THE EXPERIENCE OF WOMEN AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1906-1956.
By
LEE JEAN STEWART
A., The University of British Columbia, 1982
THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
(History)
We accept this thesis as conforming
to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
October 1986
© Lee Jean Stewart, 1986. In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission.
Department of
The University of British Columbia 1956 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Y3
DE-6 (3/81) ABSTRACT
This study of the coeducational experience of women at the
University of British Columbia from 1916 to 1956 is threefold.
It examines how the institution adapted to the female presence, the ways women assimilated or accommodated themselves to their environment, and the relationship of the changing climate of social expectations of women to the purposes of women's education and their experience at university.
The study is placed in both a thematic and a regional context. The thematic framework is suggested by the historiography concerned with women's admission to universities in the nineteenth century. This literature establishes the role of the "uncompromising" and "separatist" feminists, partisan politics, public opinion, social definitions of femininity, and institutional structures in determining the form and content of women's education. The social, economic and political factors that account for the development of higher education in the province define the regional context.
This study finds that separatist feminists exerted a significant influence in defining women's education in the early part of the twentieth century. However, social, political and economic considerations guided the establishing of Nursing and Home Economics Departments at UBC. Institutional modifications such as the appointment of a Dean of Women and the building of women's residences, similarly depended on practical economic solutions to appease feminist agitation. iii
Irrespective of the equality that is implied by
coeducation, social expectations of women continued to act as obstacles to women's participation in higher education and ensured their secondary status. Female students devised
strategies to ease the contradictory expectations of the academic and the social community. They chose nonconformity to
gender expectations, conformity to standards of femininity, the precarious balance of double conformity to academic and feminine standards, and separatist feminism to redress the
inequity of women's secondary status within higher education. iv
CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER I THE THEMATIC FRAMEWORK 5
II THE REGIONAL CONTEXT ...... 22
III THE ACCOMMODATION OF THE UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DEPARTMENTS OF NURSING AND HOME ECONOMICS 63
Nursing ...... 63 Home Economics 75
IV THE ACCOMMODATION OF THE UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DEAN OF WOMEN AND WOMEN'S RESIDENCES 125
Dean of Women 125 Women's Residences 139
V THE FEMININE IMAGE AND THE FEMALE REALITY: THE ACCOMMODATION OF WOMEN TO CONTRADICTORY EXPECTATIONS 161
CONCLUSION ...... 203
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CONSULTED ...... , . . 207 Part A Primary Sources ...... 207 Part B Secondary Sources 210
APPENDIX 220 V
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Page Figure
1. UBC Enrollment: 1914-15 to 1950-51 163
Tables
1. Residence of Female Students While Attending McGill University College of British Columbia
1907-14, and the University of British Columbiar 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, 1949-50 143
2. Parental Occupations of Female Students Enrolled at McGill College of British Columbia, 1907-14, and the University of British Columbia, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, 1949-50 169
3. Religious Affiliations of Female Students Enrolled at McGill University College of British Columbia, 1907-14, and the University of British Columbia, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, 1949-50 .... 170
4. Religious Affiliations by Sex and Quinquennial Age Groups for Vancouver in 1931 172
5. Nationalities of Parents of Female Students Attending the University of British Columbia 1929-30, 1939-40 173
6. Birth Place of Female Students Enrolled at McGill University College of British Columbia, 1907-14, and the University of British Columbia, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40 173 ACKNOWLEDG EMENTS
My supervisor Dr. Margaret Prang and UBC Archivist Laurenda Daniells were instrumental in directing my general research interests to the focus of this inquiry. Throughout the research and writing of this thesis, Dr. Prang's comments, questions, suggestions, and criticisms were always incisive and challenging.
Mrs. Daniells' enthusiasm for the study and her expertise at retrieving institutional records helped to reduce the frustration I often felt in attempting to research the diffuse subject of the female experience. The index to sources pertaining to women at UBC, began by Frances Wasserlein and Penny Washington in the summer of 1979, complemented my own research. It is my hope that Wasserlein and Washington (whom I have never met) will find this thesis a satisfying conclusion to the project they must have envisioned several years ago.
I am appreciative, too, of Dr. Robert A.J. McDonald's forebearance in our discussions about social class; of Dr. W. Peter Ward's recommendations regarding the sorting of occupational categories; and of Jay Handel's assistance with the computer graphics.
My friend and fellow student, Donna Lomas, whose interests and areas of expertise are very different from my own, was most supportive and sympathetic to this project. I wish, here, to express my gratitude for her unflagging encouragement, her positive thinking, and helpful criticism.
Finally, I could not have invested so much time and energy in my academic interests without the cooperation, understanding and love of my family. I dedicate this thesis to my mainstay, John Levin, who helped me in every way to become a full-time student; to my sons D'Arcy and Simon Rideout, who never held it against me that I was not a full-time homemaker; and to my daughter, Tracy Rideout, who left in search of her "roots" and now begins her own experience in higher education at the University of Toronto. 1
INTRODUCTION
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, higher education in
Great Britain and North America was an exclusively male prerogative. Indeed, the argument that higher education had been articulated by and for men and that women were neither physically nor mentally equipped to participate proved to be one of the obstacles that exponents of women's education had to overcome. In their efforts to establish that female capabilities were equal to male, the early pioneers of women's education would settle for nothing less than the admission of women to academic courses identical to those offered to male students.1 Previously, women's education was confined to the
'parlour arts' but the feminist reformers envisioned higher learning that would enable women to fulfil functions more useful than decorative.
The admission of women to universities often hinged on the provision of separate learning and living space for female students. In the nineteenth century the residential Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge constituted an integral part of higher education for men. The lack of accommodation for women, therefore, was an obvious obstacle to their admission while residential requirements were instrumental in determining admission policy. Generally, North American institutions did not establish residential Colleges in the Oxbridge model, but where women had to win access to male institutions, numerous regulations governed women's activity and mobility on the 2
2 ... campus. Some universities required female students to attend separate classes in their own affiliated College and to live in the campus residence.3 Undoubtedly, these arrangements were intended to preserve the traditionally male domain as much as to protect female virtue. When segregated conditions were insisted upon, women's participation in universities was often delayed until endowments provided suitable facilities.^
In the eastern United States, the "imitative colleges" resolved some of the controversy surrounding women's education.
Vassar, Wellesley and Smith Colleges for women were all permanent institutions with high academic standards and considerable prestige. These Colleges proved that higher education with rigid standards was appropriate for women.^
Separate education in either an independent or coordinate college required generous endowments which were not readily available to newly settled populations. The newer universities in the western states and provinces failed to establish separate institutions for women, but accepted them in the same classrooms as men with little or no controversy. By the turn of the century, the justice of educating women was no longer a subject for debate and in the years before World War I, coeducation gained respectibility. Increasingly, universities introduced courses aimed at women and their future professional roles in society.
Women had been excluded from higher education . for a considerable period of history, yet the process whereby women's education became defined and acceptable was completed in less 3 than fifty years. By the time British Columbia established a provincial university in 1915, the enrollment of women was assured. The accommodation of the university to women now bears closer scrutiny. An examination of women's experience in the formative years of higher education in British Columbia affords further insight into the historical processes of change and continuity that altered or confirmed social expectations of women and defined their education. 4
Notes
1 Emily Davies recognized that women had to show they could withstand the rigours of higher learning as well as men. In 1869 Davies founded a Ladies' College in a house at Hitchin, outside of Cambridge, and persuaded Cambridge professors to lecture to her students. She also arranged for her students to take the Cambridge examinations. In 1873 the experiment was validated when Davies' school was unofficially incorporated by Cambridge as Girton College.
For instance, at Mount Allison, New Brunswick, the female academy opened in 1854 in close proximity to the existing male academy but the female branch would be "entirely distinct ... and the students of the different branches will not be allowed to associate or even meet, either in public or in private, except in the presence of some officers of the Institution." John G. Reid, "The Education of Women at Mount Allison, 1854-1914," Acadiensis, Volume XII, No. 2 (Spring) 1983, p. 6.
This was true for Cornell and McGill Universities.
^ McGill would not open its doors to women before the wealthy businessman Donald A. Smith offered a sum of $50,000 in 1884 to establish a College for women.
Adele Simmons, "Education and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: The Response of Educational Institutions to the Changing Role of Women," in Berenice A. Carroll ed., Liberating Women's History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), p. 116. c Oberlin College, Ohio, first admitted women and granted them a regular arts degree in 1841. It was the state institutions of the Middle West, in Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan, which were responsible for the growing acceptance of coeducation. Simmons, p. 120. 5
CHAPTER I
THE THEMATIC FRAMEWORK
Although removed in time and place from the controversy surrounding women's admission to universities, this study of women's education in twentieth century British Columbia cannot avoid returning to that nineteenth century experience to establish the historical roots of women's participation in higher education. More significant, however, than a narrative review of the events and personalities that ensured the admission of women to Canadian, American or British universities in the mid 1800s is the historical analysis that seeks to account for these radical changes in women's education.1
In the words of Margaret Bryant, the extension of education to women in nineteenth century England represented 2
"the most unexpected revolution of the century." In spite of formidable opposition, the movement for equal education gained a momentum that not only escaped contemporary understanding but also resisted historical explanation. Conventional histories of nineteenth century Britain acknowledged, in general terms, that women's admission to secondary and higher education was but one of the several progressive reform measures that characterized 3 the "age of improvement." In turn biographers of notable feminist educators credited the dedication of a few outstanding women for reforms that were, perhaps, too revolutionary to have been possible without reference of the wider context of social 6 change.
In the last decade historians have attempted a more sophisticated analysis of the social changes that made it possible for half the population to receive public schooling.4
The increased accessibility to education for women was not solely a product of feminist agitation; but neither was it the intention of the majority of the middle class reformers to extend education to women.5 Although nineteenth century educational reform was essentially a middle class movement it had been aimed primarily at men. Women who sought to convert public interest (and capital) to the problems of girls' education nearly always retreated to private solutions.**
Bureaucratic and institutional changes that might facilitate the women's cause were occasionally endorsed by enlightened
7 pedagogues. However, Sheila Fletcher shows that the long term efficacy of any proposed extension of schooling to girls was g subject to pragmatic political considerations. Politicians perceived that education for girls and women remained a periphery concern to the majority of public opinion and its support rarely gained any political advantage.
Institutional reforms were a prerequisite for the admission of women to the most revered of the British universities. While the commitment to women's education seldom precipitated the dismantling of discriminatory admission policies, women ultimately stood to benefit from internal and external pressures to reform Oxford and Cambridge Universities
— long regarded by dissenters and non-conformists as citadels 7 of privilege.
In effect, these prestigious medieval communities were moved by Parliamentary intervention to reflect more accurately the utilitarian values of the new middle class. The reformation of these established institutions and the creation of new ones in the nineteenth century eliminated religious affiliation as a means of limiting admission; altered the curriculum to include the new subjects of history, applied sciences and modern languages; questioned traditional teaching methods; and invested in the university a national responsibility to replace its elite one.9 Clearly the disestablishmentarians succeeded in removing obstacles to university admission that faced both dissenters and women, not only as religious tests were removed but also residence requirements. The modification and expansion of nineteenth century education promised greater social mobility for middle class men, but women had to overcome more than institutional charters in their attempts to create new social roles for themselves.
Social attitudes to women, in particular ascriptions of femininity, provided subtle and profound barriers that delayed, obstructed and attempted to define women's educational ambitions. Joan Burstyn examines the ideas surrounding the controversial issue of admitting women to higher education.1^
The articulate opponents — chiefly members of the medical professions, clergymen, reformers of male education and idealists — feared any changes they believed would 8
fundamentally alter the relationship of the sexes and upset the
social order as they knew it. In effect, the opposition sought
to defend the Victorian ideal of womanhood and the notion of
separate spheres which ensured that men and women would not
compete with each other.
The ideal of womanhood appeared as a paradoxical by-product of industrialization. As the industrialized society
came to rely less on the toil of women in the home, the middle
class constructed social values that ensured women would, in fact, remain in the home, a testimony to the economic success of their male relatives. Middle class women were expected to pattern their activity after the aristocratic model and thus to differentiate themselves from the working class who found it
increasingly necessary to combine work in the home with paid employment in industry. In order to maintain status, middle class women were required to isolate themselves from the work force. The Victorian housewife was imbued with a moral purity
that was intended to create a sanctity of the home and inspire
the management of the household and the mothering of the
children. Religious arguments reinforced the nineteenth century ideal of womanhood and supported the belief that the
relationship between the sexes had been pre-ordained.x^
The opponents of higher education for women attempted to prove that differences between the sexes were innate, or if
environmental, they were necessary to continue civilized society. Scientific and anthropological evidence was amassed to prove that female physical characteristics would impede 9
women's learning; when this evidence became discounted,
opponents argued that the effort demanded by higher education would injure women's reproductive capacity.1*^
Burstyn demonstrates how the Victorian ideal of womanhood was central to definitions of class and the preservation of the
status quo. She also confronts the ideal with reality to show
that for many middle class families the ideal and idle wife was
both economically impossible and psychologically intolerable.
Many women needed to provide for themselves, and the range of
appropriate work for middle class women had diminished.
Demographic changes, which increased family size and the number
of single women, compounded the financial pressures on incomes
struggling to maintain the rising standards of middle class
life. J The opposition fought for an ideal of womanhood that
ran counter to mounting economic imperatives.
Burstyn points out that throughout the nineteenth century
there was no consensus on the purpose of higher education for women and the issues in dispute were confused. Reformers were
obliged to defend themselves in terms defined by their
opponents. While the opponents to women's education did not
stop the movement to admit women to colleges and eventually to
receive degrees, they managed to exert some influence on the
kind of education that would be available to women.
Sara Delamont and Carol Dyhouse look more carefully at the
ideologies which determined the kind of education women 14
received. Like Burstyn, these two historians are concerned with the distance between reality and the ideal, and the 10 contradictory expectations inherent therein.
Delamont traces the central theme she calls "double
conformity" that persisted throughout the establishment of
education for middle and upper class girls and women in both
Britain and the United States.x^ This double conformity
concerned the strict adherence on the part of both educators and educated to two sets of rigid standards: those of
"ladylike" or "feminine" behaviour at all times, and those of
the dominant male cultural and educational system. Educational pioneers believed that to do otherwise would be to jeopardize the whole of female education. In effect, this is the legacy
to which Burstyn refers when she writes that reformers were forced to defend their position in their critics' terms.
Because many Victorians believed that scholarship and ladylike behaviour were incompatible, so the schools and colleges set out to prove them wrong.x^
The educational reformers who were determined that women
should do what men did, Delamont calls "the uncompromising".
But there were also those who favoured modified curriculum for 17 women — "the separatists". The separatists wanted courses for women which were particularly suited to their future as teachers, nurses and mothers. The uncompromising maintained that "separate never means equal", and thus the educational pioneers were forced to make no concessions to proposals for 18
separate curriculum or examinations. Delamont concludes that the snare of double conformity was unavoidable and an
uncompromising strategy was essential for success at the level 11
1 9 of higher education.
Carol Dyhouse shows that women's education at the
secondary level was already directed toward the role women were
expected to fulfil in society.^0 Dyhouse examines the
development of women's education between 1880 and 1920 in
Britain in the context of "Social Darwinistic" ideas. Although
Dyhouse rejects a simple causal relationship between
traditional conservative arguments about women's role in
society and the Social-Darwinistic terminology of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, her study shows how
these ideas lent credence to arguments that emphasized the
important role of women as "guardians of the race". The net
result was increased pressure to emphasize domestic subjects in the secondary education of girls.
Joyce Pederson explores the relationship between 21
institutional structures and social values. Pederson argues
that the new girls' public schools and women's colleges
stressed different behavioural norms and social values than those emphasized in private schools. The new public schools and colleges differed from private girls* schools in their
organization, the nature of their ties to the outer world,
their authority patterns, and the structure of their
populations. Whereas the traditional private schools were
smaller and the girls were often singled out for special
treatment according to their social status, the age range was
greater and relationships were more dependent or familial. The
newer, larger schools emphasized similar treatment for all 12
students, grouped them with others according to their age and academic training, and placed them in a more competitive
situation that emphasized individual achievement over social
status. Sports became acceptable for women, and more
independent, impersonal relationships were encouraged between staff and students.
Like Fletcher, Pederson concludes that educational reforms affecting women owed less to feminist commitment than to other factors. In this case, structural properties of the
institutions themselves, which responded to a more general process of change, suited those new social groups interested in acquiring elite status through academic achievement.
This reflection on the formative period of women's education in England reveals patterns of change and continuity
in the relationship of women to their social and physical environments. Although the admission of women to secondary and higher education proceeded from the efforts of the middle class to assume meaningful and influential roles in the new social order, these historians confirm that the movement for educational reforms was not committed wholly to feminist
ideology. The division within the ranks of the middle class about the expectations of women in the new order, as
illustrated by the Victorian ideal of womanhood, indicated a deeper cultural conflict of feminist and patriarchal values.
Throughout the controversy surrounding the education of women, the social meaning of womanhood remained a potent agent of
socialization aimed at confining and maintaining women's proper 13 sphere in the nineteenth century. As social, political and economic imperatives exerted pressures on the ideal and real condition of women, the movement to extend education to women appeared to recognize feminists' demands but, in fact, was largely indifferent to them. Women's education, as it was endorsed by feminist educators, became a matter of the accommodation of women to existing male oriented structures in the belief that this represented equality for women.
Nevertheless, the significant alterations in the form and content of women's education reflected changes in the wider context of society that refashioned ideals of womanhood and recast definitions of education for women. J In response to a changing climate of social and economic expectations the middle class gradually rejected an increasingly anachronistic, ornamental role for women in favour of a potentially more useful, practical one. The middle class was not entirely comfortable with the implications of higher education for women and continued to resist the conferment of degrees and women's entry into traditionally male professions.
In North America, the issue of women's education did not arouse the contentious, often militant proportions experienced in Great Britain. The cultural and geographic environments of
Canada and the United States may have offered less resistance to proponents of equal education for women than the centuries of tradition and custom that defined British institutions and attitudes.
Initially, separate or coordinate colleges served to 14 uphold standards of Victorian morality that objected to the intermingling of the sexes and preserved the notion of separate spheres. However separate women's colleges were an additional expense and relied on scarce philanthropic endowments. When it became unfashionable to publicly oppose education for women, educators might continue to forestall it due to lack of funds for the women's college. Alternately, women "bought" their way in to establish institutions through subsidies and gifts that were made available on condition of the admission of women.24
American and Canadian historians, Woody, Newcomer and
Gillett agree that economic considerations proved more important than democratic idealism in encouraging the development of education for women in North America.25 The first coeducational colleges, in the west, evidently opened their doors to women because their fees generated additional revenues and Legislatures could not afford to establish 26 separate institutions to accommodate women. Coeducation as it was implemented by institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, therefore, might signify compliance with feminist pressure to admit women to universities, but not necessarily commitment to their education.
A growing literature of women's experience in higher education attests that women entered an environment that held 27 contradictory expectations. Some historians have argued further that the benefits to women were more apparent than 2 8 real. In most instances the accommodation of colleges and universities to the female presence, beyond their admission, 15
7 9 was illusory.
The historical analysis of the economic, political,
institutional and intellectual dimensions of social change that affected women's status in Victorian society yields fundamental
insights about the relationship of women to their society with concomitant implications for their education.3^ Thus the conclusions of historians about the development of women's education in the nineteenth century provide not only a relevant preamble to this study of women's experience in higher education at the University of British Columbia but also a thematic framework for an inquiry into women's coeducational experience in British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century. The first of these themes is suggested by
Fletcher's research which shows that support for women's education was shaped more by partisan than by feminist politics. The long awaited establishment of the new provincial university in British Columbia in 1915 could hardly have been other than a political event. Not only did it occur during a
"bust cycle" in the provincial economy but also the Great War and women's suffrage hovered on the political horizon.
Fletcher's conclusions prompt questions about the impact women's organizations or feminists had on the founding of the university and the articulation of women's education in this economic and political climate. Did the combination of local and world events strengthen or weaken the women's cause?
By 1915, nearly half a century of coeducation in one of
its several forms in North America and Great Britain had 16
removed the more visible barriers to women's participation in higher education. However, Burstyn establishes that social definitions of femininity influenced both the formal and informal aspects of women's education throughout the nineteenth century. Analysis of women's experience in the twentieth century should, therefore, take account of the changing climate of expectations for women. To what extent did these expectations seek to define education — along the lines suggested by Dyhouse's research — in a deliberate attempt at social engineering?
The two views of women's education, represented in
Delamont's terms by the "uncompromising" and the "separatists", persisted in the twentieth century. But were the supporters of curricula designed for women's roles as teachers, nurses, and mothers looking backward or forward? Perhaps the uncompromising and the separatists in the twentieth century illustrate the dilemma of feminist strategies which cannot resolve the contradictions inherent in the demand for equality and the assertion of sexual difference.
One of the most enduring aspects of women's experience at university may be the most difficult to surmise. Pederson's research indicates that the socialization that occurs within the institutional environment constitutes an important element of a woman's education as it may affirm or alter expectations of women in society. Women interact with their social and physical environment in countless ways, from their classroom and residential arrangements to their recreational and service 17 organizations, and are affected on both conscious and unconscious levels. Often the subtleties of what may, in
retrospect, be termed discriminatory attitudes toward women were not perceived as such by individuals who accepted caveats or constraints as custom. Nevertheless, social attitudes formed solely on the basis of sex determined and influenced women's self-perceptions and behaviour. Historical analysis must look further than the subjective understanding of the
individual experience to identify how socialization reflects the larger relationship of women with their social community.
To this end, a study of women's collective experience at the
University of British Columbia over five decades will perhaps
contribute to an improved understanding of the forces, both
regional and cultural, that shaped women's lives and determined
their education. 18
Notes
1 A detailed overview and chronology of women's education may be found in Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred; Girls' Education in English History (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1965).
2 Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education- of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London: University of London Institute of Education, 1979), p. 22.
Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1959).
4 For instance: Sheila Fletcher, Feminists and Bureaucrats (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1980); Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (London: Croom Helm, 1980); Carol Dyhouse, "Social Darwinistic Ideas and the Development of Women's Education in England 1880-1920", History of • Education 5 (1976), pp. 41-58; Sara Delamont, "The Contradictions in Ladies' Education", The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural_and_Physical World, ed. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duff in, ppl 134-63; Joyce s". Pedersen, "The Reform of Women's Secondary and Higher Education: Institutional Change and Social Values in Mid- and Late-Victorian England", History of Education Quarterly 19 (1979), pp. 61-91. 5 The dons at Cambridge were reluctant to embrace the women's cause because they believed it would detract from their own — of defending male liberal education, which was under attack by the utilitarians — and also, of impeding the reformation of the college system. Other reformers claimed that girls' education would be at the expense of boys', particularly of the working classes.
^ Frances Mary Buss, Dorothea Beale and Emily Davies appeared before the Taunton Commission to plead for endowments for girls' education but had to rely on their own finances to run their schools. 7 Notably, Henry Sidgwick. Although he differed with Emily Davies' "uncompromising" stand he was one of the founders of Newnham College, Cambridge. See Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge arid Victorian Society in Victorian England (London: Faber, 1968) .
8 Fletcher, g This is, admittedly, a whig interpretation. The new industrial and commercial interests urged that universities became national institutions in the service of the entire nation and not merely useful to clergy, gentry and aristocracy. Rothblatt. * 19
x® Burstyn.
11 By contrast, in Canada, interpretations of the gospel by Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists often led to an increased recognition of their responsibility to provide women with higher education, albeit to fit them as better helpmates for men. Prom Donna Yavorsky Ronish, "Canadian Universities 1869-1875: British and American influences," Unpublished paper delivered at the conference of the Canadian History of Education Association in Vancouver, October, 1983.
12 Burstyn.
13 For a full discussion of the standards of consumption and behaviour that defined middle class family status, see J.A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning Among the Victorian Middle Class. (London: Routledge, 1954) .
14 Delamont; Dyhouse. 15 Delamont, P- 140. 16 Delamont, pp. 144-5. 17 Delamont, P. 154. 18 Delamont, P. 159. 19 Delamont, P- 159. 20 Dyhouse. 21 Pederson. 22 Pe dersen, P- 86. 23 Prior to the mid-nineteenth needed foremost to be "accomplished" in the parlour arts of music, drawing, and dancing. These embellishments would increase her eligibility for marriage, the only profession open to a woman, and enhance her ornamental role in the household. In the words of John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: 1865): "A woman ought to know the same language, or science, ably so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband's pleasures and in those of his best friends." In the public schools and women's colleges, women might acquire useful skills for more public spheres of life in late Victorian England. Women identified educational and service occupations as being compatible with the image of womanhood and suited for women's work. These pastimes had been effectively pioneered by women's voluntary efforts in benevolent societies and reform organizations. But the increased complexity inherent in civic bureaucracy demanded a degree of professionalization and expertise. The higher education of women then took on an 20
increased practical value as employment in the new professions, spawned by advances in public health and attitudes toward childhood and education, promised, if not an alternate choice to marriage and motherhood, an important intermediary occupation.
24 Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education For Women (New York: Harper, 1959) , pi! 153. Endowments accounted for the admission of women to Cornell in 1870 and McGill in 1884. See Charlotte Williams Conable, Women at Cornell - The Myth of Equal Education. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) and Margaret Gillett, We_Walked Very-Warily, A History of Women at McGill (Montreal: Eden Press, 1981) .
Thomas Woody, A History of Women's EducationJ in the United.states (New York: Octagon, 1974); Newcomer; Gillett. Z{j Gillett, p. 10.
27 Sara A. Burstall, Retrospect and Prospect.' Sixty Years of Women's Education. (London: Longmans, 1933) ; Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford. (New York: Macmillan, 1960); David Riesman, "Some Dilemmas of Women's Education," Educational Record, Fall 1965, pp. 422-34; Janet Lever and Pepper Schwarz, Women at Yale (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971); Rita McWill iams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge. ' A Men's University — Though of • a Mixed^ Type. (London: Victor Gollenz Ltd., 1975); Conable; Gillett; ReiS. 2 8 Sheila M. Rothman, Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1978) argues that coeducational public universities reinforced women's social role, as wife-companion from the 1920s to 1950s, both in and out of the classroom. Conable, op. cit., p. 20, argues that the women at Cornell were treated separately and unequally from the men; that the unequal sex ratio maintained women in traditional sex roles; and that women learned it was more important to be charming, feminine and passive, than to be intelligent and aggressive. Jill Conway, "Perspectives on the History of Women's Education in the United States," History of Education Quarterly, 14 (1974), pp. 1-12, challenges Woody's assertion that coeducation was automatically a "liberating experience" for American women. She argues that women need to experience a female controlled and directed world, if they are to discover a sense of their own potential for self-directing activity. Coeducation in the mid-nineteenth century, claims Conway, deprived women students of the opportunity to experience a self-supporting and self-directing female community. 29 The extent to which institutions might accommodate women students has been an issue subject to debate since the nineteenth century. However, significant studies in the twentieth century have confirmed that many of the existing procedures and structures of higher education remain 21 discriminatory to women. See Harvard University, Prel imiriary Report on the Status of Women at Harvard (Cambridge: 1970) cited Tn Nemiroff, Greta, "Women and Education," McGill Journal of Education Vol. X (Spring 1975). See also: Canada, Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada Report (Ottawa, 1970) .
