he alienated socialists and labour groups. In 1935 the UFA collapsed politically, and its defeat was in part due to the John Brownlee sex scandal and in part due to the government's inability to raise wheat prices or otherwise mitigate the Great Depression in Canada. A prolonged drought in the southern two thirds of the province produced low grain harvests and forced the abandonment and/or foreclosure of thousands of farms, while there and elsewhere in Alberta the financial picture for farmers was harmed by low world prices for grain. Heavily indebted and operating with slim profit margins, farmers were open to theories of banking and monetary reform that had been kicking around western Canada since the start of commercial farming in the 1880s in western Canada. The UFA leadership were leery of such proposals and farmers turned to William Aberhart's Social Credit movement as a weapon to do battle against what were seen as grasping bankers and collection agencies. After the defeat, the UFA pulled back to its economic-activity core purpose, as a chain of co-operative farm-supply stores and farmers' lobby group. Medical care and nursing The first homesteaders relied on themselves and their neighbours for medical services. Doctors were few. Pioneer healing women used traditional remedies and laxatives. The reliance on homeopathic remedies continued as trained nurses and doctors became more common among the pioneer communities in the early part of the 20th century. After 1900, medicine, especially nursing, and especially in urban areas, modernized and became well organized. The Lethbridge Nursing Mission in Alberta was a representative Canadian voluntary mission. It was founded, independent of the Victorian Order of Nurses, in 1909 by Jessie Turnbull Robinson. A former nurse, Robinson was elected as president of the Lethbridge Relief Society and began district nursing services aimed at poor women and children. The mission was governed by a volunteer board of women directors and began by raising money for its first year of service through charitable donations and payments from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The mission also blended social work with nursing, becoming the dispenser of unemployment relief. Richardson (1998) examines the social, political, economic, class, and professional factors that contributed to ideological and practical differences between leaders of the Alberta Association of Graduate Nurses (AAGN), established in 1916, and the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), founded in 1915, regarding the promotion and acceptance of midwifery as a