Beth Robinson’s connections with our congregation’s past and present are deep. Here she writes with passion about her Aunt, Alice Amelia Chown, and her powerful impact on family members, including grand-niece Beth.
“I walk in the footprints of my indomitable, indestructible great aunt, Alice Amelia Chown 1866-1949.
She ripped into my life with all the intensity of a summer storm and left behind corpuscles laden with social issues. My mother, before me, knew this highly charged energy. At twenty years of age, while still a student at Queen’s University, she sailed with her aunt to London. Here they marked, then joined thousands as they entered and surrounded the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate women’s suffrage in England.
Aunt Alice’s mind never walked, it always ran, insisting on women’s right to vote, to receive higher education, to be protected by fair labour laws, and work environments free of harassments. She took her organizing skills to the Settlement Houses of New York and Chicago and to the experiments in co-operative living in Letchford, England and the States of New York and Arkansas. Finally, when she returned to Canada and Toronto, she initiated a community living experiment on acres just west of the city at Clarkson. To all these initiatives, she added her skills as a journalist and playwright, presenting her views to an ever-widening audience.
World War I energized the full force of her pacifism. She extolled social sharing, believing it would lead to a system that would promote peace. Ideas, she believed, along with intelligence and good will, would replace force. Here she met with hostility, especially when she coupled her stance with an interest in the Russians’ early experiments.
Was it the Queen’s philosophy professor, John Watson and the political scientist Adam Shortt who shaped Alice’s notions of social reform or did her yearning to be free arise from the stricture of conservative Kingston and the yolk of Methodism? Fate had placed her as an only daughter with six brothers, not one of whom would have been expected to look after their mother during almost two decades as a semi-invalid. Instead, it was Alice who stayed close to home until the age of forty. Then in 1906, following her mother’s death, she sped away to the Settlement Houses and experiments in community living.
I loved this big-boned great aunt with her bobbed hair, straight-hanging simple dresses and inevitable sandals. My personal Aunt Alice initiation began when I was 14 years old. It was then that she invited equal numbers of opposites for a cup of strong tea and the simplest rectangular biscuits. The socialists gathered with the conservatives, the dark skin with the fair, ten Jewish friends with ten non-Jewish, and I was there to help and soak up these afternoons of adventure!
Our house always vibrated with her presence. Her social issues passed from discussion to exhortations across the dinner table. Surely there is a gene hospitable to change and I was the recipient decades ago!”
Beth Robinson 2021 02 09