For a theoretical discussion of the connection between the social and political status of women, and social definitions of womanhood/femininity, see Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History," History Workshop Spring 1984. See also Adele Simmons, "Education and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America: The Response of Educational Institutions to the Changing Role of Women," in L ibe r a ting • • Women' s History for an examination of the close relationship between societal attitudes toward women and the nature of educational opportunities for them. Patricia Alberg Graham, "Expansion and Exclusion: A History of Women in American Higher Education," SIGNS: Journal of Women in^Culture and Society, Summer 1978^ Vol. T~, NoT T~. argued that explanations of the historical role of women in higher education in the United States between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries rest upon the understanding of a series of related changes in both education and the status of women. 22
CHAPTER II
THE REGIONAL CONTEXT
Before attempting to explore how women's education proceeded at the University of British Columbia, it is necessary to review the early history of higher education in the province, and to establish the social, economic, political and, perhaps, psychological background that fashioned attitudes toward the education of women up to World War One.
Although the University of British Columbia was not established until 1915, the first Act to establish a provincial university was introduced into the Legislative Assembly in 1890.
This Act was precipitated by "friends of higher education" eager to implant the idea of a university in the growing provincial society. The University Act of 1890 envisioned a provincial institution that would offer an Arts Course to encompass all branches of liberal education, a Science Course to include agriculture, mechanics, mining and civil engineering, and a
Teacher Training Course or Normal School.1 The Act also provided for governance modelled after Oxford and Cambridge and invited "graduates of any University in Her Majesty's Dominions, who shall have resided in this Province two months previous to the passing of this Act" to register as members of the first 2
Convocation. Of the 125 men who responded, the majority resided in large population centres, and were doctors, educationists, engineers, judges, lawyers, clergy and members of 3 the Legislature. Evidently there were no female graduates in 23
British Columbia in 1890.
The first convocation formed a committee to draft revisions that became the British Columbia University Amendment Act of
1891. This committee repealed thirty-one of thirty-four sections of the earlier Act and substituted fifty-five sections.
There were to be four Faculties: Arts and Science, Medicine,
Law, and Applied Science.4 The Normal School was no longer to be included in the new university as a result of opposition within the Department of Education.5 The Senate would be the senior administrative body. Section fifty-two ensured the admission of women as it required that
the senate shall make full provision for the education of women at the University in such a manner as it shall deem most fitting: Provided however, that no woman shall, by reason of her sex, be deprived of any advantages or privileges accorded to other students of the University.g
The necessity of this amendment indicates that the admission of women was not entirely a foregone conclusion before 7 the turn of the century. Similarly, the phrase "in such a manner as it shall deem most fitting" invites speculation as to the form that women's education in British Columbia might have taken in 1891. It is unlikely that, in the minds of those who drafted this amendment, equal education was synonymous with the coeducation of men and women in the same classrooms. This was not the model envisioned twenty-one years later in February
1912, when the Minister of Education, Henry Esson Young, drew up the instructions and regulations of the architectural competition for university buildings. Young foresaw a women's college comprised of: 24
a group of two or three buildings for instruc• tion (lecture halls, library, laboratories, offices)... residence dormitories, commons,
clubrooms...and gymnasium....R
The proposed college would have provided separate space for all instruction, residence and physical training for women.
For better or worse, the vision of a separate college for women proved even more remote than the permanent campus for the provincial university, which was not realized before 1925.
Nevertheless, the intent to make higher education equally available to women, established by the Amendment Act 1891 was not tampered with in the subsequent Acts, prior to the opening of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1915.10 The financial difficulties, which halted construction of the university from 1914-1923, precluded the building of separate facilities for women. Coeducation without segregation was, in fact, the cheapest way in which the university could accommodate women and not deprive them of any advantages or privileges, in accordance with the spirit expressed by the long defunct first convocation.
It is difficult to assess whether the views of the members of the committee, who entrenched equal education for women in the Amendment Act of 1891, represented popular opinion, or personal commitment. Soward points out that members of the convocation had graduated from universities where coeducation, in one of its several forms, had already been established;11 also the clergy were well represented, particularly 12 13 Methodists, who had a tradition of educating women. The position of Methodists on the issue of women's higher education 25 in British Columbia was made clear at the B.C. Conference of the
Methodist Church in 1891. Members passed a resolution that congratulated the Legislature for the Act to establish a provincial university:
...where the youth of both sexes, and of all denominations may receive instruction in the secular branches of higher education.^
When the Amendment Act was presented to the Legislature on
April 1, 1891, the only issue that was discussed concerned an amendment to ensure that no religious dogma would be taught or religious tests required of any student or employee.15 Although fifteen days later, this same Legislature perfunctorily defeated a Bill to extend the provincial franchise to women, again with little discussion, the issue of women's education had provoked no opposition or attention.Perhaps by 1891 the prestigious edifices of Oxford and Cambridge not only served as models for university governance and sectarian education but also for equal 17 education.
But these Acts, after all, represented only the 'idea' of a university framed by an elite group who regarded a university as a symbol of the continuity of the cultural ties with Britain, and of the coming-of-age of their new province. The proposed provincial university remained merely an 'idea' in the face of local obstacles that proved more contentious than either the sectarian debates or the question of women's education in nineteenth century England.
The rivalry between Victoria and Vancouver over the permanent site for the university campus delayed the 26 establishment of the University of British Columbia for 18 twenty-five years. In the meantime higher education was provided in the lower mainland by private and religious institutions. Whetham College, at the corner of Georgia and
Granville Streets Vancouver, offered preparatory courses for men for the first and second year examinations in Arts at any university.19 This college opened in 1890 but closed three years later due to financial difficulties. In New Westminster, the Methodist Church founded Columbian College in 1892,. and was affiliated with Victoria College in Cobourg, Ontario and later with the University of Toronto. Columbian College was coeducational and offered courses in all four years toward 20 degrees in Arts and Theology. When it became evident that the jealousies between mainland and island interests had effectively aborted the intentions of the University Act of 1891 to establish a provincial institution, a Provincial Bill in 1894 granted permission to all high schools in the province to affiliate with any university of recognized standing. The
Victoria and Vancouver High Schools affiliated with McGill
University in Montreal to provide the first year in Arts in 1899 21 and the second year in 1902.
From 1901 to 1908 "the university question" elicited letters to the editors of the local newspapers as public opinion reacted to the government's handling of the problem of higher education in the province. The supporters of a provincial university expressed concern that affiliation with universities outside the province posed many problems: the expense to 27 students of going east to complete the final years, the loss of young people to eastern universities where they might remain, and the cost to the province to feed students to the eastern
OO universities. ^ Some writers argued that a provincial university would allow access to all students, while affiliation with eastern universities benefited only the wealthy who could afford to send their children out of the province to complete their degrees.23 The Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church suggested that high school matriculation should qualify students for choices other than McGill because "lady students," who were not yet allowed to study medicine at McGill, would have to make alternative arrangements to continue their studies.24 The authors of these letters foresaw that the continued absence of a provincial university would aggravate social inequities and ultimately threaten provincial prosperity. Moreover, this correspondence indicated that 'the idea of a university' had matured into a 'demand for higher education' under provincial control.
While the demand for higher education in the province escalated, the Legislature appeared reluctant to incur the full financial responsibility for a provincial university. In the face of public pressure, the Government welcomed an intermediary solution presented by "McGill men," one of whom, Lemuel F. 25
Robertson, was a member of the Vancouver High School staff.
Under this plan McGill University would administer in the province the first two years of university education in Arts and
Applied Sciences. This proposal to establish McGill University 28
College of British Columbia (MUCBC) evoked a stormy debate between McGill and Toronto University graduates about the preference shown by the province to the former institution over the latter.26 Administrators of Columbian College also objected to the injustice of allowing McGill to confer degrees when
Columbian College had been refused a charter to confer degrees in Arts on the grounds that no other institution should pre-empt the prerogatives that belonged to the provincial university.2^
The advocates of a British Columbian university remained similarly dissatisfied.
Matters came to a head in February 1906. Amidst charges that handing over higher education to McGill was "un-British
Columbian, un-British, and vicious"2** a new University Bill was set before the Legislature that empowered the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning to establish McGill University 2 9
College of British Columbia.
The establishment of MUCBC strengthened interest in a provincial university. The details of the inexorable legislative preparation for the University of British Columbia 3 0 from 1906 to 1915 will not be recounted here, except to note that in subsequent revisions of the University Act, the university lost its initial resemblance to English and Scottish universities as it more clearly imitated practices of eastern 31
Canadian institutions. However, a brief discussion of the change in outlook that now generated the demand for a provincial university will also clarify attitudes toward women's education in the years women attended McGill University College of British 29
Columbia in 1906-1915.
Between 1886, when the City of Vancouver was founded, and the outbreak of World War One, British Columbia was transformed from a maritime society to a continental community.32 The rapid population growth, between 1881 and 191133 was supported by the influence of a developing wheat economy; the extension of
American railroads, financial capital, entrepreneurs and technology into the north-west; and the expansion of British investment into the province.34 By 1911, Vancouver had become the financial metropolis of the region.35 The influx of business and professional interests gave rise to a middle class eager to consolidate their leadership through their economic and social activities. This group viewed higher education as a means to the fulfilment of their social expectations.3^ In short, the demand for higher education in the province came from an ambitious middle class made affluent by a burgeoning economy.
While some families could afford to send their children to prestigious universities this was a costly proposition for the majority. There was also concern that young people sent out of the province for their education would not return unless there were increased opportunities within British Columbia. A provincial university would not only satisfy the desire of the middle classes to prepare their children for leadership roles in the community, without having to send them out of the province, o p but also it could assist in the development of the province.
The majority of the immigrants to British Columbia from
1901 to 1921 were from Ontario, Great Britain and the United States. Vancouver's new residents from Ontario brought with them a Canadian identity — perhaps borne of United Empire
Loyalist traditions — that promoted and took pride in Canadian institutions.4^ Increased numbers of university alumni resident in the chief population centres of B.C. also supported higher education and the proposed university.4-*-
Thus the demand for higher education in British Columbia stemmed from social, economic and demographic factors42 that were shaped within the west coast regional context. These factors held particular significance for the education of women.
The middle class wanted to educate their daughters as well as their sons. Indeed, a provincial university would likely benefit more daughters in families where scarce funds for education were habitually directed to send sons out of the province. Prior to the establishment of university education in the province, the Normal School offered many women their only choice for post secondary education. Teaching remained one of the few options available to young women; consequently, there were three times as many female teachers as there were male.4"*
Parents and students could foresee that not all girls could 44 continue to be absorbed by the teaching profession. A provincial university promised women alternatives to teaching.
The rapid changes that engulfed the west coast society engendered conscious and subconscious needs for social control.
The impact of immigration, and the fear of a transient population, fostered a growing interest in creating loyal citizens, a stable and prosperous society, and a "better race." This last concern grew out of the endemic hostility to
A C
the "non-white" population. ° This rather ignoble sentiment,
nevertheless, increased the credibility of higher education of women who, at the turn of the century, burdened the
responsibility for "racial purity" and cultural continuity.47
The vagaries of fortune that imperilled the family economy
were not unknown to the women of British Columbia.48 Middle
class women recognized the advantages, often the necessity, of
training that would enable women to rely on their own resources.
An appeal to parents to educate their daughters appeared in the
September issue of Westward Hoi, a British Columbian magazine.
"A London Gentlewoman" was, ironically, the pen name of this writer who advised: ...The poorest girls in the world are those not taught to work...Rich parents have petted them and they have been taught to despise labour and to depend on others for a 1iving...Every daughter should learn to earn her own living, the rich as well as the poor...The wheel of fortune rolls swiftly around; the rich are likely to become poor, and the poor rich...Well-to-do girls should learn to work. No reform is more imperative than
this.49
This editorial indicated the growing concern of women that they
be equipped to earn a living.
The climate of expectations that encouraged women to
participate in higher education in B.C. was left, however,
neither to good luck nor misfortune. Although women were not
denied access either to MUCBC in 1906 or UBC in 1915, it had
become evident both to individuals and to women's organizations
that they had a role to fulfil ensuring that women would have a 32
voice in the new provincial university, and some influence over women's education. The growth of professional and business
interests determined the mandate of the University of British
Columbia to assist in the development of the province. It was to
be a practical institution responsive to the needs of an
extractive resource economy and related industry.5^* But the
vocal and visible activity of organized and well connected women
served to remind the public and the government that women must
be accommodated in higher education, beyond the mere fact of
their admission.
In the face of strong regional and institutional rivalries
for the control of higher education in British Columbia, women's
education was scarcely a contentious subject in the early years
of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, women seldom missed an
opportunity to demonstrate that the university was an issue of
prime importance to both women and men. In the heat of the
debate between the McGill and Toronto men about the claims of
McGill to parent the provincial institution, an editorial in the
Vancouver newspaper, The News Advertiser, apprised the public
that women viewed the proceedings from a more pragmatic, less
partisan perspective.
It is all very well for men who belong to this University, or that College to argue from every point of the compass in favor of the merits of their own pet and particular institution of learning; but the women of Vancouver, who are not graduates of any such institution of learning, and who simply want to see established in British Columbia the best university obtainable...cannot possibly hesitate an instant in according their endorsation and approval to 33
the University Bill now before the Provincial Parliament.•••52
In February 1906, at least one "lady" attended "a meeting of university men" to consider how to proceed toward a provincial university. Her presence was curious enough to be noted by The Vancouver World, although she was not named. One woman who was identified for taking an active interest in higher education was the wife of the Minister of Education, Henry Esson
Young.-'-' in Soward's words, Dr. Young was
...to be champion of higher education...and the provincial university, an advocacy which was doubtless brightened by the enthusiasm of his wife who had been an inspiring teacher in Victoria High School.
Gibson in his portrait of UBC's first president, Dr. Frank
Wesbrook, also refers to the assistance of "Mrs. H.E. Young" in the writing of the University Act of 1908. Doubtless it was
Rosalind (Watson) Young's experience at McGill University that informed her husband's vision of a separate women's college in
1912.56
By the beginning of the twentieth century, women at the western edge of settlement had already recognized that their -.7 interests were best pursued through collective action. Women's reform groups were generally highly esteemed in the community 5 8 and paved the way for women's activity in the public sphere.
Organizations, notably the Vancouver and Victoria Local Councils of Women, established 1895, and the University Women's Club, established 1907, proved vigilant on matters that concerned 59 women's education. In the early years of higher education in 34
the province, club membership afforded women some political
leverage whereby they could secure at least token consideration
for women in the form of female representation in convocation,
in the Senate, and the Board of Governors of the University.60
One of the first women elected by the convocation to the
UBC Senate was Evlyn Farris, a prominent supporter of higher
education and equal rights for women.61 A graduate of Acadia
University, Evlyn (Kierstead) Farris, M.A., 1899, had been a
student of philosophy, and a teacher of history and political
science. As was customary in this era, Farris gave up her
teaching after her marriage and accompanied her husband, John
Wallace de Beque Farris, to Vancouver in 1905 where he pursued a
successful career in law and politics. However, Farris never
relinquished her commitment to the education of women or her
interest in establishing a provincial university.62
Although Farris' "elite status" as the wife of the
Attorney-General of British Columbia 1917-22 afforded her the
opportunity to use her influence to further what would still be
called the 'woman's cause* in the early twentieth century,
Farris established a network of support for educated women whose
influence surpassed her own personal connections. In 1907 Evlyn
Farris organized a club for women university graduates in
Vancouver, and a year later, in Victoria, where Rosalind Young became the first president. The membership grew from eight to fifty within the first year and Farris envisioned that a union of all the college women of British Columbia would have a
significant impact on the higher education of women in the province. As a result of the lobbying of the Local Council of
Women and the University Women's Club, Farris was the first woman to be appointed to the Board of Governors in 1917. She
served as a member of the Senate or the Board for the next
thirty years.64 Evlyn Farris and the University Women's Club
exercised a profound influence with regard to the establishment
of the University of British Columbia and its location on the mainland, to the status of female students at the university,
and to the abolition of discriminatory legislation which
prohibited women from practising law in the province.65
The functions of the University Women's Club of Vancouver were manifold. At a personal level, club membership offered
graduates the opportunity to re-create the special woman's world
of friendship and shared experience that had sustained and
enhanced their experience at college. The club's second
president, Miss Anne B. Jamieson66 described this aspect of the
club when she wrote:
Our own little world was so delightful, getting acquainted with women from so many colleges, finding a bond of union so strong...rejoicing in the thought that the best things pertaining to college life were not hopelessly past and
gone.6_
Jamieson reflected further that the club
was at first a kind of protective association, fighting back the encroachments of a materialism everywhere present and threatening to engulf us-68
Clearly, the interaction and fellowship of kindred spirits was
an important facet of club membership equally for the 36 professional woman and the housewife who had little daily
contact with other women in their work. Isabel Maclnnes, the
first and for many years the only female professor to teach at
McGill College and UBCf was an active member of the University
Women's Club (UWC) as was Mary Bollert, Dean of Women 1921-42.
For these women, the UWC undoubtedly provided a sense of refuge from their male dominated environments while rekindling strengths derived from their association in this separate
sphere.71
The graduate women who initially joined the UWC had attended college at a time when education for women was largely
'experimental' and justified by the assumptions that university training would equip women for social service work in college
settlement houses and charitable and philanthropic associations.
The University Women's Club continued this focus of women's work to promote social welfare and civic reform. Their efforts to improve the status of women, which today would be termed feminist consciousness raising, propelled the UWC into various areas of active concern. Most notable was the club's dedication to the legal rights of women and children, women's prison 7 2 reform, and, quite naturally, women's education.
The University Women's Club frequently sent speakers to the Ladies' Literary Society at McGill College, and later to UBC, 73 and eventually funded scholarships for women students. The presence of an organized body of graduate women not only encouraged the participation of young women in higher education at the new university, but also served as a link that, perhaps, 37
legitimized this activity in a social and economic climate
predisposed to regard the university as a traditional area of male expertise.
The organized women of the province, represented in this
case by the UWC, were initially politically influential but not politically powerful in their attempts to pressure the
government to fully accommodate women's interests in the
university. The complexities of these feminist politics will be
unravelled in the following chapter, but an example, here,, will
substantiate the aforementioned distinction.
The University Act 1908 created a new administrative body,
the Board of Governors, which possessed the general powers of management, administration, and control of property, revenue, business and affairs of the University. In the Board, therefore, rested the authority to fix the fees, appoint, promote or remove members of the teaching staff (upon
recommendation of the President), to create Faculties and
Departments, and to direct financial policy. The Senate had no administrative powers but served as the guardian of educational policy, and a link between Faculties and the Board.74
In 1912, the UWC, which had played an active role two years previously in establishing the permanent site for UBC at
Point Grey, turned its attentions to lobby the government to appoint women to the Board of Governors. The UWC was not the only women's club to nominate women to the Board from the conviction that the participation of women at the most powerful administrative level would ensure the representation of women's 38
7 5
interests, and establish their right to hold these offices.
Two clubwomen, Mrs. Evlyn Farris (Vancouver) and Mrs. Madge Watt
(Victoria), had been elected by the convocation to the Senate,
the lesser body. Albeit from the women's point of view, the
Senate was the vehicle to guide the education of women, the
Board of Governors was clearly the more powerful. Despite
pressure exerted by women's clubs in Vancouver and Victoria, no women were appointed to the original Board. The Board of
Governors announced by the Government on April 4, 1913 was
composed of nine leading male citizens of Victoria and
Vancouver, representing business, financial and professional
interests.^6
UBC President Frank F. Wesbrook, who assumed his duties
January 1913 on condition that the University would be immune
from political influence, was assured by the Government that the appointments were made without regard to political 77
consideration. The reverse is more credible in view of the
fact that two members of Parliament from Victoria, but no women, were appointed. However, the University of British Columbia was ever an institution dependent on governmental good-will and 7 8
subsidy. It may have been hoped, therefore, that it would
prove expedient to involve powerful men in a birth so dependent
on political benevolence.
It was inevitable that the Board of Governors constituted all the interests that the university intended to serve, except women's. Organized women of the province had access to power
through their club activities but did not, in 1913, wield enough 39
power individually, or represent any important constituency, to
be considered as Governors of the University. It was not until women had won the vote from the newly elected Liberal Government
in 1917, that Evlyn Farris, who had helped to establish the
Women's Liberal Association of Vancouver in 1915 and whose husband, by this time, was the Attorney-General and Minister of
Labour, received her appointment — the first to a woman — to the Board of Governors.
Farris had already discovered the limitations of the
Senate as a decision-making body. Although members had been elected or appointed to the Senate in 1912, they were not called together before February 1916, after the University of British
Columbia had finally opened. Prior to this meeting, the press
reported Farris' indignation when she discovered that the
specific tasks allocated to the Senate were performed by
selected individuals without consultation of the entire elected members. "What annoys the women of the University Women's
Club, " she said,
is to find that the government has drawn up the curriculum dealing with the education of women (which is a power expressly given to the Senate) without giving us a chance to be heard in the matter. For instance, the tUBC 1915/16] calendar says that women may attend the classes in Arts but does not say that they may attend the classes in the Faculty of Science, the omission being equivalent to a prohibition.jg
The 'prohibition' of women from entering courses in Applied
Science echoed the implications inherent in a statement in the
MUCBC calendars: "the courses in Arts are open to men and women 40
80 on equal footing." Women were not admitted to Applied Science
courses at McGill University and had notf therefore, been eligible to attend these classes at MUCBC. What appeared to
Farris as a prohibition perhaps reflected custom rather than an intention to discourage women from considering Applied Science as a suitable course of study. Nevertheless, Farris
recognized the importance of removing any obstacles that
restricted women's education. The calendar subsequently passed through the hands of the Senate to receive 'rubber stamp1
approval, after the fact.^2
The preservation of equality of education in this small
instance had to yield to the more pragmatic victory that was achieved when the University of British Columbia finally opened
its doors in the autumn of 1915. Although from 1908 to 1915 the
establishment of the University remained more or less imminent
in the minds of Frank Wesbrook and Henry Esson Young, sufficient funds from the Government had not been forthcoming. The prolonged delay may be attributed to the overriding government policy to build railways, which resulted in deficits to the go
Provincial Treasury by 1912. Government 'cutbacks' to the
proposed University were an annual feature that Wesbrook faced even prior to the War. After the declaration of World War One,
efforts to build the permanent campus at Point Grey were abandoned in December 1914. The skeletal frame of the Science
Building remained unfinished and unoccupied until the student
body symbolically scaled the empty structure eight years later
to draw public attention to their campaign to build the 41
8 4 university. In 1915 Wesbrook resigned himself to the
supposedly temporary quarters for the new University in McGill
University College at Fairview.85
Ostensibly, an empty Provincial Treasury and the
exigencies of the War postponed indefinitely construction of the
University buildings. However in the years before the War when
the provincial coffers showed a surplus higher education in
British Columbia was not deemed a priority for government
expenditure. The interests of the affluent middle classes who
promoted the provincial university were perhaps offset by those
interested in less 'professional' employment. Socialist members
of the Legislature had objected to the university on grounds
that education in the province was already too expensive and the
costs of tuition at UBC would be prohibitive for some classes.
They were appeased only by the promise that tuition would be
free. If the majority of British Columbians believed a
provincial university was an elitist indulgence, Frank Wesbrook made every effort to dispel this image in repeated speeches that
portrayed UBC as "the people's university [which] must meet all
87 the needs of all the people." Wesbrook's efforts to
democratize the appeal of the university were calculated to win
88
a broad base of public support. Evidently, neither Wesbrook's
entreaties nor his enthusiasm awoke sufficient interest in
higher education to force the transfer of this provincial
responsibility from McGill to the University of British
Columbia.
If the government considered it inopportune to build the 42 university before World War I, the enlistment of a high proportion of men of university age made it even more inappropriate after 1914. An interview with President Frank
Wesbrook, while he was in Portland Oregon,**9 revealed the primal value placed upon the enrollment of "healthy," "fit" men at the university.
The universities of Canada are becoming practically colleges for women and at least one newly formed institution [UBC] was nearly broken up by the enlistment of its male students for the European War, according to Dr. Frank F. Wesbrook, President of UBC...UBC was hard hit in its infancy, when the enrollment of men dropped from three hundred to thirty. The thirty men who couldn't pass the examination for military
service....gQ
During the War there was little motivation to build a university for a majority of women, or men declared unfit for military service.
The subtle interplay of tensions relating to class and gender differences do not constitute, here, any fully developed argument to explain the delay in the building of the university.
It is suggested only in an attempt to capture the nuances of sentiment that, nonetheless, informed the psychological climate on the west coast.
It would appear that the construction of the university at
Point Grey might have been delayed indefinitely without the 91 extraordinary efforts of the entire student body in 1922-23.
The final stage of public commitment that brought pressure to bear on the government was generated by the student campaign to
"Build the University." Now remembered as "The Great Trek," the students formed an impressive parade that marched from downtown 43
Vancouver to the eight year old frame of the Science Building where students erected the first permanent structure — the
Cairn — to commemorate the occasion.92 This "pilgrimage" was the culmination of a year's campaign by the students who collected 17,000 signatures on a petition, which they presented with due pomp and ceremony to the Legislative Assembly in
November 1922. A week later Premier John Oliver announced that funds would be made available immediately to begin construction of university buildings at Point Grey. The first lectures were held in the new buildings on the permanent campus in September
1925.93
The University of British Columbia was not truly established by: any single Act of the Legislature but by three stages of increasing public commitment. In the years 1890-1904 the idea of a university attracted the attention of a small proportion of the population whose lofty pretensions were perhaps ahead of their time, in view of the short duration of the first University Act of 1890. By 1904 an audible demand for higher education in the province signalled the second stage of a more broadly based public recognition of the economic need for a provincial university. This demand was uneasily satisfied with temporary solutions adopted by the provincial government that included a "caretaker" institution from the east, and borrowed premises for a truncated University of British Columbia in 1915.
But in 1922, with the First World War behind them, the students of the university were threatened with an increase in the recently instituted fees, without any firm plans by the government to vacate the cramped, inadequate facilities at 44
Fairview and build at Point Grey. With the Senate, the Board of
Governors, and the Minister of Education working, at times, at
cross purposes to resolve the unremitting budgetary crises faced annually by the university, the Students' Council tackled the
real issue that deterred Government commitment: the political
unpopularity of larger money grants to the university. As a
result of the door-to-door conversion of public opinion
throughout the province, the students' petition delivered a message from an electorate that no government could safely
ignore. The fate of the University of British Columbia rested
in the political reality of votes.94
The social, economic, and finally, political factors that
affected public support for the provincial university similarily
influenced attitudes toward the higher education of women in
British Columbia and ensured their initial acceptance within
MUCBC and UBC. Although it is likely that women would have been accommodated at a coordinate college if the university had proceeded without financial restraint in 1891 or 1906,
coeducation of men and women in the same classrooms proved the
cheaper option.95
Prior to World War I the notion of higher education for women in British Columbia complemented British and North
American middle class expectations of individual mobility and
social stability. In a region where class and racial
dissension, at times exacerbated by economic tensions, remained,
at least psychologically, a latent but unpredictable threat,
women were recognized as nation builders and guardians of the race. Higher education would prepare them for these roles and their 'professional' vocations that included motherhood and teaching. In this respect, British Columbian women were perhaps fortunate that social definitions of womanhood did not thwart
their ambitions to attend university, although these definitions narrowed their future choices.
