Elsie Farwell, the first Field Secretary of the NAEA, was born Elsie May Payne in Fogo on the northeast coast of Newfoundland on May 27, 1884.[45] She was educated at the Church of England school in Fogo and at the Teacher’s Training Academy in St. John’s. Elsie taught in the regular school system from 1901 to 1918 in a number of coastal communities as geographically diverse as Lamaline on the Burin Peninsula; Channel (Port aux Basques); Herring Neck near Twillingate on New World Island; and Happy Adventure near Eastport.[46] Married to Richard Farwell of Eastport in 1921, she was widowed within three years when Richard (aged 32) drowned crossing a pond in winter. Her marriage at 37 was late by the standards of the day, as was her decision, following Richard’s death, to attend the University of Toronto at the age of 39. She was at the university from 1923 to 1925, and graduated with a diploma in social science. It is unknown whether Elsie was from a prosperous rural family, had relatives to stay with in Toronto, or had saved enough from her years of teaching to help finance this study. Graduation was quite an achievement for a woman in this time, especially for one who was 41 years old. It took quite a while for educational levels of teachers in Newfoundland to improve. By 1949 only "57 of the country’s 2,375 teachers had degrees."[47] In her marriage, educational, and professional choices Elsie was an anomaly for her time. Yet, we have minimal personal information about her, which makes it difficult to know if she saw herself as a trailblazer.

Elsie Farwell was no stranger to hard work and teaching when she was hired by the Newfoundland Adult Education Association to direct the other six field staff and to begin an innovative adult education program of Opportunity Schools. One of her first tasks was to attend a summer school at Clemson College, in South Carolina, directed by Miss Wil Lou Gray. The NAEA had been encouraged by the Carnegie Corporation to send her to Clemson College in 1931 and she willingly travelled to attend.[48] Having lived and studied in both St. John’s and Toronto, Elsie likely welcomed the challenge and saw it as a continuation of her already extensive studies. In January 1932, following summer school at Clemson, Elsie was charged with giving the six teachers she employed a "special and intensive course of training" in the methods she had learned. Under Elsie’s direction, in 1931-32 these six women started their work in a variety of remote places such as Upper Island Cove, Carbonear North and South, and Botwood. The NAEA also had experimental schools in areas such as St. John’s, Bell Island, and Goulds.[49]

By the time of her hiring, Elsie was a woman in her late forties, well educated, and clearly very dedicated. She is said to have "organized night schools in fifty five communities for 3500 students"[50] Her educational efforts and leadership were not unrewarded. In fact, she received the King’s Jubilee medal for her work in adult education.[51] She was considered significant enough a citizen to be listed in the 1937 Who’s Who of Newfoundland, one of only four women including Lady Walwyn, wife of the Governor.[52] These distinctions indicate the regard in which she and the position of Field Secretary of the first Opportunity Schools were held. Yet, her male contemporaries were destined for much higher honours. Leo English, who taught navigation, received the Order of the British Empire, as did Vincent Burke. Clearly, the bar for women was much higher in this time period, in effect reinscribing gender boundaries.

Elsie Farwell held a distinguished position that would not have been open to her in the school system. She attended conferences and she wrote articles for the Bulletin of the World Association of Adult Education (now the International Council for Adult Education or ICAE).[53] Her work included not only administering the adult schools but also convening a yearly conference and providing training for the teachers. She also published her own Bulletin of the NAEA, modelled in part on the WAAE Bulletin, and she ran a very successful organization. Along with being a good administrator, Elsie could show a lighthearted and even whimsical side. In describing the home visits, she said, "It would not surprise me if someone found poetry in our knitting needles these days. It is just beautiful to feel the power coming from our combined clubs of women all over the country."[54]

Elsie shared a great deal in common with the other women in the NAEA and it seems that they were quite friendly with each other. In her correspondence with Elizabeth (Liza) Northover, adult education teacher in the Goulds, who was leaving the Association to get married in Petite Forte, Elsie wrote an endearing letter, beginning with how she "felt the pang of coming separation." A charming tone to the December 1938 letter shows a depth of friendship with Elizabeth that was to continue in the ensuing years.[55] In acknowledging the resignation, Elsie said, "Now will you always come to me, as you have been doing, if at any time in your life you feel you need the human touch." She was a compassionate and caring woman who shared friendship with the women she supervised.

