“Maybe we could get your Aunt Mary to give a lecture on sex education at the high school while she is here,” Dr. Bob suggested to Dad, who appeared to agree. Imagine how I felt! I was a young teen, new to junior high school, having given up riding my bike to school and switched to carrying my heavy binder on my hip like the other teens. Aunt Mary was a Macaulay, not a McDonald, but, of course, everyone in the high school would find out that the stout matronly old woman with white hair was my (great) aunt!
She had never married, but she was the author of the books, “The Art of Marriage” (1957) and “Marriage for the Married”. She also wrote several other books, including her best known one, “Understanding Ourselves”. There are still a few copies of some of these two books for sale online through antiquarian book sellers.
In the fall of 1960, I was twelve, and was still experiencing the shock and grief of suddenly losing my beloved 67-year old grandmother. That’s why Dad’s Aunt Mary, Nana’s younger sister, had come from London to Vancouver to visit. Aunt Mary, liked Nana, had left Cape Breton and then nursed in World War I. After the War, Mary went to New York where she worked as a social worker in Harlem and was involved in Margaret Sanger’s campaign to provide birth control information and the fight to legalize it.
I heard that in the 1920’s in New York, she was reputed to have had an affair with the Lebanese mystic author and poet Kahlil Gibran. Mom had a copy of Gibran’s “The Prophet” that she had been given as a gift. One time, after Mom had married Dad, she couldn’t find the book. Dad told her he had burned it because Gibran had “compromised” his aunt, causing a scandal. I suspect Aunt Mary, who appeared to be a woman who did what she wanted most of her life, might have had her own opinion about that. In researching her online I found her referenced in a more recent book, “Outspoken Women: An anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex.”
Aunt Mary moved to England sometime in the 1920’s. There she carried on her birth control work and studies into mystical aspects of Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. Over time, she moved from social work to starting to teach her own continuing education workshops on psychology. She was new age before new age. She established her own psychological/self help/religious society, first called the Mary Macaulay Society, but later the Iona Educational Society, where she gathered a group of people around her.
Dad sometimes stayed with her at her flat on Edgeware Road when he was on leave in London during the Second World War. An American cousin of Dad’s, who also met her during that period, had some qualms about Mary’s associates. Margaret Sanger, like many of that era, was associated with Eugenics. Mystical new age thinking also flourished in Weimar and into Nazi Germany.
During her visit to Canada after Nana’s death in 1960, possibly the only time she had returned to Canada since moving to London, Aunt Mary gave a public lecture in Vancouver. Mom thought it was good and described her as arguing that the bible was not literal, but all metaphorical language describing the development of the higher Self.
The sex education lecture at the high school wasn’t mentioned again and never happened. Aunt Mary went back to London, from where she continued to correspond with Mom. I wrote to her a few times. Once, I must have been telling her I was studying for grade 12 exams. She wrote back, “As your life goes on, you will find that in some ways, we all have “exams” to pass as long as we live – for we attend the School of Experience” all our days…..”
She had a stroke at some point and a female companion was mentioned as attending to her, I think. She must have been gone sometime before I first went to London in 1978, or I would have visited her.
That was what I thought I knew. Then I went to the internet to research my one relative from that generation who turns up on a google search, only if in tantalizing fragments. In researching Kahlil Gibran, I found mention of several women, but not her name. They may or may not have had an affair. She at least must have spoken of some friendship with him for the family to draw some conclusions that may or may not have been correct. Gibran was also interested in the confluence of world religions and contemplative traditions and perhaps his views on marriage influenced Mary’s later work. I did find evidence of her connection with Margaret Sanger in a letter of Sanger’s quoted in a book, where she says she had been invited to stay in London by Mary Macaulay, who as the book notes was heading a British organization 1929-31.
Finally, on the internet, I rediscovered a book, “Quest for Wholeness” by an English spiritual healer/Anglican priest, Martin Israel, who had been a member of her Iona Centre group. Rediscovered, as I had found it in the early days of the internet but had failed to contact him while he was still alive. I will let Martin Israel finish the story:
“Mary Macaulay, the courageous voice of spiritual truth in psychological and social trends, was also to see her Iona Education Centre grind gradually to a halt. It was her defect in not being able to delegate her teaching work to her followers that brought about this decline, though it must be admitted that few of them could have assumed the full burden of her ministry or have spoken with her unique authority. The 1960’s were times of extreme social, psychological and spiritual experimentation, and Mary’s approach was too traditional for the radical element while far too adventurous for both professional educationalists in colleges and workers in religious institutions. ..….As the centre failed to attract visitors, so she lost heart and consoled herself by eating far too much when she was alone….her blood pressure rose to a dangerously high level, and in due course she suffered a massive stroke that left the right side of her body paralyzed and her speech reduced to gibberish.
She lived in a care home for two years before her death in 1971. Israel continues:
“It is one thing to write about spiritual and emotional maturity and another to practise it in the harsh environment of the dissonant, insensitive society around one. What she could not do when still active, she put into practice with great poignancy in her childlike openness as she lay helpless in bed. When she died there was a sense of mourning for her in the home. The nursing staff knew they had lost a source of love whose radiance illuminated so much of the heavy ritual of caring for patients.
The centre closed after her death. It had been maintained by the devotion of Freda (the companion), who could not bear the thought of Mary recovering sufficiently to continue her work and finding nowhere to go…. I often feel that Mary’s mantle fell on my shoulders …..I am frequently aware of her spiritual presence encouraging me in my own solitary path as I proclaim the message in speech and writing.”
And that may be as much as we are likely to ever know about her now.
This is a fascinating story. I think that in the 1920’s and 30’s there was more alternative thinking going on than we thought. My Grandma had some alternative beliefs from that time as well. She was the one who decorated the outhouse with pictures from Playboy, and called it the “Art Gallery”. One of the things she suggested to my mom when she was pregnant was to bare her breasts to take in the sun. And both she and my grandfather had a strong belief in creamed honey, buying 10 pound containers regularly. Our nighttime snack while visiting at their cottage was bread and honey.
It’s a shame your great aunt didn’t actually speak at the high school, as it probably would have been very interesting, although of course difficult for a young teen to cope with.
Fascinating! Unless Ken knows something I don’t know, our family did not have any free thinkers of this ilk. Imagine talking to your Great Aunt Mary now. What a privilege that would be.
A remarkable story. I am struck to think that there were not six degrees of separation between Margaret Sanger and myself, but three or four, depending on how you count them.
Whatever Sanger thought of the future, she most probably did not foresee a time when we can sit at a screen and have the details of her life in front of us within seconds. Eg., at age 15 her father was a drummer in the Civil War.