Economic conditions in British Columbia increased the
likelihood that women would have to earn their own living at
some time, either before marriage, or in the event that death or
financial calamity disrupted their lives. In an increasingly
complex world, higher education for women was necessary to maintain both social and economic status.
Perhaps the most significant factor that promoted and protected favourable attitudes toward the education of women was
the activity of organized women on the west coast. In their voluntary capacities, clubwomen pioneered women's work in the
expanding civil bureaucracies and social welfare agencies, thus
contributing to the changing views of women's work. Their
advocacy of university education to professionalize public
services and to increase opportunities for women in the public
spheres created a climate of expectations that encouraged the
participation of women in higher education from its inception in
British Columbia. The University Women's Club established a visible presence of educated women who supported the provincial
university and seized opportunities to become politically
influential in all matters pertaining to women's education.
This review of the early history of higher education in 46
British Columbia has focussed on the development of the
university from an idea to the physical plant, and the
examination of the social context that framed attitudes in
support of the education of women during this same period. By
1915, there was no longer any moral opposition to women's
presence on campus, such as was heard in the nineteenth century,
or fear that a liberal education would unhinge their minds or
unfit them for their roles as wives and mothers. However, on
the national scene, the functions of universities had also
changed from the nineteenth century British institutions, along
with the recipe for liberal education. According to Pencier's
thesis, the primary function of the English speaking
universities in Canada to 1920 was defined by the concept of
Q7
"service";" the university existed to meet the needs of the
people. A second popular function emerged, of the university as
the intellectual resource of the state. Although the cultural
and moral value of the liberal Arts remained a defensible
prescription, the functions of the English speaking universities
in Canada were initially utilitarian and showed a constant 98
concern for professional education.
These changes in the functions of the university held
„ clearly different implications for women's education in the
twentieth century from those in the nineteenth. The supporters
of women's admission to universities in Britain, a century
before, faced obstacles that were based, in part, on the
traditional concept of a university as an integrated community
of scholars concerned with making as well as transmitting 47
knowledge. Not only did the university reflect a masculine world, which men wanted to defend against any feminine
encroachment, but also higher education represented spiritual
and Platonic interests removed from the practical concerns of
daily living. To ensure that women would garner their full
share of respect and status as equals in the university
community, as well as to answer the arguments of the opposition,
the "uncompromising" would not count as victory any education
that was not the same as for men." Thus the admission of women
to Oxford and Cambridge to receive a liberal education was an essential strategy in their campaign for equal education. It was also an invasion of the male domain. But the
"uncompromising" eschewed the "separatists'" predilection for more practical education that emphasized training for women's
future roles as nurses or homemakers. In truth, women's admission to universities in nineteenth century Britain
coincided with the reformers' new utilitarian emphasis in higher
education for men; in this respect, women's education that did not take into account the changing functions of higher education
continued to lag behind.
According to the practical functions of the Canadian
university in the twentieth century, education for women should equip female graduates for professional work equivalent in economic and social status to that of the male graduates.
However, despite women's increased access to the universities,
higher education prepared men, not women, for the
professions.100 For men, a Liberal Arts degree was often a 48 prerequisite for academic careers or admission to professional schools. Education that terminated with an Arts degree, as it did more frequently for women, equipped them for unspecific occupations at the lower end of the pay scale.
In fact, the choice of Arts education for the majority of women represented a fairly accurate appraisal of the limited opportunities open to most women after graduation. Teaching was the one clear choice for women who wished to establish a career for themselves.101 The traditional male professions continued to discourage all but the most determined, exceptional women.
But for women's enrollment to continue to cluster in Arts programmes, rather than in more specialized fields, was perhaps to continue to value education for women at the level of
"accomplishments" — those nineteenth century attributes that were more useful on the marriage market than in the labour 102 force. Herein lies the dilemma, as it surfaced again in the twentieth century: how to define women's education to ensure social and economic equality? Should women lay siege to the traditionally male domains, as did the "uncompromising" half a century before? Or was it time for the "separatists" to emerge victorious with 'women's* professions certain to retain a separate but equal status?
How the university accommodated the female presence after the fact of their admittance, or to put it in Wesbrooks* terms, how the university intended to serve the needs of all the people, was of special interest to the organized women who had played an active part in ensuring women's early participation in 49 higher education in British Columbia. Their role in defining women's education after the University was established — resolving, or not, the conundrum of the social expectations of women — is the subject of the following chapters. 50
Notes
1 F. Henry Johnson, A History ofPublic Educationin British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1964), pp. 74-75; Harry T. Logan, Tuum Est: A History of the University of British Columbia, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1958), pp. 3-4.
Logan, p. 4.
Logan, p. 7. The Register of Members of Convocation, 1890 gives the place of residence, degrees held and universities of all who registered and is included in Frederic H. Soward, "The Early History of the University of British Columbia," unpublished manuscript 1930, pp. 380-388. University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections.
4 Logan, p. 8.
Johnson, p. 75. The Department of Education was unwilling to surrender authority over the field of teacher training. The Normal School opened January 1901 holding classes in the Vancouver High School before the building on the north-west corner of Cambie Street and 12th Avenue was completed in 1909 — this building is currently used by the Provincial Department of Public Works.
Statutes of British Columbia, 1891. (Victoria: Queen's Printer for British Columbia, 1891) pp. 383-39. 7 For instance, the Royal Victoria College for Women had only been established at McGill University seven years previously in 1884. Women were not admitted to McGill until an endowment for the purpose of establishing a separate women's college made it possible for women to attend classes without mingling with the men students. Gillett, Chapter 2. p Henry Esson Young, "Instructions and Regulations of the Competition for University Buildings for the Provincial Government of British Columbia," Frank Fairchild Wesbrook Papers, Box 1, Folder 3, University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections. 9 The winners of the architectural competition were a Vancouver firm of architects: Messrs. Sharp and Thompson whose original plans may be seen in Thompson, Berwick, Pratt and Partners Architectural Records, UBC Library, Special Collections. 10 The University Act of 1891 failed to establish the provincial university and a new Act in 1908 was necessary to revive the intention to create this institution. S.97 reiterated the amendment of the first Act, S.52, to provide all the advantages and privileges to women that were accorded to 51 male students of the university. "An Act to Establish and Incorporate a University for the Province of British Columbia." Statutes of British Columbia, 1908, pp. 303-320.
11 Coeducation has meant different things at different times: education of the sexes together in the same college (but not necessarily the same education for both); identical education of the sexes together; and education in coordinate colleges. Thomas Woody, p. 224. The universities attended by members of the convocation conformed to one of these models for coeducation. Of the 24 universities represented, 12 were Canadian. The largest group of graduates was from the University of Toronto (20), McGill University (16) , and Cambridge (14).
This observation from Soward, p. 6. Also, there were 11 graduates from Victoria College, Cobourg, Ontario and 3 from Mt. Allison.
13 Women were admitted as early as 1836 to the Upper Canada Academy, Cobourg, Ontario, run by the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Canada. They received separate but equal education until Dr. Egerton Ryerson, Principal of Victoria College which incorporated Upper Canada Academy, ended the female department of the Academy in 1841. For details see Marion Royce, "Methodism and the Education of Women in Nineteenth Century Ontario," Atlantis 3(2), Part 1, Spring 1978. The Methodists' Mount Allison University awarded the first degree to a woman in the British Empire, a B.Sc. to Grace Annie Lockhart in 1875, and seven years later, the first B.A. to a woman in Canada. See John G. Reid, "The Education of Women at Mount Allison, 1854-1914," Acadiensis, Vol. XII (Spring 1983).
14 Soward, p. 6. 15 The Daily Times, April 1, 1891. British Columbia Legislative Assembly "Sessional Clipping Books, Newspaper Accounts of the Debates. 16 Ibid, April 15, 1891. The Legislative Assembly was engaged more strenuously, at the time, in measures to restrict Chinese immigration.
17 In fact, women's status at these universities was far from equal or even secure, but the publicity surrounding their admission fostered the impression that the issue had been settled. By 1891, the women's colleges were tolerated as unofficial appendages of Cambridge and Oxford. Although the female students studied the same curriculum, were taught by the same professors, and sat for the same examinations as the male students, Oxford did not admit women to its degrees until after World War I, while Cambridge resisted until 1948. 18 For a more detailed discussion of the events that led to 52 the demise of the first University Act, see Soward. Also, Logan, pp. 8-12. 1 9 It is unclear whether Whetham College accepted women students. Logan refers only to men (p. 13) , while Johnson includes women, (p. 78) . 20 See Soward, pp. 41-2 and Johnson, p. 79. Columbian College was empowered to grant degrees only in Theology. The enrollment dwindled after UBC was established and Columbian College closed in 1928 soon after the Union Theological College was founded on the university campus. oi - - Soward, p. 17. See also, George Hindle, The Educational Systrste( m of British Columbi a (Trail: Trail Publishing, 1918), p. rnrr Hindle states that Okanagan College, Summerland was affiliated with McMaster University and Nelson High School with the University of Toronto. oo -- - - - For example, see letters in The Vancouver Province, November 11, 1901; November 12, 1901; March 7, 1904; March 17, 1904; February 7, 1906; February 8, 1906.
O "3 _ _ ------The Vancouver Province, November 11, 1905; The Vancouver News-Advertiser, February 5, 1908. 24 ' Letters from Rev. R.G. Macbeth to The Vancouver Province, November 11, 1901, p. 5. 25 Logan, p. 16. 26 Soward, p. 48. 27 Details of the opposition to McGill's affiliation with education in British Columbia in Brian Coleman, "McGill British Columbia, 1899-1915," McGil1 Journal of Education, 11, No. 2 (Autumn 1976) , pp. 179-T81T 28 The Vancouver News-Advertiser, February 4, 1906, p. 25; The Province, February 9, 1906, p. IT. 29 Soward, p. 104. The Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning was the official title of the Board of Governors of McGill University. Logan, p. 20. 3 0 These details have been amply recorded in both Soward and Logan's histories of the university. 31 Soward p. 74. It should be noted here, also, that throughout the formative period of the establishment of the University of British Columbia, there was pressure to create a Canadian institution, albeit mindful of the British tradition, but also distinctly un-American. There was frequent reference in the newspapers to the preference for hiring professors from 53 within Canada, and a concern about the Canadian content of textbooks, especially history texts after the War. An early proponent of what would currently be called 'Canadian Studies' was critical of Wesbrook's forays to the United States and Britain for new professors for UBC and cautioned him not to overlook Canadian scholars. This writer also suggested there be a university department devoted to Canadian problems, including Canadian history, geography and sociology, to contribute to the social and moral uplift of Canada. See Vancouver Sunset, December 24, 1913.
Robert A.J. McDonald, "Victoria and Vancouver, and the Economic Development of British Columbia, 1886-1914" in British Columbia; Historical Readings, W. Peter Ward and Robert A.J. McDonald, eds. (Vancouver: Douglas, 1981), p. 369. 33 The population of the province increased 700% in this period, from 50,000 to 392,000. R. E. Caves and R.H. Holton, "An Outline of the Economic History of British Columbia, 1881-1951" in Historical Essays on British Columbia, J. Friesen and H.K. Ralston, eds. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 153. 34 McDonald, p. 369. 3 5 With only 28% of the provincial work force, Vancouver employed 37% of the province's building trades workers and more than 40% of those engaged in finance, in real estate, in the professions, and in the iron and steel manufacturing sectors. McDonald, pp. 388-9. The population rose in Vancouver from 27,000 in 1901 to 100,401 in 1910. See Norbert Macdonald, "Population Growth and Change in Seattle and Vancouver, 1880-1960" in Friesan and Ralston, p. 214. 3 6 This is evident by the number of female students whose father's occupations were in business or the professions. See Table 2, Chapter V. Although the majority of female students did not have fathers in these occupational categories, they were represented in a higher proportion than would be found in a comparable cohort in the larger population. The pattern is confirmed for male students in private schools and universities by Jean Alice Barman, "Growing up British in British Columbia: Boys in Private School, 1900-1950". Unpublished D.Ed, thesis, UBC, 1982, p. 436. 37 The correspondence of Frank Richards, J.P., who wrote to The Province, November 5, 1906, exemplifies the view that a university would contribute to the economic development of the province: "The higher education of the children of this province means increasing the wealth-producing capacity and well-being of the future population." See also R. Cole Harris, "Locating the University of British Columbia," BC Studies, No. 32, (Winter 1976-77), who argues that British Columbians had wanted a university because it would be good for local business. 54
3 8 Some sectors of the province were quite specific about the University's role in development. Early in 1904 the Nelson University Club, in the Kootenay mining district, passed a resolution recommending "that the Government should establish as soon as possible, a thoroughly equipped School of Mines, and should add to it ... departments for the teaching of Applied Science which are of special value in the development of the industries of the Province ... that in the absence of such institutions a hardship is inflicted upon the boys and young men of British Columbia inasmuch as they must either leave the Province to secure such training as will qualify them for the leading positions in any profession or submit to permanent disqualification for such positions ... that immediate steps be taken to provide by endowment for the establishment, equipment and maintenance in the near future of a Provincial University." Logan, p. 17.
39 Macdonald, p. 214.
40 Ibid., p. 211. Barman also notes the Canadian character of public education as it developed in B.C., p. 47.
41 Soward, p. 85.
A O For a broader discussion of the demographic characteristics of British Columbia, particularly the social and economic implications of a population increased predominantly by migration, see W. Peter Ward, "Population Growth in Western Canada, 1901-71," in The Developing West, J.E. Foster, ed., (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983), pp. 157-77.
43 Teachers employed 1915-16: Total 2,064, Men 523, Women 1,541. See George Hindle, p. 72. Hindle also stated that men were not attracted to teaching because of its low status and low wages, p. 79.
44 Hindle offered several insights into girls' education and the options available to them prior to the first War. For example: "Parents with daughters to provide for, finding few other suitable avenues open to them, saw in the high schools and normal schools of the province, a solution ...." "In many interior towns that have experienced business depression teaching provides the one avenue open to a girl...." "What girls are to do when the profession becomes so crowded ... will be a serious problem for parents to solve. There was a time when women of marriageable age readily found suitable mates in British Columbia. That day is past." p. 71.
A C Westward Ho! Magazine published in British Columbia expressed these concerns in an editorial December 1907 because "... this province is suffering from slow growth in the matter of the white population," p. 1. Also typical were beliefs that, "University education will help create a better race by making better men and women." The Vancouver Province, October 8, 1913. 55
46 See W. Peter Ward, "Class and Race in the Social Structure of British Columbia, 1870-1939" in W. Peter Ward and Robert A.J. McDonald. Ward argues that class boundaries were secondary divisions in British Columbia society before 1939 and that the major cleavages were based upon race. The concern for 'a better race' was not, however, limited to the west coast but was part of the social and political ideas, predominant in the late Victoria period, that were concerned with evolutionary characteristics and 'the quality of the race.1
^ The importance of eugenics and social Darwinistic assumptions to women's education is discussed in Dyhouse. 48 See, for example, the experiences of Mrs. Joe (Nan) Bourgon in Marjorie Rosberg ed., Rubber Boots for Dancing; and Other Memories (Smithers: Hetherington, 1979) . Nan Bourgon came from England to Vancouver where she found work as a dressmaker, a hotel worker and a cafe waitress. With her savings she brought her parents to live with her but the depression of 1913-14 forced the family to break up in search of work. Nan went north to work in a caf6 and a hotel before she married a French-Canadian and settled in the Bulkley Valley. 49 Westward Ho!Magazine, September 1907, p. 15.
50 The British Columbia University Act, 1908 provided: "Such instruction, especially, whether theoretical, technical, artistic, or otherwise, as may be of service to persons engaged or about to engage in manufactures, mining, engineering, agricultural and industrial pursuits of the Province of British Columbia." See Statutes" of British Columbia, 1908. 51 ___ _ _ Vancouver News Advertiser, February 18, 1906. 52 -- - - The Vancouver World, February, 1906, in UBC Scrapbook 1, p. 49. 53 Dr. Henry Esson Young, a McGill University medical graduate was Minister of Education and Health for the province. See, W. G. Gibson, "Makers of the University — Henry Esson Young," UBC Alumni Chronicle, 9:2 (Summer 1955) p. 16. 54 Rosalind Watson retired from teaching to marry Young. Soward, p. 62. 55 Gibson says that Mrs. H.E. Young had written the Act. W.C. Gibson, Wesbrook and his University, (Vancouver: 1973) , p. 125. Mrs. Rosalind Young graduated from McGill University in geology. Gibson, Wesbrookand his University, p. 46. 57 Female organizations were a national and international feature from the 19th Century well into the 20th Century. 56
'Clubwomen' was the term that characterized women involved in a variety of collectivities that dealt with educational, political, benevolent, cultural, professional, religious and reform matters. For a view of the most significant national organization, see Veronica Strong-Boag, The Parliament of Women: The NationalCouncilof WomenofCanada, 1893-1929, (Ottawa: National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, 1976) . The activity of clubwomen in British Columbia has been investigated by Gillian Weiss, "'As Women and as Citizens': Clubwomen in Vancouver, 1910-1928," unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1984) . Weiss estimates that the affiliated membership of the Vancouver LCW in 1914 was 5,000, p. 52. See also Linda Louise Hale, "The British Columbia Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1917," unpublished M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1977 . 5 8 Clubwomen in British Columbia had a public image that was both genteel and buoyant. In a special women's edition of The Vancouver Sun, March 19, 1913, representative members of twenty women's societies with an estimated membership of 5,000 united to produce an issue of twenty pages to provide a public testimony to the work undertaken by women in the city to further philanthropy, education and patriotism. Women were first elected to school boards in Victoria, Vancouver and New Westminster because of the sponsorship of the Local Councils of Women in these centres. Lee Stewart, "'One Big Woman*: The Politics of Feminism in British Columbia 1894-1918," unpublished paper, 1985. 5 9 John Keith Foster, "Education and Work in a Changing Society: British Columbia, 1870-1930," unpublished M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1970. 60 In 1912, all graduates residing in the province under the provisions of the University Act, 1912 were invited to register for convocation. Between May 1 and July 31, 739 registered. Twenty-five were appointed by the government, including two women: Mrs. Margaret Jenkins and Mrs. Marie McNaughton. Jenkins' club membership included WCTU, Victoria Local Council of Women (vice-president 1911-14), Victoria Women's Canadian Club, the Cymrodian Society, the Metropolitan Methodist Church Ladies Aid, the Home Nursing Society, the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Young Men's Christian Association and the Victoria Women's Conservative Club. Jenkins was elected to the Victoria School Board 1897-1898 and 1902-1919. McNaughton was president of the Vancouver Local Council of Women 1910-1913 and was elected to the Vancouver School Board 1912-1914. She was also a member of the Vancouver Women's Canadian Club. Biographical data from Linda Louise Hale, "Appendix: Votes for Women: Profiles of Prominent British Columbia Suffragists and Social Reformers," in In Her Own Right, Barbara Latham and Cathy Kess, eds., (Victoria: Camosun College, 1980) . See also Note 61. 57
Both Vancouver and Victoria University Women's Clubs nominated four members as candidates for the University Senate. Two women withdrew to strengthen the clubs' endorsation of Mrs. Evlyn Farris from Vancouver and Mrs. Madge Watt, Victoria. Convocation elected fifteen members including the University Women's Club nominees. See Soward, p. 98 and Phyllis Reeve, The History oftheUniversity Women's Club of Vancouver, 1907-1982, (Vancouver: University Women's Club of Vancouver, 1982) , p. 5. 6 2 Farris' work was recognized by two Honorary Doctor of Law degrees. In 1923, she received the LL.D. from her alma mater, Acadia University — the first time a maritime university had ever awarded an LL.D to a woman — "for services rendered to education and for other distinguised public service." In 1942, UBC conferred Farris' second LL.D. 63 Reeve, p. 4. 64 Mrs. Evlyn F. Farris was appointed to the Board of Governors by the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council 1918-1929, and elected by the Senate 1936-1942. She served on the UBC Senate 1915-17, and 1930-1935. 6 s In 1910, Farris became a member of a committee in search of a permanent location for the provincial university. She argued forcefully for its location on the mainland, at Vancouver, rather than at the capital city on Vancouver Island. Reeve, pp. 4-5. See also Reeve, p. 10 for details about the UWC lobby for legislation to enable women to practise law in the province after Mabel French, a lawyer from New Brunswick, was denied admission to the Bar because of her sex. 66 Miss Anne (Annie) B. Jamieson was a teacher at Vancouver High School. Born in Leed, Quebec in 1870 she did her teacher training at the University of Manitoba. She was a member of the Local Council of Women and the University Women's Club. Jamieson served in the UBC Senate 1918-42 and on the Board of Governors 1935-1941. She was also the first woman to sit on the Vancouver Library Board as a result of a campaign by Vancouver clubwomen to support a female member. At the time of her retirement in 1927, Jamieson was vice principal of King Edward High School. Jamieson was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from UBC in 1942. 67 "Special women's Edition" of the VancouverSun, March 19, 1913. Cited also in Reeve, pp. 22-23.
68 Ibid. 6 9 The membership of the UWC in 1913 represented various professions, "including those of housewife, teacher, doctor, lawyer, dentist, journalist, editor, doctor of music, trained nurse, YWCA secretary and business woman." Jamieson in Reeve, p. 24. 58
Isabel Maclnnes was appointed to the MUCBC faculty in 1911-12 as a lecturer in Modern Languages. Born in Lancaster, Ontario, Maclnnis received her M.A. from Queen's University in 1908 and a Ph.D. from the University of California in 1925. She lectured in French, German, English Composition for 37 years at UBC. Maclnnes was the only female professor until 1920. She was president of the UWC 1934-36 and a frequent speaker on feminist topics of her day varying from "feminist theories as reflected in the English novel" to "equal opportunity, equal pay." See Chapter 3 for biographical information about Mary Bollert.
'A For the importance of the separate women's sphere and women's culture to their politicization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," Fern inist Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, (Fall 1979) pp. 512-529.
7 9 ' Helen Gregory MacGill was most influential in the commitment of the UWC to reform laws concerning women and children. She was a founding member of the Vancouver University Women's Club, active in the Local Council of Women and in the suffrage campaign. MacGill was appointed the first woman judge of juvenile court in British Columbia 1917-28 and 1934-45. MacGill authored several works on women and children and the law. Hale, "Appendix," pp. 296-7. After MacGill*s death in 1947, the UWC placed a small brass tablet to her memory on the wall of Main Library, UBC. University Women's Club, Minutes, March 24, 1947. 7 3 The University Women's Club of Victoria was the first to maintain, in 1913, a bursary for Victoria girls to study at the University. Scholarships funded by University Women's Club of Vancouver to other post-secondary institutions in the province are listed in Reeve p. 97. 74 See British Columbia University Act, 1908, also Logan, p. 36. 75 The UWC's nomination of their president, Mrs. W.J. Baird, was also endorsed by LCW and supported by a professor from University of Toronto and Rev. John MacKay. The Women's Canadian Club recommended the appointment of a woman as did the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, Municipal Chapter, and the Local Council of Women because "...a fair proportion of the students of the University will be women." The Local Councils of Women also nominated Miss Alice Ravenhill, (See Note 43, Chapter III) and Rev. F.A.P. Chadwick nominated Mrs. Helen Gregory MacGill. Wesbrook Papers, Box 1, Folder 3. 76
See Soward, p. 101; Logan, p. 45.
77 Ibid. 59
7 8 Policies toward university funding appear to have evolved more from neglect than design. As early as 1872 Provincial Superintendent of Education, John Jessop first advocated a scheme of land endowments as a means of financing a university to make it independent of annual votes from the Provincial Treasury. The University Act of 1891 indicated a reliance on future endowments made by individuals. Dr. H.E. Young, with the University Endowment Act 1907, attempted to follow Jessop's vision. The province was to set apart, within three years, two million acres of land which would eventually provide revenue for the university. When Wesbrook surveyed these lands in the Cariboo country in 1914, he was disheartened at the low value of the land — "saddened by the prospect of endowment long delayed, and resolved then to campaign for a tax-supported university rather than an endowed one." Gibson, Wesbrook, p. 108. There were no significant revenues from this land and in 1958 Logan wrote: "Hopes for any substantial advance in university policy rested then, as they do now ... on the readiness of the Government to supply necessary funds." Logan, p. 34.
7 q , _ ,y Victoria Times, January 7, 1916.
Of) See McGill University College of British Columbia Calendar, 1914-15, p. 13.
° In 1916 Margaret Healy, in fact, registered in the Faculty of Applied Science but she did not graduate. The first woman to graduate was Rona Hatt Wall is in 1922 with a degree in chemical engineering. 8 2 In view of the conflicting loyalties of the Senators and the UBC faculty that were rooted in issues unrelated to Farris' concerns, there was little opportunity to effect any substantial changes at this time. See also, Gibson, pp. 141-2 for more details of this 'stormy meeting.' 83 Logan, p. 49. 84 'The Great Trek' in 1923 is discussed further in this paper.
85 MUCBC originally held classes, 1906-7, in the new Vancouver High School at 12th Avenue and Oak Street. By 1907-08 MUCBC expanded to occupy the old city hospital buildings at the corner of Cambie and Pender Streets. After these buildings were condemned by the city health officer in 1911, temporary classroom space was erected on the site of the Vancouver General Hospital at the south east corner of Laurel Street and 10th Avenue — referred to as "the Fairview shacks." A new building built for the General Hospital, was the first Arts building of the University of British Columbia. Logan, pp. 26-7.
86 Soward, p. 74. 60
87 Frank F. Wesbrook, "The Provincial University in Canadian Development," speech given at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, November 1913. This text was reprinted in Science, early in 1914, and a version given to the Canadian Club of Victoria entitled "The People's University" in November 1914. According to Gibson, Wesbrook's contention that the university should serve more than the academic community aroused many objections from those determined to maintain the status quo. Gibson, pp. 75-8.
88 Wesbrook tailored his speeches to suit the interests and gain the support of the groups he addressed; this did not necessarily lessen his conviction but led him to sometimes misjudge his audience and vice versa. For example, he spoke to the Vancouver business community at a Progress Club luncheon selling them on the idea that the university was a good business asset from a commercial standpoint — students would spend their money and "the best class of settler" would be attracted to the city. The "Vancouver" "Sun, October 12, 1913. To the Canadian Club, Wesbrook promised that higher education would improve moral, physical and intellectual development, thus ensuring a "finer race." News "Advertiser October 8, 1913. Wesbrook's speeches often elicited responses critical of his utilitarian emphasis and when he spoke to the University Women's Club in November, 1913 advocating domestic science for women he drew a hot response from Evlyn Farris. See Chapter III for further details.