Mrs. Farwell, as she was invariably referred to, perhaps in deference to her widowed status, died at the age of 60. In a somewhat flowery obituary in the Newfoundland Quarterly, Leo English said that sorrow "tinged and pervaded her life."[56] Perhaps he was alluding to her widowed status or even mental depression, since we know that Elsie had taken a year of "rest" in 1936 after her first five years as Field Secretary.[57] The romantic way in which he describes her suggests that his own view of women in leadership, in this case a well-established woman, is somewhat stereotypic. Elsie returned to her post after that leave and held it until her death in 1944. Of her personal life after having been widowed we know little except that she lived at the YWCA and spent summers at home in Fogo. She was buried beside her husband in Eastport.[58]

Elsie chose a path that other women of her generation did not choose or have open to them. Her social class would have been a step above that of the many out-port women who went to work as domestics in St. John’s, and it also would have been higher than that of the working-class St. John’s women who went to work in retail until they married. A senior administrative position for an outport woman was unique at the time.[59] She and her contemporaries in the NAEA did not belong to the upperclass of St. John’s, such as suffragettes Armine Gosling (wife of the mayor of the city) and Adelaide Browning (wife of a prosperous merchant).[60] They also had little in common with Roman Catholic women who could enter religious orders and become school principals and teachers.

Elsie was an intelligent outport woman who had many assets but few options. As a relatively well-educated teacher she might have been expected to teach children for a few years and then leave teaching for marriage, and it seems she did that until she was widowed. Elsie’s social positioning and her chance employment with a new initiative in adult education made a rewarding career possible for her. Adult education work and the Opportunity Schools were not just a job — or an interlude — for Elsie and her peers; they provided a career with opportunity for advancement and for further education. Elsie continued teaching and administering but with adults, an option that few women of her time would have had. Whereas most of the provincial-level positions in education at this time were held by men such as Vincent Burke, this one position of Field Secretary was held by a woman, marking a major occupational victory in the 1930s and 1940s. Elsie appears to have been most able for the challenges of her position.

Jessie Beaumont Mifflen, the second of the original six field workers, was a cause célèbre in the adult education world, known in local and national circles as a successful writer, leader in adult education and most especially as a pioneer in establishing the library system in Newfoundland. She was born in 1906 in Bonavista and educated at the Methodist College and Memorial University College, after which she taught for two years. She left Newfoundland to get her BA at Mount Allison University and when she returned she was hired by the NAEA to teach adult education using the Opportunity School method. In later years she earned a Bachelor of Library Science at the University of Toronto Library School, as well as studied at Columbia University in New York City.[61]

Jessie’s early career in adult education included years spent in outport Newfoundland teaching at night and doing home visits during the day. Field Secretary Elsie Farwell’s report for 1935 shows that Jessie had her hands full "with home groups three miles in one direction, four miles in another, and a mile and a half in a third."[62] An Evening Telegram article when she was named "Woman of the Week" in 1947 said that "for the first four years [1932-36] ... she travelled all over the island, covering the north coast down to the Straits of Belle Isle, and along the south coast, spending two months in one settlement, two months in another."[63] The excitement and the busyness of it all appealed to her, especially since it did not involve teaching children in one place all year long. In her own words she was "not dying to be a teacher" and, in fact, she had entered the teaching profession because "there seemed to be no alternative when I was ready to earn my living."[64] Of those early years teaching children in rural Newfoundland, Jessie said she was soon disillusioned. Indeed, living in rural Newfoundland was quite a shock since her home-town of Bonavista was very large by comparison. In later years she admitted, "I never did get to enjoy the actual classroom teaching."[65] One suspects that this was true for many of the adult education teachers who had started out teaching children.

