Abstract

Frontier College is one of the oldest and most venerable of adult education institutions in Canada. It has provided an invaluable service to generations of some of the most marginalized people in this country, histories of the college have been largely reverent. This thesis seeks to build upon the much rarer critical historiography. Frontier College founder Alfred Fitzpatrick, and his lieutenant and successor Edmund Bradwin both displayed a marked hygiene narrative throughout their writings. They similarly ascribed to a gendered, racist, nativist, colonial worldview which idealized a white, British Canada. Frequently there is a considerable overlap or even conflation between opinions about hygiene and those about immigration or race. This thesis argues that this is not due to an accident or confusion on their part, but that this sort of opinion is consistent with a broader, problematic discourse on eugenics to which they subscribed.