89 Wesbrook was on his way east to make final arrangements for Physics and Chemistry. 90 This statement complete with statistical inacurracies was printed in a Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, April 15, 1916, UBC Scrapbook 7, p. 8. 91 The complexities of the political issues that caused the delays will be found in Logan, pp. 88-9. Q2 Logan p. 91. 93 Logan, pp. 90-1. See also, John Rodenhizer, "The student campaign of 1922 to 'build the University' of British Columbia" BC Studies, 4:21-37 (September 1970). 94 A song composed for the occasion of the student pilgrimage encapsulated the pivotal issues as seen by the students: the inadequate facilities and public support. "We're thru with tents and hovels ... The Government can't refuse us, No matter what they say, For we'll get the people voting For our new home in Point Grey." Logan, p. 91. 61
In truth, there was no real decision not to build the separate women's college indicated in the plans for UBC by Sharp and Thompson. The order of construction of buildings on the Point Grey site indicated that accommodation for science, a library, and power house were the first priorities. The remaining buildings were semi-permanent structures: administration, auditorium and cafeteria, arts and science, applied science, agriculture, three engineering buildings, and forest products building. Residences, gymnasiums and women's buildings were dropped from the plans to save costs.
96 Wesbrook's speech to the University Women's Club, November 1913. Vancouver "Sun, November 10, 1913, p. 52. This mission of women was both externally prescribed and internally conceded. Women's reform organizations were particularly willing to claim the traditional views of female moral superiority and maternal responsibility as qualifications for social reform of the Canadian community.
97 Marni Frazier De Pencier, "Ideas of the English Speaking Universities in Canada to 1920," unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1978, p. 655.
98 The ideas in this paragraph about the functions of the university have their source in Pencier's thesis, pp. 654-66. It is evident that UBC's President Wesbrook and Dr. H.E. Young's University Act 1908, along with her studies of the University of Alberta, 1906 and the University of Saskatchewan 1907, influenced her conclusions. 99 The terms 'uncompromising' and 'separatists' are Delamont's terms to describe the two views of women's education in nineteenth century England. See Chapter I.
100 „F.H T. T T Leacy, ~edJ. Historical Statistics of Canada, 2nd ed. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983), Series W504-512. Degrees awarded by Canadian universities ....
Bachelor and First Professional Master ' s Doctorate
Years Male Female Male Female Male Female
1920 3,306 701 170 48 23 1 1930 4,411 1,820 358 100 39 7 1940 5,960 2,193 520 67 70 5 1950 13,411 3,774 1,344 220 191 11
MacPherson's investigation of the careers of female Canadian university graduates in 1920 shows that the total graduates alive in 1919 was 3,751. Of this number, 1,139 were married, 1,002 were teaching, 573 were in other professions and 62
1,046 were unaccounted for. Elsinore MacPherson, "Careers of Canadian University Women," unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Toronto, 1920, p. 19a. MacPherson also shows that in the west, teaching remained the chief, sometimes the only occupation open to a woman university graduate, p. 22. See also Alison Prentice, "The Feminization of Teaching," in The Neglected Majority, Susan Mann Trofimenkoff and Alison Prentice, eds., (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, Ltd., 1977).
x MacPherson1 s data show that the largest number of graduates were married. MacPherson, p. 19a. In general, married women did not work outside the home unless they had acquired extraordinary expertise and reputation in a profession such as law or medicine, or in exceptional circumstances such as wartime, or to 'temporarily' supplement low family incomes. As women were paid lower salaries than men, marriage was attractive not only, obviously, for sentimental and social reasons but also for economic ones. 63
CHAPTER III
THE ACCOMMODATION OF THE UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN: THE ESTABLISHMENT
OF THE DEPARTMENT OF NURSING AND HOME ECONOMICS
After the University of British Columbia opened in 1916, two significant additions apparently demonstrated the willingness of the University to accommodate women. The
Department of Nursing was, in 1919, the first to be established in the British Empire, and a Dean of Women was appointed in
1921 to advise female students. However, a School of Home
Economics and a residence for women, perhaps the most common concessions to the female presence found at some of the reputable universities in Canada and the United States, were not permanently established at UBC until the fourth and fifth decades.1 An analysis of the factors that prompted or delayed the introduction of specialized curriculum, personnel, and boarding arrangements will perhaps reveal the guiding principles behind these decisions about women's education, and the degree to which these additions represented a response to the needs, interests and wishes of women.
Nursing
The exigencies of the First World War and the Spanish 2 . influenza epidemic in 1918 imparted a special significance to women's work and revised attitudes toward their education.
Although women's war work often transcended women's traditional sphere, it was the image of woman as nurse that reflected 64 social expectations of the unselfish patriotic duty of women in wartime, much as the image of man as soldier reflected this duty of men. Nursing assumed, therefore, an activity of heroic proportions as a result both of Florence Nightingale's legendary reputation and the stories that came home from the front. Furthermore, nursing began to attract the interest of middle class women who had the 'luxury' of several years of secondary education and the desire to pursue a 'useful' vocation.
Nursing had always been an apprenticeship system.3 its features of residency, regular (if minimal) wages, and the provision of a uniform undoubtedly appealed to hard working, ambitious women from poor or working class homes where extended education was otherwise impossible for them. However the growth in hospital facilities, with their specialized medical and administrative functions, increasingly demanded higher standards of education for nurses, along with more specialized training.
The Graduate Nurses' Association of British Columbia
(GNABC), with the support of the Local Council of Women, had struggled for nine years before succeeding in April 1918 in obtaining a bill that would give them regulatory powers over their own members.4 The renamed Registered Nurses' Association of British Columbia (RNABC) recognized the advantages to the fledgling nursing profession of better education for women, and in 1918 set age and educational requirements for prospective 5 nurses. The ambivalence of some members of the medical 65
profession toward the efforts of the GNABC in 1916 to regulate
and ensure high levels of training among their own personnel was evident by the prevarications of Dr. Henry Esson Young,
whose amendments to an earlier version of the Nurses'
Registration Act appeared not to recognize the intentions of
the Act. But not all medical men opposed a change in the
status of nurses, especially when it proved a means to their
own ends.
The endeavors made by nurses' associations in British
Columbia coincided with changes in attitudes toward public health and reforms in hospital administration. In British
Columbia, the leader of the Hospital Standardization Movement, which was gaining momentum throughout the United States and
Canada, was Dr. Malcolm T. MacEachern, the Medical
Superintendent of the Vancouver General Hospital (VGH).
MacEachern's commitment to the improvement of hospital services
led him to envision a uniform, standardized course for all
nurses to be given in various hospitals by teachers trained at p
the University. While the Graduate Nurses' Association tried
to raise the status of nursing through their attempts to g
examine and register nurses after their training, MacEachern
initiated plans to incorporate nursing training into a
university degree programme, in his endeavor to achieve this
same purpose. Albeit for MacEachern, high standards of nursing were probably more important to his concepts of hospital
efficiency, and to his need for supervisory staff, than to any
desire to 'professionalize' women's work."^ 66
MacEachern's schemes were innovative and he, too, confronted opposition. There was open hostility from some of the VGH staff doctors toward the degree programme.11 President
Wesbrook, also a medical doctor, did not think in 1918 that the time was right for a Department of Nursing at UBC because of the congenital monetary problems faced by the university.12 It would be sheer speculation to suggest that professional training for nurses, established before a medical school, a dream Wesbrook had abandoned years earlier, might have engendered some feelings of jealousy on his part. Nevertheless, within months of Wesbrook's untimely death in October 1918,13 the UBC Senate responded favourably to Dr. MacEachen's proposals that the University become involved in the education of nurses.14 But a letter from the College of Physicians and
Surgeons, in reply to the UBC Senate's request for guidance in establishing qualifications and requirements for the nursing programme, reveals, if not reasons to account for Wesbrook's lack of enthusiasm for MacEachern's plan, the nature of the antipathy felt by doctors of medicine toward the advanced training of nurses.
So far as the Council has been able to ascertain, the consensus of opinion of Medical men is to the effect that the teaching of a large part of the curriculum of the Medical student to nurses is undesirable...further... 1. If nursing is to be taught in the university it should be as a post-graduate course. 2. That overtraining of nurses is not desirable and results largely in the losing of their usefulness. 3. Theoretical branches of nursing are of very little use in the sick room. 4. That a nurse can be sufficiently trained in the two years to meet all requirements.-^ This letter was received, however, several months after the university approved a degree programme in nursing — the first in the British Empire.16
Considering the obstacles that had impeded nearly all of
Wesbrook• s attempts to get the provincial university under way, his own well founded skepticism about the feasibility of nursing education, the crippled financial condition of the university, the fact that no other degree programme for nursing existed in Canada, and the lack of any other professional training at the University excepting Applied Science, it was remarkable that a Department of Nursing was establ ished at all, but especially within four months. The UBC Senate first considered in February 1919 Dr. MacEachern's proposal that the university establish a Department of Nursing.17 By May, the
Senate had worked out the details and recommended to the Board of Governors that a Department of Nursing be established in connection with the Faculty of Science, leading to the degree of B.Sc. There had been no lobbying by women's groups whose energies were directed towards a Department of Home Economics at this time. The RNABC was initially rather "aloof" in its attitude to the degree course, probably because they had been 18 neither consulted nor involved. And yet the Board of
Governors approved the new department and Miss Ethel Johns, RN, was hired in August to head the Department of Nursing at UBC and assume the duties of the Director of Nursing at VGH.
The Senate's approval of the Department of Nursing was clear evidence that this body considered that the education of 68 nursing students was a desirable and legitimate field of activity for the university. But was this decision guided by any philosophical commitment to professional education for women? A closer examination of the process whereby the Senate and the Board of Governors sanctioned this new department reveals that many interests were served by this decision, and reputations were made, but any motive to assign a more professional status to nursing was rooted in the need of hospital administrators to create a hierarchy within nursing, rather than in the initiative of the university to advance the status of women or women's work.
In 1919 the university was still temporarily housed in buildings adjacent to the Vancouver General Hospital. This geographic proximity had already suggested cooperative arrangements between the two institutions. For example, Dr.
R.H. Mullin, Director of Laboratories at VGH, also headed the
Department of Bacteriology at UBC and each institution paid part of his salary. The Chancellor of UBC, Dr. Robert E.
McKechnie presided over the Senate and was also, in 1919, the
Chairman of the Education Committee of the Vancouver General
Hospital. When Dr. MacEachern's letter was read at the
February 13, 1919 meeting of the Senate, Chancellor McKechnie was able to explain in detail, and with a degree of enthusiasm, what the plan would accomplish. The Senate readily appointed a three member committee to confer with the VGH Education
Committee and to report back to the Senate. These members included Dr. W.D. Brydone-Jack, physician and surgeon and 69 chairman of the committee; Dr. H. Ashton, Department of French; and Miss Shirley Clement, B.A., the first UBC graduate to be elected to the Senate.19
On March 5, 1919 the Senate received the report of this committee with the recommendation that the Senate endorse the plan for the Department of Nursing and forward same to the
Board of Governors. Shirley Clement was compelled to halt this swift passage of a plan that carried a heavy weight of interest and influence of medical men with hospital connections. In a move that remains as the only evidence of any conscience about the responsibility of the institution conferring the degree, or of the consequences of the Senate's decision in terms of women's education, Clement declared she was not in accordance with the recommendation. Clement argued that if the university were going to grant degrees in Nursing, it should demand something in the line of general education — at least a year in Arts — as was required of the other students in Applied Science. The Senate noted Clement's objections and enlarged the committee by five members to study 20 the matter further.
On May 14, 1919, this committee recommended to the Senate that a Department of Nursing be established in connection with the Faculty of Science. The admission requirements were to be high school matriculation or its equivalent, at the discretion of the Senate. Students were to take two years of Arts along with practical work at any institution that came up to the standards set down by the university authorities. The Medical 70
Council of British Columbia would be asked to draw up a standard of qualifications for the guidance of the Senate in reference to the proposed hospital requirements. The Senate adopted this report and submitted it to the Board of 91
Governors.
All obstacles were seemingly removed after the Board of
Governors was advised that the Department of Nursing would involve no expense to the University. The Vancouver General
Hospital would pay the Director of Nursing who would head the
Department of Nursing at the University. Nursing education was thus approved on the grounds that the University would have no financial responsibility in this department. The Senate and the Board of Governors subsequently approved a fifth year of academic work in the combined course, after a four-month public 22 health nursing course. But when the Library Committee asked in February 1920 for a $250 grant to purchase books for nursing students, the Board recalled that hospital authorities had agreed that the University would not be asked to assume any costs with respect to the Department of Nursing, and this 23 request was denied.
UBC received a proposal in April 1920, from the Provincial
Board of the Canadian Red Cross Society, to establish a Red
Cross Chair of Public Health. The Red Cross offered to pay
$5000 for three years and pay the professor's salary. The
Senate and the Board accepted this opportunity to advance the cause of Public Health throughout B.C. Dr. R. H. Mullin
(Bacteriology) was appointed Red Cross Professor of Public 71
Health, and Mary Ard. Mackenzie, the former Superintendent of the Victorian Order of Nurses, was named Red Cross Instructor of a public health course. Again the University was relieved of any financial responsibility.24
In recognition of her responsibilities within the
Department of Nursing at UBC, Ethel Johns had been appointed
Assistant Professor of Nursing in September 1920. Her salary at this time was still paid by the Hospital and funds from the
Red Cross. At the end of 1921 Johns resigned as the Director of Nursing at the Hospital but retained her position in the
Department of Nursing at UBC. It was not until 1923 that the
University was prepared to accept the full responsibility for
John's salary of $2500 per annum.25
In 1926, Ethel Johns resigned her position to accept a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in France.
Mabel F. Gray, R.N., succeeded Johns as Assistant Professor of
Nursing. The university had moved, at last, to Point Grey in
1925 and the Nursing Department relocated to the top floor of the Science Building. The University apparently determined that the Department of Nursing was no longer an experimental venture or one to be left in the hands of a woman without an advanced degree. Dr. Hibbert W. Hill was appointed the new 9 6 Head of the Department of Nursing and Public Health.
The University suffered drastic budget cuts in the 1930*s.
One of the first Departments to have to limit registration was
Nursing and Health. This limitation continued until, once again, a world war created an urgent need for women as nurses, 72
27 and the limitations were rescinded.
The first programme to combine a university degree with hospital training, without incurring additional costs to the university, surely enhanced the reputations of UBC and Leonard
Sylvanus Klinck, Dean of Agriculture, who was Acting-President during the months of Wesbrook's illness and subsequent to his death. The young university was credited with a 'first,1 and
Dean Klinck was offered, in May 1919, the Presidency of the
University of British Columbia. Similarly, the progressive model for nurses' training gained acclaim for VGH and its
Medical Superintendent, Dr. Malcolm MacEachern, who resigned in
1923 to become a Director of the American College of Physicians and Surgeons.28 But it would be a shallow analysis that concluded that the Department of Nursing was established to satisfy and advance the personal ambitions of university or hospital administrators. It would be equally inappropriate, however, to interpret the appearance of this programme, which was aimed in this era at female students, as a commitment by the university to women's professional education. Social, economic and class interests combined to support the establishment of the Department of Nursing at UBC.
In the early years, the costs of establishing the
University increased always at a faster rate than the provincial government anticipated. Monies required by the
University were difficult to obtain while public opinion about the role and responsibilities of the university was, in
Soward's words, "uninformed." Public expectations ranged from 73 the enthusiastic beliefs that all branches of learning should be undertaken, and all problems of society must be solved by the university, to the skeptical view that the university was
O Q only good for breeding "parasites and social butterflies."
After Wesbrook's death, the Minister of Education, Dr. J.D.
MacLean, questioned the Acting President, Leonard S. Klinck, about the university's policy regarding vocational training for
"boys and girls. "JU Clearly, a university programme that would offer practical training for a specific vocation would pacify both extremes of public opinion: that the university provide solutions for social problems, and that higher education equip students with practical, useful skills. A vocational programme that did not place any additional financial demands on the university, that is to say on provincial resources, was an attractive proposition on every account. If the costs of the
Department of Nursing had not been borne by the VGH, the university would likely have been unable and unwilling to establish this programme.
After World War I the community recognized its need for nurses. There was a shortage of nurses for patient care in the hospital, and the increased emphasis on bureaucratic and technological innovations in the new field of public health widened the opportunities for women in spheres they had identified as their own. University and hospital administrators were thus receptive to Dr. MacEachern's plan that would initially provide a cheap source of hospital labour, and eventually produce more highly educated nursing personnel 74
that could perform supervisory roles in the hospital. The
combined programme would attract middle class women who might
otherwise resist the rigours of hospital discipline and
residence requirements of hospital training schools.31 This middle class was thus assured of leadership roles in this
•noble,' expanding, but arduous profession.
In the nineteenth century, advocacy of higher education of women for nursing would have been called a 'separatist1
strategy that to the 'uncompromising* might undermine the cause for equal education for women. There was no attempt in this
instance in the twentieth century to clarify or justify this
kind of university education for women, other than the need to overcome an initial confusion and resistance of CBC faculty who did not understand how Nursing would fit into the academic community. Even Ethel Johns, R.N., recognized the tenuous basis of the status of Nursing at the University when she said, 3 2 "We came in the back door and we may be out tomorrow." The suggestion that nursing students could best be accommodated by 3 3
the Faculty of Applied Science apparently appeased everyone.
However, it was a nice irony that a female UBC graduate elected to the Senate, Shirley Clement, managed to bridge the distance
of the nineteenth century debate between the separatists and the uncompromising, and the twentieth century reality of professional education, with her insistence that the university
should require at least one year of general education to
justify a university degree.
There is little doubt that a degree in nursing allowed a 75 woman to combine a general, a liberal, education with the practical training that would provide her with specific skills and status in the work force. For this reason alone, the
Department of Nursing, established at UBC in 1919, was a significant step toward post secondary education that recognized women's work, and sought to increase its social and economic value. But this was more likely an 'effect' than a
'cause' in the decision of the University to offer a degree programme for nursing students.
Home Economics
The establishment of the Department of Nursing at the
University of British Columbia cannot properly be attributed to feminist agitation from either the student body or the larger population. Although the Local Council of Women was instrumental in establishing the School of Nursing at the
Vancouver City Hospital in 1899,34 the Department of Nursing at
UBC represented a confluence of interests that were more pragmatically conceived than philosophically inspired. On the other hand, no other single issue since women's suffrage commanded such sustained and energetic support from women in
British Columbia, as the movement to establish a Department of
Home Economics at UBC. For reasons, often altered and sometimes forgotten, during the span of a campaign that persisted for over twenty-five years, women representative of the full spectrum of feminist politics worked together to implement a course of study aimed at professionalizing female domesticity. 76
The evolution of the terms to describe a course of study that combined the practical and theoretical aspects of both homemaking and the domestic economy indicated the impact of social, educational, and technological changes on the concepts of the family, and of work in the home. Thus, what were called
'Courses in Domestic Science' before the First World War became
'Departments of Home Economies' by the Second; and at the time of this writing, UBC offers a Bachelor of Home Economics degree from its 'School of Family and Nutritional Sciences.'
Concurrent with these changes were fluctuations in the status of women, of women's work, and of feminist consciousness. The point to be made is that conventionally women's sphere was in the home and the Home Economics movement37 represented the efforts of women, predominantly, to redefine their own sphere.
While seeking to maintain women's familiar occupation within the home, the Home Economics movement, which stressed the application of scientific and economic principles to home 3 8 management, sought also to elevate the status of 'housewife.'
In economic terms, a degree in Home Economics would give a woman an advantage in a new professional field free from the 39 competition of men. Historically then, the Home Economics movement was a 'separatist* strategy that promoted education to prepare women for their life's work. In the twentieth century the movement attracted both conservatives and reformers; conservative women wanted a course to teach the basics of housewifery and motherhood, and reforming women recognized the potential of the 'separatist' strategy to counteract a male 77 bias in professional education.40
In the initial years of planning for UBC, the differences between the 'separatists' and the 'uncompromising', in matters that pertained to the education of women, were more sharply drawn than in later years.41 The separatist position was taken up by the National Council of Women and the Women's Institutes who championed the teaching of Home Economics in the schools.
Indeed, one of the founders of both these national organizations, Adelaide Hoodless, originated the Home Economics movement in Canada.42 In B.C. the Local Councils of Women urged President Wesbrook to establish university courses for women. The LCW also nominated (unsuccessfully) to the UBC
Senate, a recent immigrant and Council member, who had pioneered home economics instruction in English schools, Alice
Ravenhill.43 The LCW, received a sympathetic hearing from
President Wesbrook, perhaps because his mother-in-law, Lady
Taylor, was a Vice President of the National Council of 44
Women, although he appeared to have his own convictions about the value of Home Economics instruction and its capacity to effect reform attitudes towards health and nutrition.
On the other hand, the Vancouver University Women's Club, in the beginning, refused membership to women from outstanding universities if their degrees were obtained with Home Economics 46 as part of their course work. President Wesbrook trod on unfirm ground, therefore, when he spoke to the UWC about the
"nation's need for experts in special lines — household 47 administration, home economics, domestic science." 78
Evlyn Farris, founder and former President of the UWC, and
UBC Senator, held strong and 'uncompromising' views about
domestic science courses at the university. Farris presented her convictions in an address, "The University and the Home" delivered to the Women's Educational Club of Columbian College
in 1914. Farris believed that the tendency in America to
introduce practical training for women imperilled their
intellectual development, and endangered the value of
philosophical learning. In short, Farris upheld the benefits of a liberal education in a world that she thought increasingly
substituted "practice for principles." She was reluctant to attribute professional status to homemaking, but conceded that
if it was a profession then women could enter professional
schools for training after receiving a bachelor's degree.
Alternately, domestic science courses were better offered "in other schools entirely distinct from the university and under a 48 board of control." Farris clearly meant to disassociate women's education from the prevailing acceptance of the sexual
division of labour, and the assumption that women's interests were overwhelmingly domestic. It is likely, too, that Farris wanted to preserve the emphasis on equal education, meaning the
same education for men and women, at the university.
After reading the newspaper's account of Farris'
demonstration that Home Economics was an unsuitable subject for inclusion in the curriculum of a university, Alice Ravenhill 49
responded. Ravenhill's reply to the editor of the News-
Advertiser justified Home Economics as a valid intellectual 79 pursuit; her letter remains as evidence of the argumentation that persuaded many women to support this cause, and silenced the objections of others. Much of the letter is cited here to illustrate the strength of her appeal.
Mrs. Farris is reported to have based her objections on these grounds: (1) that the arts course in Canadian Universities is itself a practical training for the homemaker; (2) the chief work of a University is to teach people to think, whereas she maintains 'the introduction of too many subjects on scientific lines is not well calculated to produce thinkers'; (3) 'popular courses without a high condition of entrance weaken a University.'
I would like to enquire why — if the arts course in Canadian Universities gives this practical training for home life, do the graduates in arts permit the rate of infant mortality in Canada to reach a height only equalled in Russia; why does tuberculosis annually claim such an undue proportion of victims among the population; why are the reports on the medical inspection of school children in this province such anxious reading? Again, why was it that efforts to check communicable diseases or to safeguard the health of nations were so futile until the birth of biology and the application of chemistry and physics to these social problems in the second quarter of the last century threw a flood of light on courses previously hidden, and formed the foundation of modern sanitation?
With regard to Mrs. Farris' second point: Are such men as Darwin, Wallace, Huxley ... Pasteur, Currie ... not to be numbered among the world's greatest thinkers? In the third place, why should 'Home Economics' necessarily weaken a University? It is based upon a large group of sciences — biology, chemistry, physics, mechanics, economics ... as well as psychology, physiology and hygiene. Much of the work ... demands capacity for real research.... There is no difficulty in placing the subject on a strictly University level.
Finally, may I ask why, if the care of plant and animal life is of such moment to the well-being of this province, that again and again emphatic 80
assurances have been given that a foremost place in the curriculum of the new University is to be given to agriculture,™ why does not the right care of human life call for similar
recognition.5^
Ravenhill and Farris1 public exchange of opinions regarding the place of Home Economics at the university echoed the debate of the 'separatists' and the 'uncompromising' half a century before, when women's education first emerged as a controversial issue. Moreover, Ravenhill's arguments complemented the rhetoric of the "maternal feminists" who justified women's interest in social and civic reform as an extension of the traditional views of female moral superiority and maternal responsibility. Home Economics could provide the solution to the nation's social problems.52
Farris' concerns focussed more precisely on issues of education and the ' idea of a university.' Her defense of liberal education reflected her own experience as a student of philosophy and classical studies. The rise of professional or vocational training at the university, in contrast to the intellectual pursuits of a 'general' or 'liberal' education, had proved contentious since the mid-nineteenth century when
British universities were reformed to reflect a more utilitarian emphasis. In British Columbia, in the twentieth century, it was an old issue in a new context because now the practical training under discussion was aimed at women.
Farris' arguments had less appeal to the majority of women who did not have a university education. For many, her views represented an elitist attitude toward education. Supporters 81 of the Home Economics movement would refer to women like Farris CO as "narrowly cultured."
As the Home Economics movement gained momentum in the province, the objections of Farris, and women who held similar views, were heard less. By the mid-twenties, the University
Women's Club was committed to raising funds for a Chair in Home
Economics at UBC. Although the University Women's Club became an active promoter for Home Economics Courses at the university, the UWC Minutes show that in every instance that the issue was discussed, or resolutions were made on the subject, either to raise financial or public support, Farris was absent from those meetings.54 From 1913 to her retirement in 1942, Dr. Farris served alternately on the UBC Senate and the Board of Governors. After her original public statement of her position on the subject of Home Economics in 1914, Farris remained silent on the issue. Neither the Minutes of the
Senate, the Board, nor the UWC reveal the measure of Farris' aversion, indifference, or even assent to proposals for Home
Economics Courses at UBC. It remains a curious coincidence, however, that the movement for Home Economics met finally with success within six months of Dr. Farris' retirement from the
Board of Governors in 1942. In the absence of any clear record that she changed her mind on this issue, it would appear that
Farris did not use her position to promote this education for women, as did Annie Jamieson, for instance, who spoke in support of Home Economics when she served on the Senate and the
Board. Farris may have purposefully,disassociated herself from 82 the UWC's interests in home economics to retain her credibility in other spheres. But she may also have been a powerful behind-the-scenes ally in the university's passive resistance to Home Economics that lasted for a quarter of a century.
In the beginning, women had every reason to be hopeful that Home Economics would be available at the provincial university. The proposed building plans for UBC in 1913-14, which provided that a domestic science building would be one of
the first constructed, indicated the university's tacit approval of this course of study.55 Home economics courses were established at other Canadian universities in this era, and with President Wesbrook's sanction it seemed likely that
UBC would follow suit.56
The Senate first recommended to the Board of Governors in
April 1919 that the University establish a School of Home
Economics with a Bachelors degree of Household Science. This proposal urged an early appointment of a Dean to arrange for staff and equipment for lectures to begin in the 1920-21 57 session. The response of the Board was "sympathetic" to the
Senate's request and promised to consider it when the c ft
University was in a better financial position. Taken aback by this postponement the Senate sent a clear message to the
Board. ... we as a Senate strongly recommend to the Board of Governors that they put forth every effort to have a Faculty of Home Economics
opened in 1920.5Q 83
Again the Board deferred this undertaking. The following spring the Senate Committee on Home Economics — Annie Jamieson and J.A. McLean — interviewed the board members to urge immediate action be taken to establish a Home Economics
Course. They emphasized that without it, women would have to leave the province to take this training; that women wanted to take this training to fit them for their duties in the home and community and not with a view to remunerative employment; and that the majority of homemakers would prefer a Home
Economics Course to any other.60 The Board reiterated that in the present condition of finances it was impossible to establish a Faculty of Domestic Science.61 This was to be the pattern of communication between the Senate and the Board of
Governors on this subject for the next twenty years.