Of her adult education career, Jessie was much more positive. She liked it so much, "it isn’t work at all. It’s a pleasure."[66] After graduating from Mount Allison University she had been waiting for seven months for "something to turn up" when she had an offer to be a field worker with the NAEA. Her own recollections of those days include a fond remembrance of a public performance to mark the end of the term, which "was always enjoyed by both the performers and the audience."[67] She felt more successful in this career than she had as a schoolteacher. Indeed, her own descriptions of these Opportunity Schools make the experience sound somewhat adventurous. In describing the rigour of her travels, she noted that sometimes she went by train but more often by the coastal steamer.[68] Like the other adult educators, she sometimes taught in communities with a religion different from her own, which caused local gossip; she reports finding the residents’ surprise somewhat amusing. In looking back on her years in adult education Jessie reflected, "Wherever it happened to be I enjoyed the work in its infinite variety."[69]

Jessie wanted her work to be interesting and varied. Proof of her need for variety is shown in her decision to join the RCAF in the latter years of World War II, presumably for excitement, though that experience turned out to be "deadly dull. All I did was count nuts and bolts and airplane parts."[70] Jessie was somewhat relieved to be called home to succeed Elsie Farwell as Field Secretary in 1944. Jessie had held that position for a year in 1936 when Elsie was on sick leave so she probably looked forward to taking a position with which she was familiar. She had much more responsibility in the new position but "it was an interesting and challenging [position].... It also involved much more travelling which made it even more interesting. I remained happily in that job for some three to four years roaming around the out-ports preaching the gospel of education."[71]

Even in the 1940s a woman in a leadership role was somewhat suspect. When she went to communities to hold meetings it "raised a few eyebrows where people were used to addressing a chairman not chairwoman."[72] Her groundbreaking work as a woman in a senior civil servant position, along with her later leadership work in libraries, earned her the distinction of being "outspoken on the rights of women."[73]

Jessie’s work in adult education set the basis for her later career in the library system where she spent more than 20 years (1949-72) helping to establish in excess of 50 libraries. When she retired as director of the regional library system it included 75 libraries. Her leadership did not stop with her paid work. Jessie gave generously of her time, serving as president of the Atlantic Provinces Library Association and vice-president of the Canadian Library Association. Not surprisingly, her honours were legion: honorary doctor of laws from Mount Allison University and Memorial University; second winner of the Canadian Library Association’s Outstanding Service Award; member of the Order of Canada; and honorary membership in the Newfoundland Teachers Association.[74]

Jessie’s educational career in rural Newfoundland is presented in a humorous way in her own publications of later years, including Be You a Library Missionary, Miss? (1981); Journey to Yesterday in the Out-harbours of Newfoundland (1983); and a Collection of Memories (1989).[75] These offer a gentle view of Newfoundland and are written in a folksy style common to Newfoundland writing of the time. Notably, she also co-wrote and published with some established male academics and authors a collection titled A Yaffle of Yarns (1985). Others involved in this work included Otto Tucker, Professor of Education at Memorial University; Ted Russell, a well-known writer and teacher; Cyril Poole, principal of the Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (of Memorial University) in Corner Brook; and George Earle, a canon of the Anglican Church, former principal of Queen’s Theological College, and sometime television actor.[76] She was in very fine company indeed, and it speaks to both her confidence and the esteem in which she was held that she would be part of this writing collective.

Jessie died in St. John’s, on April 1, 1994, at the age of 87, having lived a very long and distinguished life.[77] Adult education had offered her a career possibility unlike that of a classroom teacher of children. It offered adventure and challenge, and served as a springboard to even greater career success in advancing adult education through the library system. She is distinguished among the three women described here in her career achievements, likely because she was younger than the other women and her working life extended into the 1970s, when opportunities for women expanded. There may also have been mentors in her career that made it possible for her to far exceed the expectations of a woman born in Bonavista in 1906. Plus, even after retiring from her second "major" career in the library system, she wrote and published a great deal.

