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In University Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada, Sara Z. MacDonald describes women’s entrance into universities and colleges in Canada, beginning in 1870. From the beginning women fought for coeducation, which would give them access to the same universities, degrees, and classrooms as men – and the campaigns were successful. But the opportunities that opened to women would narrow by the 1920s, as a backlash against the growing presence of women on campuses resulted in separate academic programs and barriers restricting their admission to the emerging fields of science and engineering. In this post, Sara MacDonald describes the challenges facing women interested in the STEM fields in the early twentieth century.
In December 1882, women were expelled from the medical school at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The story put about by their physiology professor was that he had been forced to garble his course material to avoid offending the women (“So absurd as tho’ we did not want all the science they could give us,” one woman student wrote). The truth was that the professor, deeply opposed to teaching women alongside men, had been embellishing his lectures with sexual anecdotes and jokes, and the women finally walked out in protest. The men students, who had stamped and jeered as the women left the room, threatened to decamp to another school if the women continued to attend their classes. Fearing this sudden loss of revenue, the college decided to expel its women students and not to admit new women students in future. Women were not permitted back into medicine at Queen’s until 1943.
The persistent gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is well documented. According to Statistics Canada, in 2015 women accounted for only 24.4 per cent of people employed in professional science occupations in Canada. Yet during the first decades of women’s admission to universities in Canada, from the 1880s to the early 1900s, women moved eagerly into science and medicine. The early bachelor of arts degree required all students to take courses in both the arts and the sciences, including classics, mathematics, and philosophy, as well as chemistry, botany, zoology, and geology. Most universities did not have separate faculties of science until well into the twentieth century, and only in the 1920s did the BSc (bachelor of science) emerge as a distinct degree granted to students who specialized in mathematics or science.
Grace Annie Lockhart was the first woman to graduate with a degree in Canada or Britain, earning the three-year BS degree, bachelor of science and English literature, from Mount Allison College in 1875. Her obvious sense of discomfort in this class photo is accentuated by the fact that she is the only graduate not wearing a gown or holding a mortarboard – because Mount Allison faculty opposed women wearing academic dress. Later women students would insist on wearing their own caps and gowns. At Acadia University, Katie Hall (class of 1891) adopted the gown without asking permission, after discovering that the men students were wearing bulky clothes under their gowns to keep warm in the cold classrooms and unheated corridors.
By the 1890s, women undergraduates were moving in greater numbers into the sciences, entering the newer field of physics, where they found employment as laboratory assistants and researchers, or preparing to study medicine. This photo shows students at work in a physics lab at McMaster University, c. 1899. In the decades that followed, academic specialization generated new disciplines in the social sciences, as well as the separation of the sciences and the arts, creating different degree programs. For most women students, these changes – combined with a masculine culture that created exclusionary attitudes within the sciences – resulted in a gradual but relentless movement toward academic separation.
After World War I, university administrators fretted about a new tendency among students to challenge rules and authority. Young women – such as these friends outside Annesley Hall at Victoria College, University of Toronto, c. 1920 – were blamed for the perceived frivolity of youth culture on campus. Women were not the only ones dancing, but their growing presence at the university was singled out by many as the source of the problem. By the 1920s, women applying to faculties of medicine in Canada usually faced enrolment quotas. If they were admitted, they often met with antagonism in the classroom, a lack of women role models, and limited opportunities for clinical placements or research positions. At the same time, fearing that BA degrees were becoming feminized and diminishing in value, Canadian universities created professional courses – such as household science, nursing, and library science – that were designed specifically to attract women away from faculties of arts and science.
The legacy of these developments is still with us. Canadian universities perpetuate historically constructed barriers on the basis of race and Indigeneity, as well as gender. Women have gained access to all institutions of higher education in Canada yet are underrepresented in many academic programs, particularly the physical sciences, computer science, engineering, and mathematics. In analyzing the roots of the gender gap in STEM fields, it would be wrong to assume that women have always been excluded from the sciences or that historically they weren’t interested in these fields. University women experienced greater opportunities to study science and medicine in the 1880s and 1890s than they did for most of the century that followed, but the door that briefly opened soon closed again.
Sara Z. MacDonald is associate professor in the Department of History at Laurentian University. For more, see her book University Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in Canada.
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