Even more relentless than the Senate in their remonstrances with the Board of Governors were the representatives from various women's organizations, whose continuous petitions kept the matter of Home Economics from being forgotten. The LCW's interest in Home Economics education for girls was longstanding. John Foster's thesis,
"Education and Work in a Changing Society: British Columbia,
1870-1930" reviews the previously successful role of voluntary associations, and the Councils of Women particularly, in bringing new forms of occupational training into provincial education. The Local Councils of Women, founded in Victoria and Vancouver in 1894, succeeded in establishing Domestic
Science instruction in the city schools. Foster reveals that 84 the tactics of the LCW were straightforward and methodical.
After getting a change in legislation that allowed women to serve as school trustees, they then elected members of the
Local Council to school boards. Concurrently, the Local
Councils set about to educate the public to the value of
Domestic Science education for girls. They sponsored teaching demonstrations and purchased equipment for high schools.
Before the changes brought about by the BC School Survey,
1924-25, Home Economics (and Manual Training for boys) was introduced only when local tax payers wanted these courses which were considered 'frills'.63 The LCW. was familiar, then, with the necessary process of applying pressure to the government and influencing public opinion to achieve success.
The LCW.' initiated the campaign for a Home Economics Course at the university, but a new association — the Parent-Teacher
Federation — appeared in the twenties to carry the campaign 64 through two decades to its final conclusions. The Parent-
Teacher Federation (P-TF), a provincial body composed of representatives from local Parent-Teacher Associations, was nominally an organization with a membership of both men and women. However, women consistently formed P-TA executives and appeared to be the predominantly active members. Doubtless the
P-TA continued the association of women for their common interests in a tradition well established by the women's club movement; but the un-restricted membership ensured their emancipation from an image that now had conservative connotations. The P-TF was, perhaps, one of the few 85 organizations open to both men and women that women controlled
— an indication that home and school were still accepted by the public as the legitimate spheres of women.
Parent-Teacher Associations were formed in the city in
1916 after the Education Committee of the University Women's
Club first proposed the benefits of such communication between the home and school.65 But it was the new Dean of Women, Mary
Bollert, who was credited with founding the provincial federation in the early twenties. As a member of the UWC she presented a paper outlining the full potential of cooperation between Parent-Teacher Associations.66 One of the first and longest lasting interests of the Provincial Parent-Teacher
Federation was the campaign to establish a Home Economics
Course at the University.
The Second Parent-Teacher Educational Conference held in
Vancouver in January 1922, marked the official launching of this campaign. Mr. M.B. Mackenzie, Assistant Municipal
Inspector of Vancouver Schools, formerly from New Zealand, spoke on "The Education of Women and Girls in New Zealand."
Mackenzie expressed the view that a woman ought to be educated to be a homemaker, but her training ought also to fit her to be economically independent. He outlined the School of Domestic
Science at the University in New Zealand. In the discussion that followed, Annie Jamieson observed that the women of
Vancouver had long been in favor of a similar training course and urged every person present to work to attain this
6 objw ective4.- . ? 86
The initial strategy in the P-TF Campaign was to mobilize public support for Home Economics. Articles plus the agendas of meetings of the P-TF, published in the daily and weekly newspapers, kept alive the issue of Home Economics education in the university, and served to educate public opinion. By 1922 the "Parent-Teacher News and Views," which featured publicity about Home Economics, dominated the front pages of the Western
Woman's Weekly (WWW).68 Elizabeth Berry, Supervisor of Home
Economics for Vancouver City Schools, addressed the question of
Home Economics education for women in an article in the WWW, in
April 1922.69 Berry quoted from a prominent educator at
Columbia University, Dr. Frederick H. Sykes whose paper "The
Social Basis of the New Education for Women" justified women's education for their work in the home and the city. Berry also put women's historical struggle for access to education in a contemporary context. She reviewed
women's long, disheartening, unnecessary fight ... for the right to benefit in their just share of the money for educational purposes [and] for their right to what appeals to them in subject matter. ~j ^
Berry believed that the fight for equal education had caused women to reject this 'traditional' sphere of women's work and resulted in the deterioration of the 'arts' of cooking and sewing. In addition, modern changes in sanitation standards, household technology and industrial innovation lessened the ability of mothers to transmit home management to their daughters. To remedy this situation Berry asserted that this 72 education must be administered by the schools. In an earlier 87 article in The Province Berry argued that a Home Economics
Department at UBC would provide the necessary standardized training for teachers of Home Economics in B.C. schools.73
Doubtless Berry's arguments encouraged a number of women's groups to join forces with the P-TF to raise funds to establish a Chair of Home Economics at UBC, and to plead their case repeatedly before the University.74
Before the end of the second decade, women's organizations focussed their energies primarily on the Senate which was the determining body for educational curriculum at the University.
But a growing awareness that their concerns required a political solution was evident after a Home Economics Endowment
Fund was established in 1926 by the P-TF.75 in a province-wide campaign women's organizations raised the sum of $11,000 mostly 7 fi through private subscriptions. At one point in the campaign, leading businessmen in Vancouver reportedly offered to subscribe $20,000 provided the women could match this contribution, and also provided that the University would 77 accept a $40,000 diminishing endowment. Despite President
Klinck's avowed sympathies with the annual petitions received from the Home Economics supporters, the Board of Governors remained intractable and women's organizations began to lobby the Provincial Minister of Education.
A delegation from the Provincial Parent-Teacher Federation and the Local Councils of Women appeared again before the
Board, in December 1928, determined to undermine the resistance 88
7 8 to establishing a Course in Home Economics at the University.
This delegation testified that public interest, rather than subsiding, was advancing, and there was a great demand for teachers of Home Economics in the Province. The delegation further reported that both the Minister of Education, Canon
Hinchliffe, and Premier Tolmie were favorable to the women's petition, but had pointed out that their chief objection was that the authorities of the University had not asked for the establishment of such a Course.79 The women appealed to the
Board, therefore, to seek funds from the Government to establish the Course in September.
It must have proved difficult for the P-TF to imagine how the campaign that had raised a substantial sum of financial support, in addition to the moral support of public opinion, the UBC Senate, and the Minister of Education, could have failed to win official sanction from an allegedly sympathetic
Board of Governors, or to evoke their request for additional votes from the Legislative Assembly for a Home Economics
Course. This revelation was a clear indication to the P-TF that their powers of persuasion might be more profitably directed toward the Provincial government.
The persistence of the delegation of women was rewarded in
1929 when a Provincial grant was made available to the
University for the purpose of establishing a Course in Home
Economics; but the Board ruled the amount "entirely inadequate" 8 0 and took no action. After being advised that any unused portion of this grant allotted for Home Economics in 1929-30 89
would not be carried over to 1930-31, and that no additional
monies would be available for Home Economics in 1930,
representatives from women's organizations in Vancouver,
Victoria, Nanaimo, New Westminster and North Vancouver appeared
again before the Board of Governors. Whereas previously this
delegation confined its efforts to lobby alternately the
University and the Government, it now attempted to perform
brokerage functions between the Minister of Education and the
University President.81
The women delegates had set up a "round table conference
on all phases of the Home Economics situation" to be attended
by the Minister of Education, Canon Joshua Hinchliffe,
representatives of the Provincial P-TF and the Councils of
Women. The delegation requested that President Klinck and a
Committee from the Board of Governors, "with power to act," be
appointed to confer with the Minister and the female delegates
at the meeting in two days time (April 2, 1930). This
conference yielded positive results. The Minister stated he would do his utmost to obtain the necessary funds to provide
accommodation for Home Economics by 1931 and recommended that
the President, therefore, should arrange courses for the first
two years. The Minister would provide money for additional
expenditures if instructors needed to be hired before the end p o of the present fiscal year. By May, the Board had adopted a
Report from the Senate outlining a two year Course in Home 83 Economics to begin in the fall of 1931. Twenty-five women registered at UBC in 1930 intending to 90
84 take the first two years of the Home Economics Course. in
1931, the P-TF and the Local Councils of Women sent letters of gratitude to the Board.85 The P-TF only awaited confirmation from the Board of Governors that plans were underway to establish the full four-year programme, before they transferred their Endowment Fund to the University. The Board, however, could not give these assurances and the Fund remained in the hands of the P-TF. In fact, in April 1932, the President advised the Board to discontinue Home Economics and to return the unused portion of $12,500.00 to the Provincial Treasury.86
The Home Economics Course had survived for only one year when it became the casualty of the political struggles that enveloped the University from 1930-32. A steadily reduced operating revenue, resulting both from the coercive tactics of the Minister of Education to force changes in University 87 education and the effects of the economic depression in BC, precipitated an internal crisis. Factions in the Senate challenged the Board's administrative policy. The eventual result was a vote by the Senate in March 1932 of non-confidence 88 in the President of the University.
The Board subsequently requested an enquiry into the problems of the University. Judge Peter Lampman, the
Commissioner of the Enquiry, concluded that the chief issue of contention, internally, had been the costs of Agricultural research and the apparent favoritism shown to this Faculty by its former Dean Klinck in the face of declining enrollment and grants. Also, the distinctions between the decision making 91 powers of the Senate and the Board were imprecise, and the
President proved to be an insufficient liaison between the two bodies.89
The extent to which Home Economics had become a political pawn in an external struggle for power was revealed by its emphasis in the Lampman Report. Lampman was highly critical of the Government's role in establishing the Department of Home
Economics and pilloried the efforts of the women who promoted this Course. Judge Lampman stated:
And herein lies one of the troubles of the University. Instead of competent authorities being allowed to fix courses of study, some individuals, obsessed with the importance of some particular course, prevail upon the authorities to add their particular pet subject. This is all the more dangerous when a fund has been raised and subscribed for the purpose.... I am suspicious of all such resolutions. The Government has apparently succumbed to the pressure as it actually provided money for that course. It is almost unbelievable, considering
the state of finances at this time.nr,
Lampman may have been correct to censure the interference of the Government in the educational decisions of the University.
However, Lampman appeared ignorant of the historical precedent in B.C. wherein voluntary associations played a role in 91 affecting educational change. More specifically, special interest groups had funded, previously, new university programmes 'for the public good,' for example, the Department 92 of Nursing and Public Health. Moreover, in the absence of any clear decision by the "competent authorities," with respect to Home Economics, their repeated assurances of sympathy 92
accompanied by excuses of insufficient finances conveyed to the women's delegations the need for a political solution to
overcome the apparent stalemate.
The preservation of academic freedom from political
interference has always been the concern of universities that
are funded by the state. However, the university surely has a
responsibility to express its position on educational matters
that are raised by public opinion. The President and the
Board, prior to 1929, had ample opportunity to either uphold or
denounce Home Economics education on reasonable grounds.
Instead, they chose to defer and resist all attempts by the
Senate and popular support groups to establish this Course while appearing to give it approval. The Board's
equivocations, which may have been a deliberate ploy,93
seemingly shifted the responsibility to the government to
provide additional funds. Lampman could not, therefore,
reasonably charge political interference in a matter that so 94
clearly invited political intervention.
A prominent clubwoman, Alice Townley, attacked Lampman* s
judgements and defended both the interests of women and the q c
decision of the government to fund Home Economics. in a
letter to the editor of The Province, July 31, 1932, Townley
argued ...sometimes our women voters are inclined to think that their opinions and desires are not given that consideration that should be extended in all fairness, but in this matter we should appreciate the stand taken by the government. There are many other departments [at the University]. Why should Home Economics bear the brunt of Judge Lampman's high disapproval? Who 93
are the "competent authorities* that should 'fix desirable courses of study' in this case? It is a changing world.... What about the Department of Agriculture? If it be reasonable to spend such an amount on teaching men to farm, why not encourage our women to learn how to manage the home, the foundation of the nation?qg
Townley's letter indicated that Lampman's attack would likely renew the campaign for Home Economics despite the financial difficulties that threatened the continued existence of the
University.97 In fact, the P-TF established in 1932 a
Permanent Committee of the Home Economics Endowment Fund to take charge of the funds, to work for the reestablishment of the Course, to keep up a publicity campaign, and to award scholarships and prizes to students intending to pursue Home
Q O
Economics elsewhere.
The next decade saw this whole series of events repeated: the P-TF and the Councils of Women sent letters and delegations to the Board requesting a decision on the reestablishment of the Department of Home Economics; the President and the Board reiterated their sympathy with those requests but claimed they could not proceed without funds; and the Board refused to include estimates for the Course in their operating budgets 99 submitted to the government.
Late in 1936, representatives from the following organizations, under the auspices of the Provincial Parent-
Teacher Federation, met with the Board of Governors to urge the reestablishment of a degree course in Home Economics: the
Provincial Parent-Teacher Federation, Vancouver University 94
Women's Club, Local Councils of Women (Vancouver, Victoria, New
Westminster), Business and Professional Women's Club of
Vancouver, BC Teachers' Federation, BC Trustees Association,
Women's Institutes, Trade and Labour Council, BC Girl Guides
Association, Women's Educational Auxiliary of the United
Church, Kiwanis Club and the P.E.O. Sisterhood.x®® The wide
cross-section of public opinion represented by this delegation
prompted a Report to the Board of Governors submitted by
President Klinck on February 22, 1937 .101 Klinck's Report
reviewed the negotiations and costs for Home Economics from
1931-32, and found
... that the present financial position of the University parallels too closely the situation which obtained when Home Economics was discontinued to warrant a resumption of this course at the present time.
And further,
... the Board has definitely committed itself to the strengthening of a number of basic Departments now in existence, and for which the funds necessary to give effect to this policy have not been obtained.
President Klinck also recorded his own attitude:
Throughout the entire period of the negotiations, the President actively supported the request for the establishment of a Department of Home Economics. To him, the need was evident, the demand undoubted. The content of the courses, insofar as these were definitely determined, was unquestionably of University grade. These reasons might be addressed with
even greater force today., n9
Clearly President Klinck wished to align himself with the
supporters of the Home Economics Course, but it was not then 95
(nor had it ever been) included in the Board's priorities for
instruction, or projected into the budgetary requisitions.
Again, the Home Economics delegations were led to believe
that the strength of the University's opposition lay in
insufficient funding; but they also had reason to hope that
this obstacle might be overcome. The Province was beginning to
show signs of recovery from the effects of the economic 1 03
depression. The University budget slowly expanded to
include grants for research and public education. Furthermore,
UBC faculty member, Dr. George M. Weir, served as Provincial
Secretary and Minister of Education in the new Liberal
administration.104 Dr. Weir co-authored with J.H. Putnam the
BC Schools Survey in 1925, (known also as the Putnam-Weir
Survey), which was responsible for the integration of Home
Economics into the regular school curriculum.105 The P-TF might reasonably expect Weir to be sympathetic to their cause,
and early in 1937 they inquired about the Board's policy in the
event that a promise could be obtained from the Minister of
Education of an appropriation for Home Economics in the next
University budget (1938-39).106
Perhaps determined to avoid a repetition of the 1929
fiasco, President Klinck replied to the P-TF Committee in terms which made it clear that the priorities set by the University,
which did not include Home Economics, should not be placed at
risk by any additional pleas for supplementary funds.107
Evidently the P-TF was forestalled and there was no recurrence,
in this instance, of the Minister's actions in 1929 that had 96
resulted in the temporary satisfaction of the Home Economics
proponents at the cost of dissension in the University.
The economic depression of the 1930's thwarted the
extension of instruction and facilities at UBC. The
overcrowded conditions, after 1935, forced limitation of
enrollment, especially in laboratory courses.108 Early in 1939
expectations of resumed building prompted requests from various
delegations who were anxious not only to establish Home
Economics but also to provide instruction in Law, Pharmacy, 10 9
Pre-Medical Training, and Social Services. But the outbreak
of World War II in August 193 9 suspended all practical plans
for immediate expansion in these areas.
By 1940 the University began to chart its course for the
future. And so did the Permanent Committee of the Home
Economics Endowment Fund. Alerted to the activity of other
groups that were courting the approval of the Senate and the
Board of Governors for new courses, the Committee decided to
interview "certain people" prior to the next meeting of the
Senate (February 21, 1940), once again, to bring to its
attention "the increasing need of the reestablishment of the
Home Economics Course."110 The Home Economics Committee
gained a substantial concession at this meeting when the Senate
recommended to the Board of Governors "that if and when funds
are available, the Course in Home Economics be reestablished
prior to the establishment of any other course."111
A number of political and administrative changes occurred in the next few years that affected decisions about University 97 education in B.C. In the provincial election in 1941 none of the three political parties received a clear majority. The
Liberals and Conservatives were forced into an uneasy coalition with Liberal John Hart serving as Premier. Early in 1942 the
University came under attack in the Legislative Assembly. The
Minister of Education, H.G.T. Perry, wanted more control over how the grants were spent by the University. Dorothy Steeves,
CCF member, announced her intention to sponsor a bill "to democratize the Board of Governors." Steeves charged the
University was operating in a "sacrosanct vacuum" and Herbert
Gargrave, CCF, complained that "the Legislature was subsidizing a class of society that can afford to pay for itself."
Moreover, the five women in the Legislature — Laura Jamieson
(CCF), Tilly Jean Rolston (Conservative), Nancy Hodges
(Liberal), Dorothy Steeves (CCF), and Grace Maclnnis (CCF) — transcended their partisan differences to press for the establishment of a Department of Home Economics. They were outraged that students had to leave the Province to complete a
degree in Home Economics. Rolston and Hodges pointed out that
$17,000 had been raised by women's organizations to assist the funding of Home Economics but still no action had been 112 taken. 1Z
Sweeping changes took place in this period in the administration of UBC. Although there were reasons for their resignations, not clearly connected to the attacks in the
Legislature, only three of the nine members of the Board of 113 Governors in the session 193 9-40 remained in 1944-45. 98
President Klinck also prepared to retire early in 1944. Such a
revision of personnel inevitably brought new perspectives to the UBC Governors.
Undoubtedly tensions raised in the Legislature prompted the Minister of Education, in September 1942, to request
President Klinck to include an estimate of the costs of establishing Home Economics in the University budget for
1943-44.114 The amount of $14,570.00 was subsequently approved for the Department of Home Economics to begin operations in
1943, utilizing the laboratories in one of the city schools.115
For the second time, the decision to establish Home Economics instruction at the University was founded on political
intervention. But the terms of the solution, which relied on borrowed facilities, suggest that in this round of negotiations, the Board was equally anxious to settle this longstanding problem. In the face of a campaign that had endured for a quarter of a century, it is reasonable to ask why the provincial government pushed and the University yielded on the issue of Home Economics instruction at this time.
The Home Economics campaign depended on the upheaval of political change and wartime conditions to persuade the
University to make this education available to women. In education, as in other matters of social welfare, the balance of responsibility had shifted to governments to deal with
inequities caused by the economic depression, and emergencies caused by wartime circumstances. In B.C. a coalition government and a left-leaning party in opposition proved eager to exercise 99 their commitment to a new political consciousness to solve social problems. The P-TF campaign became an object of mutual interest to all political parties in light of the criticism levelled by both the CCF opposition and the Minister of
Education against the University administration, and the solidarity of the five female MLAs on the question of Home
Economics. The existence of the Home Economics Endowment Fund clearly attested to a substantial basis of support for this
Course. In view of the recalcitrance of the University, the
Provincial legislators appeared justified in suggesting to the
President that estimates for this Course be included in the budget for the following year. The lengthy campaign of the P-TF was thus aided, considerably, by the current mood of the government to place a more 'democratic emphasis' on the administration of the University, and to make post secondary education more responsive to the needs of the population.
The tenor of the times, perhaps, made government intervention more palatable to the University in 1942 than it did in 1930. With this 'encouragement' from the Minister of
Education, the Governors appeared to quickly surmount obstacles that had impeded the establishment of Home Economics since
1919. The amount of money available for the Department of Home
Economics in 1942 was actually less than the grants made nearly ten years previous, which had been deemed insufficient at that 116 time. If the use of high school laboratories had been rejected in the past as unsuitable accommodations, these objections were overcome in view of more pressing 100 considerations.
The resolution of the Senate to give Home Economics priority over the introduction of any other new instruction at the University, presented a problem in planning for the future of the University. President Klinck and the Board did not need a long memory to recall the increase in the University's enrollment that followed World War I. That the present War would eventually end was certain, and the necessity for the
University to accommodate the returning veterans, most of them men, was equally assured. But the University * could make no plans before Home Economics was reestablished.Ultimately
it was in the University's interests to institute Home
Economics and clear the way for the Senate's approval for
instruction in new areas like Social Service work and in those areas of traditionally male expertise: Law, Pharmacy, and
Pre-Med.
Early in 1943, the schedule to establish a Department of
Home Economics for the fall session was nearly disrupted when
President Klinck's search across the country for suitable teaching staff fell short of his expectations. In his Report to the Board of Governors, President Klinck reviewed his difficulties in this respect. After having made a fairly
exhaustive canvass of Canadian graduates in Home Economics,
Klinck concluded that
I do not have a single name to recommend to the Committee for appointment to the Headship ... the reason ... is the almost total absence of women in Canada with the necessary academic qualifications and professional and administrative experience necessary for the 101
Headship, that is, if the Department of Home Economics is to be established in a basis comparable with that of of other Departments in
the University.11R
The President considered the decisions by the Universities of Saskatchewan and Manitoba to go to the United States for women to Head their Departments and questioned whether UBC should follow this option. Klinck suggested also that a year's delay might allow more time for candidates to study the local
situation. He advised that the lack of departmental accommodation was a barrier not easily surmounted,
especially when one approaches members of large and generously equipped departments where specialization has been highly developed and where ... a large staff is regarded as essential
to desired professional recognition.^q
Neither the UBC Senate nor the Minister of Education was in favor of any further delay and the President was authorized to
conclude negotiations in May for prospective appointees in the 120
Department of Home Economics.
Many women in British Columbia finally achieved their goal
to establish Home Economics at UBC. Perhaps unaware that this victory for feminist politics was tempered by the current need
for political and administrative expediency, the longtime
supporters of the home economics campaign were more exhilerated
by the swift installation of the Course, than critical of its
shortcomings.
There is no better illustration of the dilemma that faced
the proponents of post-secondary domestic education for women 102 than was revealed by the President's attempts to hire women with doctoral degrees to staff the Department of Home
Economics. Without high academic standards for teachers and research facilities, the study of Home Economics would not achieve a status comparable to that of other Departments in the
University. Nor could it hope to raise the status of 'women's work' on a level comparable with other professional training at the University. But while Home Economics education was continually deferred by the University, women were denied the opportunity to develop this field and to raise its credibility within the university community.
However, the real pitfall for the 'separatists', perhaps foreseen by 'the uncompromising', was that the success of education for women's social roles was measured by the capacity of the graduate to put her theoretical learning to practical use, and to fulfil the social expectations prescribed for her sex. The Home Economics Department was one of the few areas in which a graduate's marriage and subsequent work in the home was regarded as the practical employment of her post-secondary 121 education. Thus the ambition to pursue graduate studies was evidence that the student had defied (or denied) social expectations, to prepare for a professional career. As long as the choice between domesticity and scholarship was, for women, mutually exclusive, fewer women would pursue graduate degrees.122
While the observations about the conflict between graduate education and marriage held equally true for women in other 103 disciplines, the implications of the paucity of graduate degrees in Home Economics were particularly debilitating in view of feminist aims. As long as the emphasis of education in
Home Economics lay on the maternal and homemaking
responsibilities of women, and not on specific scholarly
research and professional expertise to enliven the field, it was difficult to encourage women to undertake graduate work in
Home Economics. Women, therefore, remained relatively
underqualified in university departments that might have
ensured a female sphere within the academy.
In fact, in the twenty-five years that the P-TF petitioned the Board of Governors at UBC, domestic education ceased to
retain the feminist complexion of its youth. Whereas initially
the Home Economics movement encompassed aims, both liberative and conservative, by 1942 the prevailing social ideals and
realities of women's roles cast the movement into a more
retrogressive mode. A brief understanding of the relationship of the feminist aims of the Home Economics movement to the
status of women within a changing climate of social
expectations will help to explain, further, how the more
radical aims became diluted, and why the expeditious
establishment of Home Economics in 1942 no longer represented a victory for feminist politics.
Alice Ravenhill and Adelaide Hoodless advocated women's
education for their domestic roles at a time when maternal
feminism was both credible and effective because it emerged
from a well-defined women's culture formed in the late 104 nineteenth century. The women's movement in this period was strenghthened by separate female institutions that mobilized women and gained political leverage in the larger society.123
Thus suffragists developed a successful strategy, based on the strength of women's separate sphere, but designed to extend women's political influence and participation beyond the domestic sphere. The Home Economics supporters adopted the same strategies in an attempt to overcome a male bias in education.124
Schools and universities that established Home Economics
Departments before, during, or immediately following WWI, more likely responded to the maternal feminist aims of this new
instruction. In fact, Home Economics was often seen as complementary to instruction in agricultural training for men in an era when men and women claimed separate but equal spheres 125 in the work of nation building. Furthermore, the emphasis on the scientific principles of household science encouraged women to venture into scientific studies as an extension of a legitimate (socially approved) interest, rather than as a deviation from the interests usually expected of their sex. The feminist aims of the Home Economics movement showed greater promise while a separate female sphere prevailed.
The attempt of the 'new women' in the 1920's to assimilate
into male dominated institutions and professions, effectively eroded the strengths of a separate female identity, female 126
institutions, and public feminism. After women's suffrage, women's networks appeared outdated. In the words of one 105 historian of American feminism, women gave up many of the strengths of the female sphere without gaining equally from the man's world they entered.127
In B.C. the Home Economics movement was an attempt by many women to sustain maternal feminism and recover 'a sphere they
had lost'!-'-2** The Home Economics campaign mobilized public support in a manner reminiscent of the pre-suffrage feminist politics. The delegations that appeared before the Board of
Governors of the University, perhaps represented a broad cross-section of female support. However, the membership in these organizations suffered a severe decline from the 1920's that suggests their failure to speak for a substantial majority
of women.ii:7 Possibly, the most vehement Home Economics
supporters were alumni of the pre-suffrage female institutions.
Although women should be free to determine their own spheres,
'professional' education that continued to stress homemaking,
as women's most essential function in society was an attempt to
solve new problems with old solutions, irrespective of
feminism.
The idea that a degree in Home Economics might prepare women, who did not marry, for related professions was put
forward in the twenties. But by the thirties and forties, the
inequities of society made increasingly visible by the economic
depression, and the imperative to harness resources and ideals
once again to the war effort, renewed a traditional emphasis on 130 women's place in the home as the hub of social stability. It is more than coincidence that social expectations 106 reaffirmed the ideal division of work according to gender at a time when women were visibly employed outside the home, often in conventionally male areas.131 Both the depression and the war encouraged a female labor force that would prove temporary
in light of a stabilizing economy, the return of enlisted men, and the revival of conservative attitudes toward women's work.132 In the social climate that prevailed in 1942, domestic education for women represented a philosophy of women's education that was more conservative than progressive. In this respect, the reactionary aims inherent in the Home Economics movement intersected with the prevailing climate of social expectations; thus the education of women in Home Economics primarily served social imperatives before individual or
I -JO feminist preferences. ->J The validity of this conclusion is borne out by the decisions made concerning the Department of
Home Economics in the years following the end of the war.