Sara Coady was born at Fox Cove on the Burin Peninsula in the first decade of the twentieth century.[78] Although a later addition to the NAEA staff than the original seven women, she also had a distinguished career in adult education, and her life story evidences many of the same choices and opportunities. Sara was trained as a schoolteacher and began her teaching career in 1922 in Tors Cove. Soon after, she served as a principal, and by the time she was hired by the NAEA in 1935 she was well established as a professional teacher. In 1936 she attended the summer school at Clemson College and was appointed Acting Assistant Field Secretary.[79] Indeed Sara’s files contain a play by Erin Kohn from Clemson that she used in her classes. She became Acting Field Secretary with the sudden death of Elsie Farwell in 1944, a death that seemed to have troubled her deeply:

To find words to express this shock which we all experienced when we heard of Mrs. Farwell’s passing in May is indeed a task. It is difficult to think of Mrs. Farwell as gone – gone and left the work for which she was so pre-eminently qualified, and which she loved so much. But she will live on in her work and in the hearts of those who knew and appreciated her many sterling qualities. The sudden termination of her life’s work came as a great blow and our loss is great. Newfoundland has lost a fine teacher — a splendid Social Service worker, the cause of Adult Education, — a great friend.[80]

Sara’s years in adult education were busy, and like her colleagues in the NAEA, her work involved extensive travel and teaching in many remote villages. Her files contain reports on Opportunity Schools she had taught in Joe Batt’s Arm and Tilting (Fogo Island), Corbin, Rushoon, and Salmonier (Burin region), Chapel’s Cove and Holyrood (Conception Bay), Springdale and Poole’s Island, St. John’s, Trepassey, and Argentia. In later years she seems to have taken a teaching position at the Waterford Hospital, St. John’s, where she met and married Humbert Giovannetti, a widower and staff dentist, in the mid-1960s.[81]

The depth of Sara’s concern for her adult education work is reflected in her musings on education and what it demanded of the teacher, especially in a time of war. Describing what is needed to teach in a city context, she says in her 1939-40 report to Dr. Burke:

To keep a group of city boys interested and enthusiastic five days of the week for four continuous months requires enthusiasm, interest and tact on the part of teachers ordinarily, and much more so this year with so much unrest and disturbance in the air.[82]

Although energetic and innovative, Sara was challenged at times by a few difficult students. In her reports, she notes she has taught "youth not unknown to the criminal court," an indication that she had some adult troublemakers in her class, which was presumably all male. She was challenged, too, by the fact that some of her students were slow learners, although they worked hard for her: there were some who were "genuine plodders, who having put their hand to the plough, had not the slightest intention of looking backward."[83] Overall, Sara had a sense that "every day we felt we were helping some man to live a better and fuller life."[84] This sense of hope and of being involved in work that helped people live richer and fuller lives was common to these adult educators, and suggests that they saw themselves as being part of something bigger.

Faced with any form of adversity, Sara’s tendency was to persevere. Along with her adult schools on Fogo Island, she saw the need to set up a club specifically for the women and girls on Saturday evening. When there was no longer a church-sponsored adult education program in St. John’s, she set up a school there in 1937. Her efforts were applauded. Mrs. Farwell singled her out for special mention in a report in 1935:

Rushoon with its closing on Nov. 30 and here we have some startling things to report. We expected from the way Miss Coady assimilated her Training Course that something would result, so we gave her a new centre, virgin soil, a big problem, and we were not disappointed. Aided by Rev. J. Fleming, Miss Coady held her own public meeting.... Miss Coady’s music evidently drove dull care away.[85]

Along with being a teacher, Sara seems to have supported extracurricular activities. While teaching at the US naval base in Argentia during and after World War II, she encouraged the publishing of a school newspaper in which both the Newfoundland and American students contribute articles and poems. The paper was called the Mirror and the society that sponsored it had a full executive, including a president, vice-president, and secretary.[86] Obviously, she was innovative.

A large part of the curriculum Sara Coady taught had to do with civics and hygiene, not surprising since she had training in these areas. Her papers include a guide for going to an interview, which had a section specially designed for women. Readers were told to "make sure the seams of your hose are straight" and to "take a bath, brush your teeth, and attend to your personal hygiene." Other guides told them to "wash your hair every three weeks." Yet, Sara seemed to have employed music, plays, and literature to stimulate the students’ imagination. She thought her job was in part to foster well-being. She noted that the students "enjoyed the music side of the programme very much, and although we had but a few moments each day to devote to this very important branch of our work, yet we feel that much joy and harmony was brought into many hearts."[87] Her files contain a number of plays and poems used to teach, including a jaunty version of "The Night before Christmas," dated 1959, that jests about being released from the local sanatorium. These days of teaching and her students meant a great deal to her.

