard Pinch Bowles, was inducted in the fall of 1913. At the same time, Mrs R.N. Burns replaced Mrs Burwash as president of the committee of management. She was the former Mary Crossen, the first student at Brookhurst Academy in Cobourg to attend lectures at Victoria. Although she was to serve as president for sixteen years, she was a...

The upbeat note at the end of Addison’s annual report in April 1920 was perhaps a whistling in the dark; the spirit of the students may have been improving, but administratively problems abounded. The most immediate was financial. For some reason, despite letting out rooms to conferences during the summer holiday, the residences were no longer paying their way; in February the committee had written to Chancellor Bowles confessing a shortfall in revenue that might reach $4000 by the end of the year.¹ Addison’s overwork was also a problem. Reinforcing the themes of her 1917 reports, she repeated in the...

Addison was fifty-one when she became dean of women in 1920, and sixty-two when she retired in 1931. She was, then, a mature woman when she became the official advisor to all the young women in Victoria University. Understanding between generations is never easy, but its inherent difficulties were increased by the far-reaching changes that had taken place since Addison’s own youth, as society moved from the Victorian to the modern era, from an agricultural to an urban economy, and from professed Christianity to a growing secularism. Addison’s generation, even more than that of most people in their fifties, had...

During her working years, Addison envisaged her retirement as a long-awaited period of peace and contemplation - except, of course, for a little work on the side for the betterment of humankind. “I expect to retire to a small village,” she told her correspondents shortly after handing in her resignation in 1929, “and the height of my ambition when I get there is to be on the School Board and to learn something of the problems of rural education.”¹ To this end she bought a house in Newcastle, where she had so many friends and memories. The house was far...