The foundation of the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC) in October of 1893 marked an important departure for the middle-class women's movement in late Victorian Canada. Most Council women in the 1890s believed that a sexual division of labour rooted in women's peculiar responsibility for mothering and homemaking engendered an authoritative female moral voice. Their construction of female authority was grounded in a non-hierarchical understanding of gender relations in which women's institutions and social responsibilities were merely different from, not subordinate to, those of men. As such, they believed that a middle-class women's "parliament" like the NCWC would enable them to transform their traditional religious responsibility for the welfare of poor women and children into a national obligation to protect, relieve, and rescue the female half of humanity.

Council women were initially able to convince legislators that the NCWC represented and spoke for the women of Canada but, as the decade progressed, they found that the NCWC had no real power to effect social reforms that challenged institutionalized male prerogative or authority. This was most forcefully underscored by the NCWC's attempts to found the Victorian Order of Nurses for Canada. Originally conceived by the NCWC as a maternal welfare service for isolated prairie women, within a month of the scheme's public inauguration in February 1897 its name was changed from the Victorian Order of Home Helpers to the Victorian Order of Nurses; moreover, by the time the new institution received its royal charter in May of 1898, it had been recrafted as an urban public health initiative employing only hospital trained district nurses.

Why both the purpose and personnel of the Victorian Order were changed so dramatically between May of 1896 and May of 1898, and what effect the experience of founding this new institution had on the NCWC's non-hierarchical construction of gender relations, is explored in detail by this dissertation. What emerges is a gendered picture of the late nineteenth-century institution-building process in which organized women's conception of their public role, and the domestic and religious bases of their social authority, were severely tested.