Sara’s papers reveal a life that was both rich and broad. She kept news items and bulletins from the World Association for Adult Education, which no doubt served as an inspiration for her student newspaper in Argentia. Her private papers reference the Scandinavian folk schools and credit unions, as well as the National Film Society of Canada, a voluntary organization founded in 1935, which had a role in the establishment of the National Film Board several years later and encouraged film appreciation and the value of film in education, especially in adult education.[88] She held onto class lists from a night school in Branch in 1940-41, in which she and Jessie Mifflen taught 58 students, and she kept a handwritten thank-you note from those students.

Sara seems to have felt deeply about the circumstance of her students and of the value of her work. In a report on a community centre in St. Johns from 1939-40 she related the great distances people walked to go to school, including a 61-year-old man from the Lower Battery who walked several hours each day to go to the classes. Her concern for the truly poor and unlearned was strong enough that she begged Vincent Burke to "get in touch with more pure illiterates, such men as these are shy, self-conscious, and quite naturally, are not quick to come forward."[89] Sara continued her career in adult education for many years, working more and more in St. John’s and after a time as a staff teacher in the Waterford Hospital. Clearly, adult education was her life’s work, and she saw herself mainly as a helper of the disadvantaged. Her career path shows she believed people, male and female, to be equally capable.

The Opportunity School model, designed to build on relationships and to involve the whole family, furnished the female educators with new ideas and skills.[90] For women like Jessie and Sara, the model and their positioning within it provided an opportunity in a very constrained social and economic environment to experience teaching in a unique way, as well as to benefit from education and travel. As shown in Jessie’s recollections, it provided them with a viable alternative to teaching children in an isolated setting for a full year, as well as helped them push the boundaries of women’s work to include the new profession of adult education.

The Opportunity School model allowed women to help women. Visiting the home and teaching women in groups allowed the teachers a more personal kind of relationship with their adult pupils while it gave greater educational access to women at home. Blackall’s initial description of the Opportunity School model makes clear that it was conceived as an innovative approach to teaching literacy, for it took women’s needs into account.[91] He boasted that during home schools the teacher can reach the women who cannot attend — "the teacher goes to them" and provides instruction on "the management of the home, the management of the children, and the management of the mother’s health."[92] When one considers twenty-first-century efforts to focus on women to improve maternal child health in developing countries, such a focus in Newfoundland in the Depression years seems to be well ahead of its time. As well, an effort to recognize and accommodate women’s multiple roles and responsibilities in the home and the barrier these presented to educational access also seems prescient. In 1935 alone, these adult educators made 3,040 home visits and taught 630 people in evening classes.[93]

The Opportunity School model included women’s clubs in the home whereby the "teacher becomes the leader or director of a group rather than a teacher" as they learned in groups to read and write, or to weave, for example.[94] In addition, a household science teacher was provided to teach cooking, nutrition, and balance.[95] Given the reality of many women’s lives at the time, this kind of in-house teaching was likely welcomed. Yet, it must be said that there was a somewhat paternalistic tone to the plans for both the women’s clubs and the home visits. Women’s work in the home was viewed as so dull that it needed to be brightened up.[96] In commenting on the need for women’s clubs, the inaugural pamphlet on the NAEA had this to say:

How continuous and monotonous day by day and week by week, is the work of most of our women folk. They are at it from early morning till late at night and through it all carry the care of children. It is amazing how they stand up to it. What a delight to them surely would be a happy gathering together of the women of the place for one night a week! Some reading aloud could be done, some songs sung, and all sorts of talk could be had about the next way to do things at home. A good, sensible active woman – no matter of what age, young or old, – would be necessary to keep the organization going.[97]

The "good, sensible active woman" descriptor hints at some of the stereotypes of what a female leader or teacher might look or act like. Yet, the very fact that these classes, groups, and visits provided access to women students was no doubt pleasing to the female teachers such as Sara, Elsie and Jessie. They could use this opportunity to be part of the amelioration of troubling home circumstances, especially during the Great Depression.