Klinck's retirement in July 1944 coincided with a new era of building the University under assistance from the Federal
Government, and the innovative, sometimes unorthodox decisions of President Norman A.M. MacKenzie. MacKenzie's installation address echoed the earlier convictions of UBC's first president, Dr. Frank F. Wesbrook, who also believed: "the
University should and must strive to serve the community and every group and individual in it."134 To the P-TF's Permanent
Committee of the Home Economics Fund, which was still intact while deliberating the best use for their $20,000, Dr.
MacKenzie's words promised "a friendly spirit of cooperation"; 107 his request in 1945 that a member of this Committee act in a consultative capacity with the University Home Economics
Committee was "deeply appreciated."-'-35
MacKenzie, himself, appreciated the service that the Home
Economics Department could render to his campus over the next few years. In 1945-46, registration at UBC almost doubled with
2,254 veterans in a total student body of 5,621.136 Whereas
President Klinck, who faced an increase in the student population in 1931, consulted the fire marshall and limited enrollment,137 President MacKenzie recognized the urgent need for both classrooms and student housing could be met by utilizing the abandoned Army and Air Force camps. Twelve camps were dismantled to transport the huts to the campus to equip as lecture rooms and laboratories. Four camps remained on their original sites to serve as living quarters for students; two of them, Acadia and Fort Camps, were adjacent to the campus; a third was on Lulu Island; and the fourth situated on
Little Mountain, was converted into suites for married 13 8 students. The problem of how to feed 200 single and married university students in campus residences was solved by
commandeering dietetic majors in Home Economics to operate the 139
dining service at Acadia Camp as part of their instruction.
Here, surely, was the denouement of that old debate
between Evlyn Farris and Alice Ravenhill. Time had validated
Farris* concerns that the emphasis on practical training for women at the University could divert their intellectual
energies from, what she termed, philosophic learning. The fact 108 that women comprised the smallest minority of the student population in the post war years,140 while at the same time some women on campus were actively perpetuating women's service role in society, made academic women appear to be an endangered species. It would be a contention of a later feminist movement, the seeds of which were sown in the years following
World War II, that would suggest that the aims of domestic education for women's social roles ran contrary to the aims of higher learning: to liberate the human potential from the
social limitations that may stem from gender, ethnic, or class differences. Evlyn Farris had been similarly discomfited by
the prospect of Domestic Science Courses at the university in
1913.
It did not appear that 'women's work' was more highly valued when it was performed in the university setting as the
Governors were not initially eager to make available adequately
equipped facilities for Home Economics. A Committee of the
Board of Governors, in November 1946, allocated funds for permanent buildings based on 'the most urgent needs'; at this time a Home Economics Building was deferred in favor of an
Applied Sciences Building, and a Biological Science and 141 Pharmacy Building. The first Head of the Department of Home Economics, Dorothy Lefebvre, resigned on December 31, 1946, to 142
be married. But she took this occasion to protest the
Governors' assessment of priorities for permanent buildings and
urged them to reconsider their decisions in view of gifts 143 received for a Home Economics Building. Lefebvre was 109
referring to a $75,000.00 bequest from the late Jonathan
Rogers144 and the $20,000 donation from the P-TF.145 The Board was unmoved by this request and the Department of Home
Economics continued to occupy six army huts until January 1949 when they were destroyed by fire.
There followed some hasty decisions to erect a permanent building with the money from Rogers' estate, the insurance
settlement, and the P-TF fund.146 The Department of Home
Economics was thus comfortably housed by October 1949 in a modern building, "one of the newest and best equipped in all
Canada."147 Seven years later, the final objective of the home economics campaign was met when a Home Management House was opened in which students in their second year learned "skills and techniques of housekeeping as well as some managerial
skills."148
Although Home Economics education appeared to serve
ideologies that were more conservative than progressive, and was more oriented to social usefulness than to individual
fulfilment, there were practical advantages for women with Home
Economics degrees. In fact, the majority of UBC graduates in
1946 and 1947 with degrees in home economics had little difficulty finding employment in hospitals, schools and 149
industry. The maternal feminists in the inter-war years were unable to solve the conundrum of social expectations of women in their efforts to promote domestic education, but they
recognized, perhaps, that home economics might prepare women
for economic roles unchallenged by men. The Department of Home 110
Economics at UBC could begin to stimulate a demand for
graduates that would expand economic opportunities for women.
Without the campaign that was sustained throughout the
twenties and thirties by women who wanted to elevate the status of women's work in the home, it is unlikely that a Department of Home Economics would have been established at UBC. To this end, maternal feminism served to mobilize women's organizations
to exert continuous pressure on the government and the
university. However, economic, political and social forces
proved more persuasive then feminist politics in finally
determining the decision of the Board of Governors to offer
this Course for women. Ill
Notes
1 The establishment of the Dean of Women and of women's residences is discussed in Chapter IV. o The influenza epidemic reached Vancouver in the autumn of 1918. The University suspended lectures for five weeks on October 20 and the Auditorium and classrooms were converted into hospital wards for influenza patients. Some of the staff and students volunteered for orderly and nursing duties. Three UBC students died.
Jo Ann Whittaker, "The Search for Legitimacy: Nurses' Registration in British Columbia 1913-1935," in Latham and Pazdro, p. 315.
4 Whittaker, p. 317. 5 Whittaker, p. 320. The handbook for nursing students at Vancouver General Hospital made it quite apparent that middle class women with several years of high school were in demand. The handbook stated: "women of superior education and refinement will be given preference." See Cavers, p. 30. 6 Whittaker, pp. 318-19. 7 MacEachern was Medical Superintendent from 1913-23. Margaret M. Street, Watch-fires on the Mountains: The Life and Writings ofEthel Johns. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 115.
8 Street, p. 115. a The nurses* association also tried to effect changes in their working conditions.
10 The shortage of nurses after the war contributed to the lack of supervisory staff. 11 Street, p. 130. 12 Street, p. 116. 13 Wesbrook died October 19, 1918, three weeks before the end of the war, of kidney disease and possibly influenza infection.
14 Street, p. 117.
15 Letter dated 3 May 1920 from A.P. Proctor, Registrar of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. to Stanley W. Mathews, Secretary, The Senate UBC. See Street, pp. 128-9. 16 The Senate subsequently asked the B.C. Hospital 112
Association for advice on hospital standards for the practical course for nurses. Dr. MacEachern, Secretary of the Hospital Association set forth the proper standards.
17 Street, p. 117.
IP This observation from Ethel Johns, cited in Street, p. 118.
1 Q Sources: Street, pp. 116-118; Logan, p. 45; University of British Columbia Senate, Minutes of Meetings, Volume I; University of British Columbia Board of Governors, Minutes of Meetings.
20 UBC Senate Minutes, March 5, 1919.
21 UBC Senate Minutes, May 14, 1919. 22 All recommendations from Johns according to Street, p. 126. 23 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, February 23, 1920. 24 UBC Senate Minutes, April 1920. 25 Street, p. 141. 26 Dr. H.W. Hill succeeded Dr. R.H. Mullin, after his death, as the Head of Bacteriology and Public Health. In 1925 the Department of Nursing and Public Health fused and retained Dr. Hill as the Head. Dr. Hill had been a colleague, of Dr. Wesbrook at the University of Minnesota. Gibson, p. 191. 27 Enrollment was limited to fifteen in first year Nursing and Health in July 1931. In January 1942, all regulations limiting attendance were waived except for Nursing and Public Health, and Teacher Training. These limitations were rescinded a month later "in light of the urgent need for nurses and teachers at the present time." UBC Board of Governors Minutes, July 29, 1931; January 26, 1942; February 23, 1942. 28 Ann S. Cavers. Our School of Nursing 1899 to 1949 (Vancouver: 1949), p. 24. 29 Soward, p. 315. 30 Letter to President Klinck from Minister of Education, Dr. J.D. MacLean, 1918. Soward, p. 202. 31 Daughters of the middle classes were in a better position to afford the costs of a university education, both in terms of tuition expenses and the ability of their families to support a non-wage earner living at home. Also these women were likely to have completed more years of secondary 113 schooling and to find attractive the prospect of a university degree.
32 Ethel Johns, R.N. Address to members of the King Edward High School Parent-Teacher Association, The Province, January 1, 1923 .
33 In a letter from Ethel Johns to Dr. Muriel Uprichard, September 16, 1965, Johns wrote: "It is apparent that certain members of the faculty of the University disapprove of this intrusion by a group of students in Nursing. What right had nurses to University privileges? And where did they belong? There was no medical school ... no school of education ... not even a Department of Home Economics .... Dr. MacEachern and Dr. Mullin came to our rescue ... our proper place [was] in the Department of Applied Science ... Dean Brock agreed. This decision heartened me considerably. I believed then, as I do now, that nursing is an applied science and that we had a right to be there." Street, p. 126.
34 Cavers, p. 14.
35 Without reviewing the complexities of the national and provincial suffrage campaigns, suffice to say that women officially received the right to vote in British Columbia on April 5, 1917 and in federal elections on May 24, 1918. Significantly, under the War Time Election Act, relatives of members of armed forces were eligible to vote from September 20, 1917. See Catherine L. Cleverdon, The Woman Suffrage Movement in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) . 3 6 The current terminology that puts the emphasis of study on 'family and nutritional sciences' attempts to make this Department less gender specific in its appeal and expectations. The feminist consciousness that surfaced with the women's movement in the 1960s identified education that perpetuated occupational divisions according to sex as both inequitable and discriminatory. In consequence, a few male students chose this school but generally men are less interested in the traditionally female professions than the reverse. 37 The 'Home Economics movement' identifies, here, the attempts to establish the study of Home Economics for female students at the university. 3 8 Robert M. Stamp, "Teaching Girls Their 'God Given Place in Life': The Introduction of Home Economics in the Schools," Atlantis 2,2, Part I (Spring 1977). This article outlines Hoodless' commitment to home economics education as a means of protecting the family from disease and death caused by improper nutrition, food preservation and unsanitary conditions. She believed that practical education for women would create "a higher type of womanhood" and give greater respect to the domestic occupations. 114
In British Columbia, Mrs. D.L. MacLaurin of the Education Committee of the Victoria Council of Women argued to the authors of the B.C. Schools Survey that Home Economics "is pre-eminently the proper and logical study for womankind" and that if Home Economics were given its rightful place and recognition in education "that much undesirable and unnecessary competition between the sexes will be avoided." Cited in Maureen Sangster Chestnutt, "Origin and Development of Home Economics Instruction in British Columbia from 1870 to 1951," Unpublished Thesis for M.Sc. in Home Economics, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 1975, p. 43. See also Joan M. Burstyn, "Women's Education in England during the Nineteenth Century: A Review of the Literature, 1970-1976," History of Education, 6, 1(1977), p. 16. Burstyn points out that in the United States for first generation of women Ph.D.'s in Zoology and Chemistry were, in fact, the leaders in the new field of Home Economics.
40 Burstyn; Marta Danylewycz, Nadia Fahmy-Eid, et Nicole Thivierge, "L'Enseignement Manager et Les "Home Economics" au Quebec et en Ontario au Dgbut du 20e Siecle Une Analyse Comparee," in An Imperfect Past: Education and Society in Canadian History^ ecT. J~. Donald Wilson (Vancouver: Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, 1984).
41 The terms 'separatist' and 'uncompromising' are taken from the themes of the nineteenth century campaign for women's education as outlined in Chapter I. 42 Robert M. Stamp, "Adelaide Hoodless, Champion of Women's Rights," in Profiles of Canadian Educators, eds. Robert S. Patterson, et. aT~. (Toronto: Heath, 1974) . Adelaide Hoodless, in 1897 founded the first Women's Institute in Stoney Creek, Ontario. She also originated with Lady Aberdeen, the National Council of Women, the Victorian Order of Nurses, and the YWCA. British Columbia was the second province to organize Women's Institutes in 1909. See also Alexandra Zacharias, "British Columbia Women's Institute in the Early Years: Time to Remember," in In Her Own Right, eds. Barbara Latham and Cathy Kess (Victoria: Camosun College, 1980) . A O Vancouver Council of Women Papers, Minutes 1912, p. 47, University of British Columbia, Special Collections. Alice Ravenhill and her sister left England in 1910 to look after their brother and his son on Vancouver Island. Ravenhill had been a pioneer in preventative medicine, public health, home economics, sanitation and hygiene in Great Britain. She was the first woman Fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute of London and one of the founding members of the British Columbia Women's Institute. From 1911 to 1917 Ravenhill worked for the B.C. Department of Agriculture to organize Women's Institutes and write bulletins for their use. By 1915 she was appointed to the Provincial Advisory Board — a body comprised of representatives of the Women's Institutes who made recommendations to the 115
Department of Agriculture. In this capacity, Ravenhill headed a deputation for the establishment of a Chair of Home Economics at the University of British Columbia. In 1917, Ravenhill became Director of Home Economics, Utah State College but returned to Victoria in 1919. Although Alice Ravenhill did not serve on the Board of Governors of UBC, she received an honourary Doctorate of Science in 1948. Ravenhill donated the largest most valuable collection the UBC Library had yet received in 1923. This gift included books, periodicals and proceedings of Scientific Societies, many of which contained her own publications. Sources for Ravenhill: Zacharias; Alice Ravenhill, Memories of" ah" Educational Pioneer, (Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1951); UBC Scrapbook #16, p. 7.
44 Vancouver News-Advertiser, December 2, 1913. 45 Wesbrook addressed the LCW in 1913 on the subject of women's education. In response to the LCW.'s resolution to establish physical education at UBC, he agreed that physical education at the university, along with instruction in public and personal hygiene could help solve a number of social problems. In an address to the Progressive Association in New Westminster, President Wesbrook considered that the training of homemakers was the most important work facing the University. (Physical Education was established in 1936, Home Economics in 1943). UBC scrapbook #2, pp. 78, 85. 46 Chestnutt, p. 19.
47 The Vancouver Sun, November 20, 1913. 48 The Vancouver Sun, February 26, 1914, in UBC Scrapbook #2, p. 125. 49 See Note 43. 50 There was an historical alliance between instruction in Agriculture and Home Economics. Home Economics supporters regarded this instruction for girls complementary to agriculture for boys. The founding objective of the Women's Institute was to promote household science and were funded in their endeavors to disseminate information in rural areas by Provincial Departments of Agriculture. Ravenhill appealed then, to this customary alliance of agriculture and home economics in view of a substantial sum that was awarded to the University by the Dominion Government to establish a Faculty of Agriculture. 51 The Daily News-Advertiser, March 13, 1914 in UBC Scrapbook #2, p. 125. 52 For a more complete discussion of 'maternal feminism', a term that signifies the concerns and arguments of many of the suffragists before World War I, see Veronica Strong-Boag, "Introduction," in InTimes Like These, Nellie L. McClung, 116
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) . 53 Elizabeth Berry, B.Sc, Supervisor of Home Economics, Vancouver City Schools, wrote in 1922, "Many narrowly-cultured women still object to this innovation on the ground that it is a method of again assuming a yoke from which woman has only recently freed herself." Western Woman's Weekly, April 1, 1922. University Women's Club of Vancouver, Minutes, Vol. 1, Vancouver City Archives. For example: The Minutes of the meeting October 5, 1926 record President Evlyn Farris' absence from the meeting in which the Educational Committee recommended that the UWC support the Provincial Parent- Peacher Federation to endow a Chair of Home Economics at UBC. Farris was absent October 19, 1926 when a fundraising bridge game was organized to raise money for Home Economics. Also on April 5, 1927 when this effort was repeated.
55 UBC Building Plans, Thompson, Berwick, Pratt and Partners Architectural Records, UBC Main Library, Special Collections. Also a letter to the Premier from Chancellor F. Carter-Cotton, December 17, 1914, projected the costs based on plans to provide for arts and science, mining and other engineering branches in 1915; agriculture and domestic science in 1916; forestry in 1917 "... these being the lines of work which most closely affect the wellbeing of the people and the life and the industrial development of the Province." UBC Board of Governors, Minutes, December 17, 1914.
56 The Universities of Aberta, Manitoba, McGill, Saskatchewan and Toronto offered degree courses, in Household Science by 1920. The Department became a School at Saskatchewan in 1928 and the B.H.Sc. was substituted for the B.A. in 1929. Robin S. Harris, A History of Higher Education in Canada 1663-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 407. 57 UBC Senate, Minutes of Meetings, March 15, 1919; April 2, 1919, Vol. 1, pp. 86, 95. 58 UBC Senate, Minutes of Meetings, May 14, 1919, October 15, 1919; UBC Board of Governors Minutes, May 26, 1919.
59 UBC Senate, Minutes of Meetings, May 14, 1919.
60 UBC Senate, Minutes of Meetings, May 5, 1920. The meeting took place February 23, 1920. 61 Ibid. Letter from Board of Governors, April 28, 1920. 6 9 Foster, Chapter 4. 63 Chestnutt, p. 29. 64 The Council of Women lost a large measure of its earlier 117 prestige and influence in the decades following World War I. This was due in part, to a general loss in status of gender specific organizations after the victory of women's suffrage made them appear outdated and membership declined. Also, with a shift to more bureaucratic and specialized agencies for reform, social work, and education, the LCW. relinquished some of these functions. 65 Reeve, p. 17. 66 Western Woman's Weekly, January 21, 1922. 67 Western Woman's Weekly, January 28, 1922. 68 From December 1917 to July 1924 the Western Woman's Weekly, was edited and published every Thursday in Vancouver by Miss Amy Kerr and her sister Mrs. Pollanger Pogue. It was the official organ of the most active of Vancouver's women's clubs. The purpose of this newspaper was to "reach and unite the greater public" on issues deemed important to the women of B.C.
69 Elizabeth Berry, "why is Home Economics a School Subject?" Western Woman's Weekly, April 1, 1922.
70 Frederick Henry Sykes, "The Social Basis of the New Education for Women" in Teachers College Record, 18, 1917, pp. 226-242. Sykes recognized that women's primary work was homemaking but in the urban context, schools, libraries, parks, playgrounds, and hospitals all became "splendid extensions of the home." 71 Berry, "Why is Home Economics a School Subject?". 72 Ibid. 73 The Vancouver Province, November 12, 1920, in UBC Scrapbook #12, p. 80. 74 Some of the more active organizations included the Women's Institutes, the Local Councils of Women, the University Women's Club and the Women's Canadian Club. 7 5 "Synopsis of history of movement to establish a degree course ....", in Home Economics Scrapbook, Box 1, Department of Home Economics, University of British Columbia Archives. 76 Ibid. 77 "Short History", Department of Home Economics, University of British Columbia Archives. This typed history by an unknown author contains the allegation that a brewery offered to match the sum raised by the women's organizations so that the Chair of Home Economics could be established but the President of the University was not willing to accept 'tainted money.' 118
7 8 UBC Board of Governors, Minutes, December 22, 1928. This delegation from the Provincial Parent-Teacher Federation was led by (Mrs.) Olive Muirhead and (Mrs.) Charlotte E. Rae, who would remain the spokeswomen for the P-TF campaign until 1949. The Local Council of Women was represented by (Mrs.) Paul Smith and Mary Fall is. 7 9 Canon Joshua Hinchliffe had been critical of the University and its policies since 1920. As an MLA he joined in the attack on the history text by Canadian W.L. Grant, charging that it was anti-British. Mack Eastman and W.N. Sage of the UBC history department defended the text but J.D. MacLean, Liberal Minister of Education, withdrew it from B.C. schools. Again in 1923, Hinchliffe attacked the 'anti-British spirit' at UBC as reflected in its texts and remarks made by Professor Sedgewick in defense of a student who voiced his objection to the British dismissal of Canadian valor in World War I. Hinchliffe's apparent receptivity to the Home Economics delegation was calculated, in all likelihood, to discredit the University administration and to strengthen his own potential to intercede. See also Note 54. On the banning of the history text, see Charles W. Humphries, "The Banning of a Book in British Columbia," BC Studies 1 (1968-69), pp. 1-12.
80 A grant of $20,000 was intended to establish both a Department of Home Economics and Economics. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, January 28, 1929, p. 1452.
81 UBC Board of Governors, Minutes, March 31, 1930. 9,7
UBC Board of Governors, Minutes, April 28, 1930.
UBC Board of Governors, Minutes, May 26, 1930. OA ° Chestnutt, p. 65. p c UBC Board of Governors Minutes, November 30, 1931. 86 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, April 22, 1932. Although President Klinck had travelled to eastern Canada in 1930 to study the equipment and accommodation needed for Home Economics, and to interview candidates to staff this Department, only one appointment/expenditure was incurred. In October 1931, the first appointment charged to the Home Economics Department was for a Physics assistant — Mr. P. Armstrong. The unused portion of the grant was returned to the Provincial Treasury to be used for compensations to discharged employees — the result of the drastic reduction in the budget. 87 In view of this Education Minister's historical antipathy toward the University (see Note 46) it is not difficult to imagine Hinchliffe's intentions to undermine administrative discussions. Logan observed that Hinchliffe did not approve of the University as it was then being administered, 119 that his own experience with Canadian educational systems was negligible, and he had little sympathy with the ideal of popular education. He was convinced that standards of the University were not high enough, and he suspected that many of the University's activities were wasteful. He disliked the professional and occupational courses and focussed his attacks on the Faculty of Agriculture. Minister Hinchliffe also adopted the practice of attending Board meetings and arranged for them to be held in the Minister's Room in the Vancouver Court House. This environment had a harmful effect upon the discussions. Logan, p. 110. It is doubtful, then, that Hinchliffe's support of Home Economics represented anything more than a challenge to the President and the Governors' management, while giving the appearance of responding to the demands of public opinion. The repurcussions of these politics proved destructive to all interests. pq The Home Economics issue was really the last straw in an internal conflict that saw Faculties competing for scarce resources. For details of this complex and bitter struggle see Logan, pp. 109-120. 89 Judge Peter Lampman, Report, University of British Columbia Archives. QQ Letter to Editor from Alice Townley, Vancouver Province, July 31, 1932. UBC Scrapbook #19, p. 43. Townley quotes (accurately) from Lampman's report. See Note 62. 91 See Foster. 92 See Chapter III. 93 In the same way that Hinchliffe used the Home Economics contingent to undermine the University administration, the Governors may have wished to gain public sympathy for the continual lack of funds. 94 Clearly, this conflict reflected a failure in the personalities involved to negotiate solutions to what amounted to their own ideological differences. This refers to Canon Hinchliffe's understanding of Canadian post- secondary education in the twentieth century and also to President Klinck's. 95 Alice Townley was an active member of the LCW, Vancouver, founding member of the Vancouver Women's Press Club, Vancouver Womens' Canadian Club, member of the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Women's Musical Club, the King Edward Parent-Teacher Association, the Women's Institute and other Arts and Scientific associations. Townley was also founder and president of the BC Equal Franchise Association 1912-1917 and other political clubs. She was the first woman elected to the Vancouver Park Board, 1928-1935. Townley authored several 120 publications including Points in the Laws of Briish Columbia RegardingtheLegal Status of Women (1911). Source: Linda Louise Hale, "Appendix: Votes for Women: Profiles of Prominent British Columbia Suffragists and Social Reformers," in Latham and Kess, pp. 301-2. 96 Here again the argument emerged that Home Economics education for women was the coeducational alternative to Agricultural training for men. In view of the struggle of the Department of Agriculture to survive during the controversy at the University, this analogy had an increased significance. 97 See the findings of the Kidd Committee in Logan, p. 119. 98 Address by Charlotte E. Rae, Co-Chairman of the Permanent Committee of the Home Economics Endowment Fund, delivered at the opening of the Home Economics Building, UBC, October 26, 1949. Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives, qq UBC Board of Governors Minutes, May 30, 1932; November 30, 1936; February 22, 1937; May 22, 1937; May 28, 1938; May 30, 1938; November 28, 1938. 100 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, November 30, 1936. Also, Rae's address, Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives.
101 President Klinck wrote, "Report to the Board of Governors," following the request by a delegation, under the auspices of the Provincial Parent-Teacher Federation, that the degree course in Home Economics be resumed. Department of Home Economics, Box 1, Folder 2, UBC Library, UBC Archives. l 02 Klinck, Home Economics Report. 103 Logan, pp. 120-1. 104 In 1935 the Liberals were elected with T.D. Patullo as the Premier. Dr. G.M. Weir was on leave of absence as Head of the Education Department at UBC from 1933-41 while he served as the Minister of Education and the Provincial Secretary. 105 J.H. Putnam and G.M. Weir, Survey of the School System (Victoria: King's Printer, 1925). Weir was regarded as a progressive educator. See Jean Mann, "G.M. Weir and H.B. King: Progressive Education or Education for the Progressive State?" in SchoolingandSocietyin 20th Century BritishColumbia, J. Donald Wilson and David CT Jones eds., (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1980) .
106 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, March 22, 1937. 107 Letter to Isabel Salter, Secretary Permanent Committee 121 of the Home Economics Endowment Fund from President L.S. Klinck, March 30, 1937, Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives.
108 Logan, p. 121.
109 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, January 30, 1939. Dr. Weir wanted provision also for "Nutritional Dietetics.1
110 Isabel Salter, Secretary Permanent Committee of the Home Economics Endowment Fund, Typed Report, Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives.
111 Ibid.
112 The Vancouver Pr 6v ince, February 4, 1942. Home Economics Scrapbook, p. 30, Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives.
113 Logan, p. 168.
114 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, September 28, 1942.
115 Ibid.
116 In 1929-30 the grant was awarded for $20,000.00 and in 1931 it amounted to $25,000.00. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, February 24, 1930; March 16, 1931. In 1943 it was $14,570.00.
117 Although in the 1920s and 1930s the Governors had not felt obliged to implement the Senate's recommendations to establish a Home Economics Course, the publicity surrounding the issue and the avowed sympathy of the President, in the 1940s, ensured that the Board of Governors could not easily overcome the Senate's stipulation that Home Economics should be given priority. lip . UBC Board of Governors Minutes, Vol. 22, January 25, 1943. 119 Ibid. 120 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, Vol. 22, May 31, 1943. (Miss) Dorothy P. Lefebvre, B.H.Sc. (Sask.), M.S. (Iowa State) was appointed Associate Professor and Acting Head for three years at $3,800.00 per annum. (Miss) Charlotte S. Black was appointed Associate Professor at $3,400.00 per annum. Stella Beil, B.Sc. in Home Economics, M.Sc. (Kansas State) was Assistant Professor at $2,800.00 per annum. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, June 28, 1943; July 26, 1943. 191 Charlotte S. Black, Director, "Report on School of Home Economics, 1951-52," Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives. Black reported that Home Economics 122 graduates could be found employed in hospitals, department stores, businesses, schools and health departments "... so you may see that the School of Home Economics at UBC is making a contribution in the country. Close to one half of the graduates are now married and in homes of their own ... we have a large number of 'grand-children.'"
122 If a faculty woman were to marry she endangered her position. Stella McGuire was allowed to share the teaching duties in English with her husband who suffered poor health after World War I. Dorothy Blakey in the forties sought Klinck's assurance that she could keep her position at UBC when she married because she could not afford to marry without her job. Dr. Dorothy Blakey Smith, Taped interview.
