Antigonish Movement

The Antigonish movement is a cooperative movement that began in the 1920s in the impoverished rural area around the university town of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to address the decline of the fisheries, agriculture, and coal mining industry. The reform-minded priests who have become synonymous with this movement are Father Jimmy Tompkins and his cousin, Father Moses Coady. Under their leadership, the Extension Department of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish was created in 1928 with Coady as its first director. Both Tompkins and Coady were committed to the university going to the people, and not the other way around.

Although the Antigonish movement has much in common with the social gospel movement, its program of social justice was influenced most heavily by the church teachings in the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum of 1891 and later Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. The visionary leaders of the movement were diocesan priests and the Sisters of St. Martha, the service-focused religious order established in Antigonish in 1900.

The Antigonish movement is well known for linking emancipatory adult education practices to the local context of “social Catholicism.” The adult education initiatives for organizing people for cooperative action in the early days of the movement included mass meetings, study clubs, kitchen meetings, lending libraries, leadership courses, radio broadcasts, pamphlets, and conferences. In the late 1920s, Moses Coady held a first meeting with 600 people and then proceeded to travel 13,000 kilometers in 10 months, organizing up to four meetings a day in fishing villages. By the summer of 1930, Coady had brought together 200 delegates from fishing communities to Halifax for the inaugural meeting of the United Maritime Fishermen, a marketing cooperative. Through study clubs, the members gained skills in fish conservation, marketing, refrigeration, and so forth; as the cooperative grew, housing and banking were added to their repertoire. Before Coady assumed leadership of the Extension Department, Jimmy Tompkins had been working for several years in the remote coastal towns of Canso and Dover. In 1933, Father Tompkins and the Sisters of St. Martha established the Canso Library and this was the departure point for promoting local libraries, which led to the regional library system.

Although the recognized leaders of the Antigonish movement are male, women were active leaders in many of the programs that endure to the present day. The lifelong friendship between Father Tompkins and the Sisters of St. Martha opened up opportunities for women to lead adult education programs in household management. Sisters Monica Doyle, Denis Marie, Augustine, and Jean Doyle created an educational environment for the women of Canso, with a focus on learning to provide necessities for their families. They held workshops and meetings, and taught the women to sew, mend, and dye clothing. The main publication of the movement, the Maritime Co-operator, was managed entirely by local women during the first decades, with leadership from Coady's secretary, Kay Thompson DesJardins. Sister Irene Doyle organized a handicraft conference in 1942 that led to the Nova Scotia government setting up a program that included the marketing of handicrafts. Lilian Burke of Cheticamp, Northern Nova Scotia, created the floral designs that were the trademark in the rug hooking industry that she developed in the 1920s and 1930s as part of the movement, an industry now estimated to generate more than $3 million yearly.

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