Along with the clubs and the home visits, on occasion the NAEA had female-only classes, such as one they hosted at the Church of England cathedral, which was described as the "outstanding event of our year."[98] Another was "a special class for women [which] was established in the Synod Building, St Johns. Many of the girls who attended this ... were girls from the outports."[99] The tradition of separating girls and boys already had been established by religious groups, Protestant and Catholic, in Newfoundland. As well, the upper-class supporters of "The Girls’ Department of the King George the Fifth Institute" operated a residence for outport girls working as domestics in the city. This started as a home for Labrador girls who came to St. John’s as helpers on the schooners, and it soon broadened to be a home for out-port girls. Lady Davidson, wife of the Governor, Mrs. W.C. Job, and Mrs. Armine Gosling, along with Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, set up the residence and initiated the weekly literacy classes for girls.[100] Having separate classes for NAEA students, then, was an accepted practice and it likely allowed some flexibility in the curriculum and an opportunity for the women involved, either as teachers or learners, to be freer in discussion and in content focus.

Of course, these adult education teachers were not free of the constraints of their sex. Some evidence suggests that "classic" feminine traits constituted competence or effectiveness in their jobs. In correspondence from 1940 with the Secretary for Education, the Field Secretary, Elsie Farwell, describes the work of Miss Marion Christian who had been in Isle Valen, Placentia Bay, noting that Marion has the "personality, tact and sympathy so much needed in a world which brings the teachers very near to the daily lives of people" and she has "keen interest in everything pertaining to their [students’] welfare." Thus, the model of teaching was one of personality, and the feminization of this role is reflected in language like "tact and sympathy,"[101] very stereotypic feminine qualities.[102] So ingrained were these expectations and beliefs about women that the teachers themselves perpetuated them.

There is no doubt that Burke saw adult education work as women’s work. According to him, they were engaged partly in teaching and partly in social service in that they visited homes, "among with which were found many social problems, some which were diagnosed and help given towards a solution."[103] When he described their work elsewhere Burke noted that they used first aid kits from the Public Health Department so that the "teachers were able, in places where no nurse or doctor was available, to administer to minor ills and accidents ... and in some cases, assisting in the work of inoculation."[104] In many ways, Burke’s leadership and his expectation of caring behaviour reinscribed class and gender roles for these women. It is instructive to think of what he does not say in his reports and writings: he does not refer to these women as leaders, as possible successors to him, or as deserving of positions like his own. It is also instructive to think of what the women themselves do not say: they do not indicate other career aspirations or show any resentment to the primarily male leadership. For them, adult education work appears to be a reprieve from what Jessie Mifflen described as the tedium of teaching children. Seemingly, they are caught in the confines of their own gender and class expectations.

The use of eight-week stints was a contributing factor in the adult school success and in the educators’ satisfaction with it. Jessie remembered that that she "enjoyed adult education much more [than school teaching] as we went from community to community and never stayed more than two months."[105] The language of the educators shows that to some degree they saw themselves as part of a larger effort to cure illiteracy, despondency, and poverty. In her 1935 annual report Elsie says that they are fighting "the fight with our most alarming peril, illiteracy"[106] and that they need to "slay the dragon in our midst" even if it means continuing on "the front line trenches"[107] to combat illiteracy. Apart from the use of fighting language, Elsie is quick to point out that this work is adventuresome: "the winter months for Field Secretary and teachers must continue to be venturesome, thrilling even dangerous, particularly with a winter like last. Any person reading this report with aspirations to do the work in either of these capacities should do so with body, mind and soul searchings before taking the final plunge."[108] Clearly, this was not just any job. For Elsie and her colleagues, it was a bona fide career made possible by the Opportunity School model. While the model had gender constraints, it also allowed great freedom and possibility for women at the time.