123 See Freedman. In British Columbia some measure of this female institution building is evident in Weiss' thesis.
124 For example, Mrs. D.L. MacLaurin, representing the Victoria LCW to the Putnam-Weir Survey in 1925, expressed the importance of Home Economics courses for girls and young women in terms that were familiar to the maternal feminists. MacLaurin concluded her presentation: "We believe that the home is the natural and rightful domain of woman, and therefore that Home Economics, the science of the Home, is pre-eminently the proper and logical study for womankind; we believe ... [that] many other social problems [will be] solved when the dignity of homemaking is adequately recognized and Home Economics given its rightful place in a national ... scheme of education." Chestnutt, p. 43. 1 25 Adelaide Hoodless won Sir William Macdonald's support for Home Economics and the Macdonald Institute of Home Economics was established at the Agricultural College in Guelph, Ontario in 1904 — the first college education for women in Home Economics in the country. Gillett, p. 348. 126 This explanation is implicit in Freedman1s analysis. It is also suggested in Lee Stewart, "Women on Campus in British Columba: Strategies for Survival, Years of War and Peace 1906-1920," in Latham and Pazdro. I27 Freedman, p. 529. 128 Apologies to Peter Laslett for rephrasing of "the world we have lost." 129 The decline of women's club membership in B.C. is noted by Weiss, and, in Canada, by Veronica Strong-Boag, The Pariiament of Wornen. 130 . Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, andthe Status of Women during World War II (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981) pp. 110-111; Mary Vipond, 123
"The Image of Women in Mass Circulation Magazines in the 1920s," The Neglected Majority; Essays in Canadian Women's History, Susan Mann Trof imenkoff and Alison Prentice eds., (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977) pp. 116-124; Ruth Pierson, "Women's Emancipation and the Recruitment of Women into the Labour Force in World War II," in Trofimenkoff and Prentice, pp. 125-145.
131 Vipond.
TOO J-J* Pierson; Susan Hartmann, "Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on Women's Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans," Women's Studies 5(1978), pp. 223-29.
133 This conclusion is reached also by Jill K. Conway, "Perspectives on the History of Women's Education in the United States," Hist ory of Education Quarterly, 14(1974), pp. 1-12. Conway states: "The development of women's professions should thus be interpreted as a conservative trend by which the potential for change inherent in changed educational experience was still-born and women's intellectual energies were channeled into perpetuating women's service role in society rather than into independent and self-justifying intellectual endeavor." p. 9.
134 Logan, p. 173.
135 "Report" by Olive Muirhead and Charlotte Rae, Co-Chairmen of the Permanent Committee of the Home Economics Fund, October 25, 1959, Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives. •jog The increased enrollment was possible because of the Federal Government's assistance, the admissions policy adopted by the National Conference of Canada on Universities, and the decision of the President and Board of Governors to reject no one with entrance qualifications. Logan, pp. 175-76.
137 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, March 25, 1931; Logan, p. 112. Initially limitation of enrollment was a matter for the government to decide before an amendment to the University Act empowered the Board to enforce this decision. 138 Logan, p. 176. 139 Chestnutt. 140 See Chapter 5. 141 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, November 25, 1946. 142 Lefebvre was succeeded by Charlotte S. Black. 143 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, December 30, 1946. 124
The Rogers bequest was received in January 1946 for the erection of a building to house the Department of Home Economics. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, January 28, 1946.
145 In October 1944 the P-TF finally relinquished the $20,000.00 they had raised for Home Economics. The P-TF and the UBC Board of Governors agreed that the money would be used for the erection and equipping of a Home Management House on the University Campus. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, April 24, 1944; October 30, 1944.
146 The money from the P-TF fund was actually 'borrowed' at this time because it had already been designated for a Home Management House. The decision to erect a Home Economics building was not without further controversy. Contractors vocalized their criticism of the UBC administration for not submitting the project for tender. President MacKenzie defended his actions by claiming that the building was needed immediately and funded by private not public monies whose exact amount was not known. MacKenzie was in the habit of expediting procedures and taking on heavy responsibility for decisions in the post war period since he had been given authorization by the Board of Governors to take "emergency action ... as may be necessary in respect of staff, equipment and accommodation," UBC Board of Governors Minutes, September 24, 1945.
147 Muirhead and Rae, "Report". The large amount of money that had been left for the University for the Home Economics Building by Jonathan Rogers, convinced some people that the building should be named after this donor. This proposition was discussed by the Board of Governors who (sensibly and sensitively) decided a plaque and Rogers' portrait would suffice. It would have been a final irony, indeed, if the women of British Columbia whose energies were directed to this cause for many years had seen their project named for a male benefactor, albeit, Rogers' bequest was gratefully received. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, September 26, 1949, October 31, 1949. 148 "General History of Home Management Houses;" "UBC Home Management House History," Department of Home Economics, Box 1, Folder 4, UBC Library, UBC Archives. The Home Management House was built with further assistance from the Women's Committee of the UBC Alumni Development Fund and the continued interest and donations of B.C. women's organizations. 149 "Reporting on the University," Department of Home Economics, Box 1, UBC Library, UBC Archives. 125
CHAPTER IV
THE ACCOMMODATION OF THE UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN:
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE DEAN OF WOMEN
AND WOMEN'S RESIDENCES
Dean of Worneh
Prior to 1921, the duties of the Dean of Women at the
University of British Columbia were informally taken up by
various women associated with the university, either on their
own initiative or at the request of administrators and
students. President Wesbrook first requested assistance from
the wives of faculty members to approve boarding houses for
students from out of town.1 The faculty wives subsequently
organized into the Faculty Women's Club with the objectives of
promoting sociability among the faculty and staff, of taking an
active interest in student affairs, and of lending such
services to university activities as might be needed from time
to time. The Faculty Women's Club welcomed new women students,
held teas for the junior and senior women, visited sick
students, and entertained students in members' homes on
Sundays.2
In the absence of other female faculty members at MUCBC in
Vancouver, or at UBC before 1921, Isabel S. Maclnnes, Professor
of Modern Languages, fulfilled additional duties as chaperone
and patron at the students' social and club functions. Although
in later years she denied that she was an unofficial Dean of 3 Women, at the end of the war when men returned to the 126 classroom in greater numbers, Maclnnes, arrogated to herself the responsibility of reminding her students "what college women did and didn't do."4 Isabel Maclnnes served, in 1919-21, as President of the Faculty Women's Club, which included female faculty members as they appeared at the university.5
These women, then, were familiar with the variety of tasks that needed to be performed in the interests of women students; it was likely this awareness that led the Faculty Women's Club to recommend to President Wesbrook in January 1918 the appointment of an Acting Dean of Women.6 The Faculty Women's
Club may also have grown tired of shouldering the responsibility of the university for female students. Maclnnes claimed that her heavy load of teaching forced her to eventually drop out of the Faculty Women's Club as an active 7 member. The Club, evidently, thought it was time the
University formally accommodated female students with a Dean of
Women. Wesbrook's illness and the Club's sympathies toward his wife, Anne Wesbrook, also the Club's Vice President in 1917-18, undoubtedly tempered the amount of pressure the Club was willing to exert at this time.
The issue surfaced again a year later at a general meeting of the Women's Undergraduate Society (WUS). In February 1919, the young women at UBC decided that there was an ever increasing need for the official appointment of a Dean of
Women. On this occasion a committee was chosen to obtain permission from the Alma Mater Society (AMS) — the students' society — to petition Dean Klinck and the Board of Governors 127 for such an appointment. It is unclear whether this decision resulted from any particular grievances held by women students at this time. They did indicate, however, that as they formed a significant number in the student body, "their need can no longer be overlooked."8 Evidently, a Dean of Women represented to these women a recognition of their own status within the university community, as well as an office of practical value to female students.
The following month, the Board of Governors expressed its sympathy with the WUS request and promised that in the event of the University's moving to Point Grey, it would be given early Q and serious consideration. Action was thus deferred by the
Board while the University was housed in its 'temporary' quarters.
The women students again argued their case for a Dean of
Women in their special issue of the student newspaper, Ubyssey,
February 17, 1921. This issue entitled "Arts Women's Number" included a variety of subjects of interest to the women students, in addition to an article that supported a Dean of
Women at UBC. The author of this editorial outlined not only the university's responsibility to women in this matter, but also the qualifications and attributes that would recommend a woman for this position. The article stressed the importance of the college woman ...as a factor in Canadian life...of whom great things are expected. The type of woman she is to be is the vital concern of the university. 128
The article suggested also that a Dean of Women should be a scholar who would serve as an inspiration for undergraduate women.
She should be a woman of some age and experience, with a good judgement and a knowledge of life; a lovable woman, dignified and reasonable; one who understands the Canadian character and ideals, and sympathizes with them. That the women students will respect her, she should be influential in the management of the university affairs and hold a position of adequate authority.
After giving examples of the Dean's work at Queen's University and at the Royal Victoria College for Women at McGill, the article concluded,
...If we think how much certain professors always mean to the young men of a university, we shall realize perhaps the great difference which a Dean of Women would make in a girl's four years of college. It's up to the university to take care of its type.
Here, then, was a clear indication that female students recognized both the difficulties of assimilation in a male oriented environment, and the conflicts in social expectations faced by women at the university. These students identified the appointment of a Dean of Women as the means whereby the university might affirm women's place within the academic community.
By 1921, three facts became increasingly evident to the university administration: the growth in the student population was greater than had been anticipated, even without the influx of returning war veterans; the government grants would continue to fall short of projected expenditures; and the 129
University would not be moving to Point Grey in the near future. The appointment of a Dean of Women in these circumstances, therefore, came somewhat as a surprise.
Although the university received no increase in funds from the provincial government for the following year, President
Klinck, nonetheless, assured students, in an interview conducted by Ubyssey staff in March, that an allowance had been made for a Dean of Women for the next session.13 On his return from discussions with university presidents in Eastern Canada in the summer of 1921,14 President Klinck recommended and the
Board approved the appointment of Miss Mary Louise Bollert,
M.A. , as the new "Advisor of Women" and Assistant Professor of
English.15 By making Bollert an "Advisor to Women" rather than a Dean, both the status and the salary of this position dropped 16 significantly. Similarly, by hiring a woman without a doctorate to teach in the Department of English, the University was not obliged to offer an initial appointment above the level of Assistant Professor. The University thus hired Bollert at the minimal remuneration of $3,000 per annum for a period of 17 three years. Clearly, it hoped to comply nominally with the request of female students, with as little expenditure as possible.
It appeared that the University did not want to invest much authority in this position. In the autumn of 1921,
President Klinck formally introduced Mary Bollert, Advisor to
Women, to the female students. He clarified the extent and limitations of her jurisdiction: 130
She is not here to discipline students... that ...rests with the Faculties...neither to draw up rules and regulations for the government of students...she is here to assist you in making self-government easier, more responsible, more efficient. Neither is she here to advise directly in academic matters...that is the duty of the Deans of Faculties. She is here to assist you in every undertaking, organized or unorganized, which is designed for your individual or collective benefit and in all matters not within the province of the Deans of Faculties, for example, choosing a vocation.-^g
Bollert was meant to be a counsellor to women in all matters except those that related to their chief reasons for being at the university — their academic studies. Her administrative authority was curtailed because the responsibilities of the office, unlike the Deans of Faculties, did not include a seat on the UBC Senate. Moreover, Bollert's teaching duties were confined to "freshman" English classes for the female 19 students. In effect, the newly created office of an Advisor of Women, as it was defined and implemented by the Board, fell far short of the ideal proposed earlier that spring by the women in their student newspaper.
There was a notable exception to the Board's unanimous 20 approval of Mary Bollert's appointment. The minutes of the
Board of Governors do not indicate why Evlyn Farris cast a dissenting vote. However, in view of her known reputation for upholding women's interests in education, it is possible to speculate on several reasons. Farris may have disapproved altogether of an office that suggested 'separatist' treatment of women that might detract from their status as equals on campus. Her generation strived, after all, to commend the 131 virtues of coeducation and advocated assimilation of women in all aspects of the university community. On the other hand,
Farris may have objected to the diluted status and authority of the position as it developed from 'Dean* to an 'Advisor' of
Women, to the lack of superior scholastic credentials either expected or accepted in the candidate, to the combination of the office with teaching duties that institutionalized the segregation of students by gender in the English classes, to the salary, or to the choice of Bollert, herself, as the successful applicant. Whatever were Farris' reasons, as the only female member of the Board of Governors, it was a significant dissent and remains as the only, albeit silent, indication that there was any reflection on the implications of this decision for women's education.
Despite the evident limitations to the newly created office of Advisor of Women, Mary Bollert and the three women who subsequently assumed this position, directed their distinctive talents and energies to legitimizing, and expanding 22 women's place on campus. The 'Advisor of Women* became de facto Dean of Women almost from the start of Bollert's term.
The customary title would not give way to the descriptive designation, and Bollert was the "Dean of Women" to both 23 students and faculty for the next twenty years. Similarly,
Mary Bollert overcame limitations to her administrative responsibilities when she served as an elected member of the
Senate of the University from June 1933 to her retirement in
1941. 132
In August 1941, Dr. Evlyn Farris and Miss Annie Jamieson were responsible for a proposed amendment to the University Act to include the Dean of Women with the Deans of Faculties as members of the Senate.24 The new Dean of Women, Dr. Dorothy
Mawdsley, wrote to the Senate a few years after her appointment to suggest that her work would be assisted if she was included as an ex-officio member of the Faculty Council and of the 25
Senate. J Although Mawdsley, like Bollert, was an elected member of the Senate, she recognized the importance of securing legally this right and responsibility for the Dean of Women. It was not until May 1949 that the University's Solicitor advised the Senate that in his opinion, "all Deans, irrespective of whether they are Deans of Faculty or otherwise are automatically members of the Senate."26 The Dean of Women was thus assured of her status as a University Senator, and no longer dependent on the Senate or Convocation for an elected seat.
The handicap of the low salary was not overcome for either
Dean Bollert or Dean Mawdsley. The Dean of Women was a highly visible member of the university community and had to attend numerous public functions. She was called upon to address organizations who wanted an entertaining speaker, and to canvass associations that might be financially supportive of the university and women students. Clearly, there were social responsibilities and expenses attached to this position that were not common to other staff members. According to Mawdsley, this aspect was somewhat of a hardship for her with limited 133
27 resources. Mawdsley envied Bollert1s private means that allowed her greater freedom to travel and entertain while she was Dean.28
Perhaps the most important factor that determined how the office of the Dean of Women would evolve was the particular personality and interests of the woman to take this position.
Mary Bollert was a "gentle soul," a gracious and sympathetic counsellor to female students.29 Reportedly a bit of a
Puritan, she was a woman of strong conscience and dedicated to educational work and social welfare activities.30 But in
Mawdsley's words, Bollert was "no scholar" and felt handicapped without her doctorate.31 Bollert's contributions were primarily distinguished by her activity as a liaison between the university and the larger community, especially women's associations. In this capacity, Bollert frequently defended her students' behaviour to a public that hardly knew how to justify the seemingly iconoclastic eruptions of youthful energy prevalent in the 1920's and 1930's.32
Mary Bollert was representative of many of the educated
'professional' women of her day. She believed that it was 33 women's greatest duty to sway public opinion. To this end she worked in international peace organizations between the wars. She encouraged female students to take public speaking classes to help them feel secure in public roles. But she was a realist who recognized that for many more years homemaking would be the chief occupation and vocation of girls. Bollert believed, however, that education was important for women to 134 develop ethical character and inner control, and to teach them how to use leisure time in a responsible manner.34
Bollert espoused the equality of men and women but in many respects she invoked seemingly outdated views about women's proclivities. Her advice to first year students in 1932 perhaps best illustrates Bollert's ideal for women's conduct — a curious blend of an old gender stereotype and the new woman.
Bollert cautioned: "A cultured woman never makes a noise in a public place except in a great cause."35 And in 1935 Dean
Bollert declared that she did not favor a proposal by Varsity women to form a track team, in the belief that the sport was too strenuous for women without close supervision of their activities.36
Dean Bollert remained unmarried and lived a full life that reflected the strength of her commitment to social and educational issues. She was buttressed by strong ties to a woman's culture that persisted with difficulty after the first wave of feminism peaked when Canadian women won the vote. In her capacities as Dean and clubwoman, Bollert was a world traveller. She was a delegate for Canada at the International
Federation of Women Conference in Paris in 1924, in Geneva in
1929, and in Edinburgh in 1932. Bollert was a speaker at the
International Congress of Women in Chicago in 1933. And in
1934 she was one of twelve Deans of Women in North America to 37 tour Japan as a guest of the Japanese YWCA. Bollert was affiliated with numerous organizations. A member of the UWC,
Bollert worked with Evlyn Farris to found Parent-Teacher 135
Associations in the city schools. At her death in July 1945, she was President of the Pan Pacific Women's Association.
Dr. Dorothy Mawdsley succeeded Mary Bollert as Dean of
Women in 1941. Mawdsley brought a new image to the Dean's office with her down-to-earth, pragmatic disposition and a quick sense of humour. Mawdsley was less a social personality and more an academic scholar than her predecessor. She earned a M.A. degree in English and French from UBC in 1927, and a
Ph.D. in English from Chicago in 1933. The latter degree was completed in the summer months after lecturing at UBC in the winter sessions to pay her way. In 1935, with her friend and colleague, Marjorie Leeming, Mawdsley co-authored a composition text for use in B.C. schools.40
Mawdsley was personally very familiar with the financial difficulties that faced many female students. She believed that the cost of higher education for women was more formidable than for men because women were usually paid less for their 41 summertime work. She concentrated her efforts on practical solutions for women who had to work their way through a college education. Dean Mawdsley launched an employment bureau for female students where they could register for typing work on the campus, and for babysitting — called nursemaid — in the evenings. Interested employers contacted the bureau 42
"Buttercup Enterprises Ltd." — where they were matched with an available student.
After her retirement, Dr. Mawdsley was critical of some of
the administrative practices that she felt were disadvantageous 136 to women. It annoyed her when the fruits of her own labours for women were denied to them. For example, she lectured to various organizations to raise money for the Dean of Women's
Fund, to help women students in emergencies, but Mawdsley claimed the funds were deposited by the Bursar into the general budget and were not available to her when she needed them. Dr.
Mawdsley was critical, too, of the segregated English classes for first and second year students. English professors initiated separate instruction for male and female students after World War I when increased enrollment determined the need for additional sections of required English courses. Mawdsley claimed that the male professors who did not want to teach the women gave these sections to the junior female assistants.
These assistants, and Mawdsley was one for several years, were also expected to read compositions of the senior men. Mawdsley judged that it was particularly unfair that the male professors set the examinations and the female instructors never saw them before they were given. This practice, she felt, gave the male students a slight edge because their own instructors set the tests.43
The 'tradition' of separate English classes for men and women continued unchallenged until 1941. Finding that one of the three weekly English 2 lectures for women conflicted with a lecture in another subject, ten female students sat in on the men's classes. In the first term, Professors Larsen and
MacDonald raised no objections but in the second term when
Professor F.G.C. Wood found these students in his class, they 137
were summarily ejected.44 It was reported in the student
newspaper that Wood declared
I am not accustomed to lecturing to young women in this course ... such young women will therefore vacate the room at once.^
The girls then moved out en masse, "blushing uncomfortably and accompanied by loud hisses and boos from the roomful of
AC males."*0 Wood later denied to the Ubyssey that he had any
antipathy toward women students, but that he was taken by
surprise when he saw the large number of women and assumed they were "visitors". "For years," Wood claimed, "English 2 was
divided into a men's section and a women's section ... girls who had a legitimate reason for doing so will be permitted to attend the men's classes.1,47
Separate instruction was rejected by the female students because it was impracticable; but Dean Mawdsley recognized that
separate instruction for women, based on the preference of male professors to teach male students, subordinated the experience
of women within the academic community. Mawdsley focussed her
energy, however, not on the dismantling of separate learning space for women at UBC, but on the constructing of separate living space. She identified the lack of dormitory
accommodation for UBC women as a more serious impediment to women's opportunity to participate in higher education. Dean
Mawdsley*s success in this regard relied on the efforts of
organized women, many of whom first campaigned for women's
residences when they attended UBC many years earlier. Their
efforts to establish residential accommodation for women are 138
recounted in the following pages.
Ideally, the position of Dean of Women in North American
universities represented an early attempt to acknowledge the particular needs of women students, and to accommodate them within an institution that was traditionally defined to serve men. The Dean acted as an advisor, confidante and counsellor while also serving as a role model for young women. Her own academic achievements, won in a predominantly male sphere,
might offer reassurance and encouragement to the female scholar who felt the frustrations peculiar to a minority.
The office of the Dean of Women was both a conservative and a radical response to the ambiguous status of women on campus.
It was conservative in that it appeared to focus on the
preservation of a separate women's sphere within a coeducational
environment that emphasized equality in the learning experience.
But in its radical aspect, the position of Dean of Women attempted to establish women in the administrative functions of
the university, and to ensure women a voice in an otherwise male
sphere. Similar to contemporary concepts of affirmative action,
the office of the Dean of Women tried to redress an imbalance
perceived within the institution. By providing women students with their own administrative representative, they might be
assured their interests would be upheld.
For its part, the University of British Columbia endeavored
to accommodate women's request for a Dean of Women. But the
University conceded any real status or authority to the position
only reluctantly. It was, therefore, the strengths and 139 weaknesses of the individual personalities of the Deans,
themselves, that defined this office and made it an effective
resource for female students.
The Dean of Women was often as much an enigma on campus as was the female student. Was she a full fledged academic administrator or a surrogate mother figure? The two images of women were not wholly compatible at the university; indeed, they were emblematic of the conflict that female students faced in their choice of their future roles, as long as social
expectations decreed these choices to be mutually exclusive.
Women's Residehces
Irrespective of a university's ability to provide student
residences, or require students to live in them, universities have tended to shoulder some of the responsibility, almost throughout the twentieth century, for the housing of its female
students. This paternalism'stemmed from widely accepted views that members of 'the weaker sex1, being more vulnerable, were in need either of physical or moral protection and assistance in
determining what was a suitable boarding situation. Families often looked to the university for assurances about their
daughters' welfare while they were away at college, and welcomed a degree of control and influence by the University
administration. The lack of these assurances where there were
no authorized residences might even reduce the opportunity of a woman to attend a university some distance from home. 140
In lieu of building women's residences, UBC provided prospective students with a list of available rooms that had been approved either by the wives of faculty members, or after
1921, by the Dean of Women.48 Male students might share a 4 9 bachelor apartment and tend to their own housekeeping. This proved an economical and sociable strategy for male students.
However, female students faced rules that prohibited their living together in a shared apartment unless one of the girls was twenty-five years of age. u It was unlikely that many undergraduate students were older than twenty-one, even in their last year, which meant that female students without friends or relatives in the city must be prepared to pay for room and board. As women were limited also in the kind of summer employment that was available to them, and generally received 51 less wages than their male counterparts, they were, perhaps, more dependent on the financial capabilities of their families to support them while they attended university. Women students who came to UBC from other parts of the province and who lived in boarding houses scattered all over the city missed also the companionship afforded by shared residence.
Student residences may provide social and economic benefits for both sexes, but while women's autonomy was more
constrained by social expectations, residential accommodation on
campus was, perhaps, a necessary condition for the equal
participation of women in higher education. This was surely the 52 view of the architects of the University in 1912, of the Board 53 54 of Governors in 1913, of the female students in 1921, of 141
55 President Klinck in 1921, and of members of the Sub-Committee
on Women's Residences who expressed in their Report in 1947:
...the enrollment of women at this University would be larger if residence accommodation were available.
To the UBC administrators, a women's residence remained an
ideal that was impossible to realize. The original intentions
of the University to provide student residences by 1916 were 57
abandoned due to UBC's precarious financial state. After
World War I, the staff and administrators faced with the
inadequacies of the Fairview site increasingly regarded Point
Grey as the promised land where the reality of a provincial
university would merge at last with the dream. President Klinck
thus assured female students that "a residence for out-of-town 5 Q women would be a pre-requisite" for UBC's move to Point Grey.
Although the University was unclear how or when a women's
residence would be built, students were quite certain about why
it was needed. Female students advocated that a women's
residence be established even before the move to Point Grey.
They recognized that Eastern universities with residences were
more attractive than boarding houses to families who were
willing to send their daughters away to university. In 1921,
they suggested a house in Fairview be converted not only to
provide for "the physical comfort of the girls" but also for 59
"the companionship and fun of community life." These views
expressed by the women suggest that the partial independence
offered by a student residence, with its promise of a social
support network, was preferable to the impersonal, often lonely, 142 arrangements found in a rooming house.
Soon after her arrival Dean Bollert similarly observed:
...the UBC stands greatly in need of a women's residence ... not only for more comfort and uniform housing ... but for the greater sociability such a residence affords ... tit] would increase out-of-town enrollments. Many women would send their
daughters if there was such a residence.fiQ
Without dormitory accommodation, the University served the urban population more than the provincial one. The majority of students who attended UBC resided permanently in Vancouver with their families (table 1). Women whose homes were outside of the
City had to be able to afford to board in rooming houses near the University, or live with relatives. Bollert also held the view that a residence offered more to a student than a roof and a bed; "it offers training as valuable as the classroom." Dean
Bollert envisioned her own role extended to supervise the running of the women's residence and looked forward to meeting the girls on a more intimate basis.^x
A residence for women was not recommended only as a source of comfort, convenience,and sociability that would possibly increase the female enrollment at UBC. Mary Ellen Smith, B.C.'s first elected female MLA urged, in May 1922, the provision of student residences "so that the poor as well as the rich...might 6 2 have the equal opportunity of education." In the minds of
Smith, and others, campus residences should provide economical housing for students with limited financial resources.
In the thirties this theme became more prominent as the costs of room and board escalated against the background of the 143
-economic depression. Four female students devised a strategy
whereby they could reduce their costs by sharing rented
accommodation without violating the University's rules for
women's boarding arrangements. These students rented,
individually, housekeeping rooms on the main floor and basement
of a large family house situated near the University. The
owners occupied the top floor. The girls did their own
housekeeping and cooking but shared a communal kitchen. Each
paid $6.00 per month for their room, and board costs came to
approximately $15.00. This represented a sizeable reduction of
combined room and board costs that averaged from $30.00 to
$35.00 per month for students in rooming houses.63
TABLE 1
RESIDENCE OF FEMALE STUDENTS WHILE ATTENDING McGILL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1907-14, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40 , 1949-50. N=100x5.
V; • V-""- ' ••;'-;
Residence 1907-14 1919-20 1929-30 1939-40 1949-50
At Home 79% 85% 77% 65% 63% Boa rding 21% 15% 23% 35%. 37%
SOURCE: UBC Registration for the years noted. Registrar's Records, UBC Archives.
NOTE: The increase in the number of boarding students from 1919 to 1949 may reflect the rising prestige of the Provincial University and a greater willingness of families outside the City to send their daughters to UBC. In 1949 a small number of female veterans of the armed services lived in the UBC residence Acadia Camp. In 1939-40, 2% and in 1949-50, 7% of the women with permanent city addresses chose to board closer to the university. This choice reflected a trend toward greater autonomy for female students that may or may not have relied on parental studies. 144
In 1939 students took another decisive step to solve their housing problems at UBC. The co-op boarding house movement, which began as an experiment by thirteen male students, spread
to include four establishments with forty-one students. Members
bought shares (10 x $1.00) to provide capital to start the
project and formed a Co-operative Society which became
registered under the Societies Act. They maintained a legal
advisor and also a car for each group. By 1941, three houses
provided accommodation for male students and one for the 64 women. *
The co-op boarding houses represented an alternative way
of life that mirrored the idealogical currents in the larger
society as it searched for social, economic and political
reforms to counteract the upheaval of the Depression.
Discussion clubs were integral to the cooperative movement as
was self-government. House leaders were elected each term. By
ordering groceries in large quantities every two weeks and
sharing the housework, members experienced communal living and
costs were reasonable.
The University maintained a discrete vigilance over these
living arrangements of female students. "Gentlemen friends"
could be entertained in the house and the women had a curfew
when they went out for the evening. A "house mother" acted as a 6 6 chaperone and performed the heavier duties. Furnishings were provided by a donation of $90.00 from the Faculty Women's 67 Club. Dean Bollert gave the co-op house her blessing after 145
she accepted a dinner invitation from the women and inspected
the premises. Dean Mawdsley, however, regarded the
'experiment1 as a failure. She found it wasteful and
inefficient because the houses were vacated by students in the
summer months and the contents were stolen.69 This was
particularly disturbing for Mawdsley who spoke to women's
organizations to raise money to furnish the house. She maintained it could only work if a person were paid to live in 70
the house permanently.
Dean Mawdsley's efforts were directed toward the building
of a permanent women's residence on campus. Even before the end
of World War II Mawdsley found it difficult to find suitable
accommodation for students from out-of-town. Rooms that were
available did not always provide meals. In the fall of 1943,
the University had to place ads in the city newspapers to ensure
housing requirements would be met. In that same year, the
President of the Alumni Association, and a Senate Committee to
consider student living accommodation, recommended that the 71 University build a student residence to ease this urgent need.
By 1945, the demobilization of the armed forces compounded
the housing problems in Vancouver. Men and women who were war
veterans were entitled to a month of education for each month 72
spent in service. Their return to campus forced the
University to provide temporary accommodation. President
MacKenzie moved army huts onto the campus to increase classroom
and laboratory space, and also to serve as residences for 146 married and single students. The major problems of providing dining services was turned over to the newly established
Department of Home Economics.73
The army hut residences gave priority to veterans. Acadia
Camp was the only one of the four to accept single female students and the huts allotted to women were filled within two days of the receipt of the first applications.74 Because of the 7 5 lack of space, more women were refused than accepted. The
residents of Acadia Camp in 1945 included a total of 72 women
(61 veterans and 11 non veterans) and 170 men (138 veterans and
32 non veterans),76
While university residences for women have been represented
in an earlier era as bastions of social control, the Acadia
Residence was regarded, perhaps more in hindsight, as "an unique 77 experiment in community." The combination of men and women, married and single, some who had seen active service, and others who were away from home for the first time, made stringent rules and regulations inconceivable. There was, in fact, little means of enforcing even minimal attempts to monitor the girls' 7 8 whereabouts. Behavioral constraints were largely determined
by the need for harmony within the cramped and close living conditions in the Camp described as follows. Thin-walled huts, housing from twelve to sixty students, were crowded close to one another, with a few yards separating the single students from the married quarters, and only a quick walk between the single men and women; in the middle of it all was a trailer camp! No one thought much about supervisory staff and regulations were
at an absolute minimum.7q 147
The students organized their own Residence Council, including a Women's Council, and drew up a constitution by which
Oft to govern themselves and mediate disputes. u From time to time decisions were made with approval of the majority that were unacceptable to the minority of female residents. Although a representative of the Dean of Women, a faculty member called
'the don' resided in Acadia, women rarely contacted her because they never clearly understood which issues should be referred to the Dean of Women instead of the Residence Council.81 In any case, the Dean of Women's recommendations were largely ignored,82 overruled,83 or subject to such controversy as to cast doubt on her authority to make decisions about the students p A in residence.* In this respect, the Office of the Dean of
Women, which had yet to resolve the inherent ambiguity of the powers of this position, failed to strengthen the voice of women who comprised a small minority of the student body, in or out of the campus residence, after the war.
Two issues at Acadia demonstrated that women had particular interests that had to be upheld against the majority vote. A building designated as the women's lounge was unfurnished and, at first, used very little; despite the objections of the women, the men decided to move a billiard table into the room for their own recreational purposes. The matter was settled by President
MacKenzie who argued that the building was for the women's use, and it was not within the power of the students' council to usurp the space for any other purposes. The women subsequently set about making their lounge a more attractive place and 148 were aided in this endeavor by Dean Mawdsley who canvassed the 8 5 University Women's Club for funds.
At another meeting of the Council a motion was passed, again over the protestations of the women, to allow men to visit in the women's rooms until 10 p.m. on Sundays. The Faculty
Council approved this measure regardless of the strong opposition of the Dean of Women.86 The female residents believed their opposition should not be overlooked by the majority vote. In a secret ballot, eighty percent of the women rejected the motion to allow male visitors, with the exception of close relatives, in their rooms. They argued that the ruling would be harmful to the reputation of Acadia. Perhaps they felt it was detrimental to their own reputations and would pose difficulties in their relationships with roommates. As a result of this negative poll, the University reconsidered its decision and the ruling was withdrawn. This issue prompted constitutional amendments to determine more definite procedures, to control the Council's authority, and to clarify the Dean of 87
Women's position in regard to women residents.
The University had responded to the housing crisis by providing residences for men. Only Acadia accommodated a few women. Little Mountain and Lulu Island were family residences for married students but rarely was the student the female partner. As observed by one commentator in the UBC Annual: In most, but not all cases, it is the male member of the household who makes the daily pilgrimage to Point Grey. The wives stay home and vie with neighbours in inventing new and different ways to
make a four room army hut liveable.fto 149
The Union Theological College helped to ease the housing shortage by accepting male students. Four fraternity houses —
Phi Delta Theta at 10th and Wallace, Phi Kappa Pi on Cedar
Crescent, Beta Theta Pi on 12th at Granville, Zeta Psi on 6th and Blanca — also lodged male students. The Student Co-op
Association faced with high real estate prices, and difficulties in obtaining buildings in the Point Grey area, owned, in 1947, only one house for the men and rented a second for women. As always applications outnumbered the accommodation available.89
In 1947, Dean Mawdsley stepped up her campaign to get residences for women at UBC. The situation was clearly preferential for male students. The focusing of attention on their needs following WW II was inevitable but the women had waited long enough for equal consideration. Mawdsley addressed the University Women's Club and told them of the plight of 664 90 women currently boarding in various parts of the city. The
Club's membership included many UBC graduates who, themselves, had wished for a women's residence. Dr. Phyllis Ross, a UBC alumnus who had won honours as a member of the University debating team, who had been wartime Administrator of Oils and
Fats in Ottawa, and who in 1961 would become Chancellor of UBC, 91 spoke also to the Club.
The UWC supported for many years the Home Economics campaign and with this objective behind them they now directed their energies to establishing a women's residence. A Committee was formed in 1947 to investigate this cause and propose 92 action. Several women, who had close attachments to UBC and 150 women's education, served on this Committee: (Mrs.) Evelyn
Lett, Convenor, (Mrs.) Evlyn Farris, Mrs. 0. Banfield, Dr.
Isabel Maclnnes, (Mrs.) Walker, (Miss) Mary Fallis, and Dean
Dorothy Mawdsley.93
The first action of this Committee was to send a letter to the Board of Governors transmitting a resolution which called for
...a suitable, permanent women's residence as a first charge upon the next appropriation for
building purposes at the University.q^
This was endorsed by a number of BC women's organizations including: Women's Canadian Club, University Women's Clubs,
Parent-Teacher Associations, Soroptomist Clubs, Business and
Professional Women's Clubs, Women's Institutes and Panhellenic
Association. By not emphasizing the needs of women but rather the needs of the whole province to be served by the University, this resolution was calculated to attract political support. The appeal to the Board to give priority to a women's residence in future building plans recalled the finally successful attempt in the Home Economics campaign to win a resolution from the Senate that gave Home Economics first claim to additional funds for new instruction.96
B.C. women were by this time well practised in their strategies to mobilize women and to bring pressure to bear on the President of the University, the Minister of Education, and the Premier of the Province. Letters were written and delegations assembled to argue the case for a women's residence. 151
Although the women who campaigned for Home Economics were treated sympathetically, even indulgently, they had not been welcomed by the University as allies before President MacKenzie arrived in 1945. It was, however, characteristic of MacKenzie1s administration to recognize the potential of human resources to satisfy his goal, which was to build the University. Thus the
UWC Committee on Women's Residences was invited to join with
Committees of the Senate and the Board of Governors to work
Q7 together.
In January 1948 these Committees established a Women's
Residence Fund to be directed by a committee acting with the
Dean of Women. Women's organizations were to be notified of its existence and monies collected would be handled by the
University Bursar. Mrs. Evelyn Lett and the UWC arranged to discuss the matter of women's residences with the Minister of
Education prior to a formal representation to the Premier and 9 8 the Minister of Finance. Within a year, UBC was awarded $650,000.00 under the terms of the BC Loan Act for the 99 construction of three residential units for women. The
Alumni-UBC Development Fund for Women's Dorms raised an additional $15,000.00 for the project, and the Parent-Teacher
Federation and other women's organizations donated money to . , 100 furnish the rooms.
The first permanent women's residences were built on the site of Fort Camp, situated on Northwest Marine Drive and were opened in May 1951. The buildings were named Wesbrook, Maclnnes and Bollert Halls to honour the women who figured in the early 152
life of the University, and contributed to the lives of women
students.101 Dean Dorothy Mawdsley who had played a vital and
determined role was similarly honoured when the Lower Mall
Residences were completed in 1961.
Mawdsley had been instrumental in garnering the support of
the network of BC Women's Organizations but she was less
successful at manipulating University politics. Twenty years
after her retirement she still felt angry and frustrated with
the decisions of the University Residence Committee that was
'dominated by men interested in building their own empires.'102
Mawdsley confessed in a taped interview that she was "horrified
at the wasted space and costs inherent in the three buildings
that were approved as the women's residences." Although they
were well designed, they were expensive to operate. She had
wanted one compact building with a common door (to keep track of
the women.) Mawdsley named Dr. Gordon Shrum as the "power
centre" who with "one stroke of the pen made it three permanent
buildings," without consulting her. "No one could do anything with Shrum," according to Mawdsley and her former assistant
Marjorie Leeming. Mawdsley's dispute with him had a long
history. Shrum was originally reponsible for bringing the army
huts on the campus but Mawdsley was upset at the tremendous
costs of maintaining these semi-permanent structures as
residences. As each year's funds allocated for student
residences were spent in refurbishing these huts Mawdsley told 104 him, "it was like throwing money into the Fraser River." The establishing of women's residences at UBC in 1951 was 153 a curious example of the present catching up to the past, despite a significant exchange of expectations. Prior to the twentieth century, separate living space for women on campus was often presented for the 'moral' protection of both sexes. In
British Columbia, before WWI, a women's residence was identified by female students as both advantageous and necessary to provide a companionable experience, and to ensure that women from all parts of the province would be accommodated at the provincial university. For nearly half a century, female students who eventually became alumni, two Deans of Women, and a network of women's organizations reminded the University of its responsibility to provide accommodation for the women students.
Finally, after demonstrating its commitment to housing the influx of predominantly male student veterans in 1945, the
University acknowledged the practical benefit and real need for women's residences for young students from out of town. The new campus 'dorms', built mid-century, thus fulfilled the hopes and expectations that prevailed among female students since UBC opened at Fairview. 154
Notes
1 Jo Robinson, SixtyYears of Friendship and Service, 1917-1977;A BriefHistory of the Faculty Women's Club of UBC. (Vancouver, 1977), p. 1.
Faculty Women's Club Records, Box 1, University of British Columbia, The Library, Special Collections Division.
3 Ibid.
4 Isabel S. Maclnnes, Tape recorded interview, University of British Columbia, The Library, University of British Columbia Archives.
5 Robinson.
6 Faculty Women's Club Records, Box 1. 7 Maclnnes Tape. 8 UBC Scrapbook #8, February 22, 1919, p. 50. University of British Columbia, The Library, University of British Columbia Archives.
9 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, March 31, 1919.
10 Ubyssey, February 17, 1921, p. 1 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 UBC Scrapbook #12, p. 90. 14 Klinck discussed the duties of Deans of Women with other university presidents. Soward, p. 269. 15 Mary Louise Bollert, born in Guelph, Ontario, completed a B.A. at the University of Toronto 1906 and an A.M. at Columbia University in 1908. From 1910-14 she was an Assistant in English at Teachers College, Columbia University and Dean of Women at Regina College until 1921. Bollert had been the director of general educational work and social welfare activities for Robert Simpson Co. Ltd. and for Sherbourne House Club, Toronto, which she organized as a residence for business women. Her club affiliations included the Pan Pacific Women's Association, the International Federation of University Women, International Congress of Women, the Soroptomist Club, Georgian Club, Women's Canadian Club, University Chapter, I.O.D.E., University of Toronto Alumnae, Faculty Women's Club, League of Nations Society, B.C. Temperance League. The salary schedule for 1921 was as follows: Deans, 155
$5,500-$7,500; Professors, $4,000-S5,000; Associate Professors, $3,200-$3,800; Assistant Professors, $2,400-$3,000; Instructors, $l,600-$2,200; Assistants, up to $1,500. Logan, p. 84.
17 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, July 25, 1921.
18 Ubyssey, November 24, 1921, pp. 1-2. The title of the office was a fair indication of the authority that was allowed by the institution. These titles ranged from "Advisor to Women," "Dean of Women," to "Warden." The University of Alberta had an Advisor to Women Students, 1921-42, and a Dean of Women after 1950. Walter H. Johns, A History ofthe University of Alberta (Edmonton: University Press, 1981) . At McGill University the head of the Royal Victoria College for Women was called the "Warden" following the model of Somerville College, Oxford. Gillett, p. 164. In this latter case, the duties were defined initially as the Head or Principal of the women's residence, or college, and to students the responsibilities of the "guardian" were often incompatible with the confidence sought in the "counsellor".
Dr. Mary Dorothy Mawdsley, Tape recorded interview, University of British Columbia, The Library, University of British Columbia Archives. See further this chapter for discussion of segregated English classes.
20 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, July 25, 1921. 21 Dorothy Mawdsley suggested that Isabel Maclnnes also may have held these views, initially. Mawdsley tape. 22 There were four Deans of Women: Mary L. Bollert (1921-41); M. Dorothy Mawdsley (1941-1959); Helen McCrae (1959-1973); E. Margaret Fulton (1974-1978). The position was eliminated in 1978 and the functions were assumed by the Office for Women Students. 23 Soward noted that Bollert's title was changed from "Advisor" to "Dean of Women" in 1922, p. 281. 24 UBC Senate Minutes, Volume 9, p. 841, August 29, 1941.
25 UBC Senate Minutes, Volume 10, p. 1075, October 18, 1944. 2 6 UBC Senate Minutes, Volume 12, p. 1500, May 10, 1949. This decision affected also the Dean of Men, an Office established after the influx of male students following World War II. 27 In 1946 Dean Mawdsley's salary was $4,000 with $1,000 of that amount paid for her teaching in the Department of English. Board of Governors Minutes, April 29, 1946. 156
28 Mawdsley tape.
29 Ibid.
30 The Vancouver Province, January 8, 1933.
31 Dorothy Mawdsley, Tape Recording. Although retiring deans were awarded customarily an honorary degree, Bollert was not accorded this distinction.
32 UBC Scrapbook #15, p. 21, p. 41, p. 101.
33 Address to the Canadian Daughter's League, The Vancouver Province April 13, 1939, UBC Scrapbook #25, p. 37.
34 Address to the Educational Club, The Vancouver Province, December 12, 1924, UBC Scrapbook #15, p. 106.
35 Ubyssey, September 30, 1932.
36 Ubyssey, October 1, 1935.
37 Ubyssey, September 26, 1941. 38 Bollert ran as a Liberal candidate in the provincial elections in 1941 but was not elected. She died four years after retirement. 3 9 Marjorie Leeming had been a student at UBC and a champion tennis player. When they started work on their composition text, Leeming moved into Mawdsley's household which included Mawdsley's parents who were supported by their daughter. The two women continued to share their lives into retirement. Leeming had been an instructor in Physical Education at UBC and from July 1951 to June 1959 she served as the Assistant to the Dean of Women. Both retired to Vancouver Island where they built themselves a cabin. Mawdsley, Tape Recording. 40 Their accomplishment was announced in the Victoria Times, October 15, 1935: "Two Girls Produce New B.C. Composition Textbook: UBC Scrapbook, #22, p. 77. This text: M. Dorothy Mawdsley and Marjorie H. Leeming, Modern Composition forHigh Schools and Collegiates (Victoria: 1935). 41 Mawdsley, Tape recording. A O 'Buttercup' — from H.M.S. Pinafore, operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan —• a young woman whose past experience included running a baby farm. Mawdsley, Tape recording. 43 Dr. Dorothy Mawdsley, who was a student and an English instructor at UBC before she became Dean of Women, recalled that the classes had been segregated on purpose to the time of her 157
Deanship. She and Stella MacGuire taught the women's sections in the first year English because "Sedgewick didn't want women." Dr. Mawdsley felt it was unfair that men organized the courses and set the exams. The women marked their own sections and also read the papers of the senior men. As the junior instructors they delivered the first lecture in the afternoons. The junior instructors (women) were 'let go' in the depression. There are numerous and explicit references to the unequal treatment of women faculty members in the reminiscences of Mawdsley, Nevison and Maclnnes. However, as this research focussed as much as possible on the experience of female students, extensive citation to show the lesser status of female faculty has been omitted. Dr. Dorothy Mawdsley, Tape Recording, UBC Archives.
44 Ubyssey, January 10, 1941.
45 Ibid.
Ibid. Dr. Myrne Nevison was a student at UBC in the 1940s and eventually returned to teach and head the Department of Counselling Psychology in the Faculty of Education. She remembered that as a 'freshette', conspicuous in the required green attire, she waited in her first class for the English professor to arrive. When the tall lanky professor appeared, with his gown flying, he growled, "shut up you damn females" and spent ten minutes bemoaning the fact that he had been forced to take freshettes. This professor (F.G.C. Wood) was remembered as an excellent instructor who was also "very charming" but upset that he had to teach women. Dr. Myrne Nevison, Tape Recording, University of British Columbia, UBC Archives. Also, Dr. Dorothy Mawdsley, Tape Recording.
47 Ubyssey, January 14, 1941. 48 The role of the Faculty Women's Club and the Dean of Women in the inspection of rooms has been discussed earlier in this chapter. 49 "Betty Coed," in The Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1935, UBC Scrapbook #22, The University of British Columbia, UBC Archives.
50 Ibid.
5 These points about women's employment were made by Dean Mawdsley in a taped interview. 52 UBC Plans, Thompson, Berwick, Pratt and Partners Architectural Records, UBC Main Library, Special Collections. 53 A residence for 300 students was the first item to be built according to the UBC Board of Governors Minutes, May 30, 1913. 158
54 Ubyssey, February 17, 1921.
55 Ubyssey, March 10, 1921.
56 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, October 27, 1947.
57 In the statement by the Board of Governors of requirements for UBC for the first five years, the building of the Women's residence was projected for 1915-16. World War I and a shift in the provincial economy and spending priorities halted the plans to build UBC. UBC Board of Governors Minutes, May 30, 1913. See also Chapter II.
58 Ubyssey, March 10, 1921.
59 Ubyssey, February 17, 1921.
60 The Vancouver Sun, September 26, 1922. UBC Scrapbook #12, p. 178.
61 Ibid.
fi2 The Vancouver Province, November 25, 1922, UBC Scrapbook #12, p. 2~UT.
63 "Betty Coed" in The Vancouver Sun, October 10, 1935, UBC Scrapbook #22, p. 76.
64 UBC Annuals 1941-45.
65 Ibid.
66 UBC Annual 1941.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid. 69 Mawdsley, Tape recording. 70 Ibid. 71 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, April 26, 1943; May 31, 1943; August 30, 1943; September 27, 1943. 7 2 The Department of Veterans' Affairs provided assistance to students for these purposes. See Augusta Margaret Thomasson, "Acadia Camp: A Study of the Acadia Camp Residence at the University of British Columbia from September 1945 to May 1949," Unpublished thesis for Master of Social Work, UBC, 1951, p. 2. 73 See Chapter III. 74 Thomasson, p. 4. 159
7 5 Ibid. Seventy-five applicants were turned away. 7 6 Thomasson, p. 20.
77 "General Report on Acadia Camp," June 1964, Dean of Women's Office Papers, University of British Columbia Library, UBC Archives.
78 Dean Mawdsley was unhappy about the girls' practice of staying out late with no one knowing their whereabouts or when they were expected to return. She also suggested late passes be signed, a procedure that was endorsed by a vote from the female residents. Although this procedure was adopted in principle it was ignored in practice and as there was no machinery to enforce it, the matter was dropped. Thomasson, p. 40. 7 Q
"General Report on Acadia Camp," p. 1.
80 Totem, UBC Annual, p. 222; Thomasson.
81 Thomasson, p. 35.
82 See Note 46 and 51. The Faculty Council approved male visitors in women's rooms despite Dean Mawdsley's objections. See further in this pape r. OA Three women residents were reported to the Dean of Women for staying in the recreation hall with male students until three or four o'clock in the morning. The Dean requested these girls to leave Acadia at Christmas because their behavior was "undesirable". Because the Residents' Council was not consulted it disputed the Dean's action and questioned her jurisdiction in the residence. Thomasson, p. 36. p 5 Thomasson, p. 43. 86 The argument in favor of accepting the ruling was that not to do so was to show a lack of confidence in Acadia's representative body and in the students' ability to conduct themselves properly. Thomasson, p. 44. 87 Thomasson, p. 45-7. 88 Totem, UBC Annual, 1947, p. 222. 89 Ibid. 90 University Women's Club Minutes, Volume 2, January 13, 1947, City of Vancouver Archives. 91 Ibid. Dr. Phyllis Ross's son, John Turner became, briefly, Prime Minister of Canada in 1984. 160
92 University Women's Club Minutes, Volume 2, March 10, 1947 .
93 Ibid. Farris, Maclnnes and Mawdsley's connections to UBC are evident in this paper. Evelyn Lett (nee Story) Arts '17 married another prominent graduate, Sherwood Lett. Mary Fallis graduated from UBC in 1932.
94 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, March 31, 1947.
95 Ibid.
96 See Chapter III.
97 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, October 27, 1947; January 9, 1948.
98 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, June 28, 1948.
99 UBC Board of Governors Minutes, January 30, 1950.
100 Totem, UBC Annual, 1950, p. 35.
101 The Faculty Women's Club also named their first scholarship for Anne Wesbrook who had, herself, initiated a cash prize in the early years of UBC.
±VJ£m Mawdsley, Taped interview. 103 Dr. Gordon M. Shrum was the Director of the University Housing Authority. 104 Souce for this paragraph was Mawdsley's taped interview. CHAPTER V
THE FEMININE IMAGE AND THE FEMALE REALITY:
THE ACCOMMODATION OF WOMEN TO CONTRADICTORY EXPECTATIONS
Women's associations concerned with the education of women, and individuals like Evlyn Farris, Annie Jamieson, Madge
Watt, Mary Bollert and Dorothy Mawdsley, in their capacities as
Senators, Governors, or Deans of Women, worked to ensure that women would be equitably treated at the University of British
Columbia. The full burden of adjustment could only be borne, however, by the students. An understanding of the experience of female students at UBC remains incomplete without consideration of the ways in which they accommodated themselves, philosophically and practically to an institution whose primary function was to educate men, and to a social climate that remained uncertain of the purpose of higher
education for women.
The message that the university existed chiefly for the education of men was conveyed to both men and women in a variety of ways, but at the more literal level, by repeated
references to "men" as in the written and spoken emphasis on men's roles in higher education. The thrust of many an
inspired address, even as it was delivered to a female audience, stressed "the need for educated men," "the benefit afforded any community by a body of cultured men, specialists
in their own particular lines," and liberal education "designed
to enable man to adapt himself whatever the future may bring."1 162
As late as 1956, in his address to the members of the graduating class, Dean Henry F. Angus suggested an appropriate motto for UBC would be: "Not Buildings but Men Make the
City."'' Language that persistently denied women's participation in higher education, by making no mention of them, communicated an indifference to their presence. The lower ratio of women to men enrolled at UBC in all but two years during World War I, as indicated in Figure 1, was at least partly due to an indifference deeply embedded in public opinion.
In the first half of the twentieth century, indifference presented as formidable an obstacle to the participation of women at the university as hostility. Although women had established both their right and ability to attend university, women were not considered the truly legitimate heirs to higher education. The public remained uncertain about the importance of higher education in light of the different social expectations for men and women. Indifference and hostility to female students expressed not only this popular uncertainty, but also the defensive reaction of the male university community against female encroachment.
The coincidence of the founding of UBC with the beginning of World War I heightened the public's ambiguity about the
importance of women's education. Although the regional context
prior to World War I had been supportive of women's
participation in higher education, the predominance of female
students on campus during the war years was regarded as a Figure 1 UBC Enrollment: 1914-15 to 1950-51 (Full-time and part-time - Winter and Summer Sessions) 10000
9000
8000
7000 + Male Enrollment 6000 Enrollment Female Enrollment 5000 --
4000 --
3000 --
2000
1000 +
0 1914-15 1919-20 1924-25 1929-30 1934-35 1939-40 1944-45 1949-50
Academic Year
Source: UBC Calendars 164 temporary and unnatural consequence of the Empire's need for youthful soldiers. The building of the provincial university was postponed indefinitely by a community unsympathetic to a 'ladies college.'3
Women's claim to higher education seemingly required constant justification over the next three decades. Women countered any popular resentment, or collective guilt, caused by their prominence in the initial years of UBC's existence, by assuming the guardianship for the values of righteousness, truth, and honour on the home front. Miss Isabel Maclnnes,
Professor of Modern Languages, in her address to the UBC
Women's Literary Society in 1917, urged the members in this di rection.
Surely we — exempt from their great sacrifice — should unite with them in maintaining here those supreme interests for which they are facing danger and death. Surely our college life, too, should have a nobler purpose and be tested by higher standards.^
Women's role in higher education during the war years thus served a moral and patriotic purpose which strengthened and unified women's activities on campus and deflected belittling
insinuations.
After World War I, women faced again the need to redefine and expand their roles in higher education in response to
changing social conditions and public antipathy. For many years a university education for women was deemed unnecessary because motherhood was regarded as the only true career for women. Women then argued that the benefits of "a trained and 165 disciplined mind" supplemented the "inherited instincts of motherhood." Furthermore, feminists who recognized the need to extend women's economic opportunities beyond their dependence or marriage seized the argument that justified women's education for its social usefulness. Ethel Johns, Head of Department of Nursing, proclaimed it "our duty to prepare
the modern girl for one of two alternatives, marriage, or the life she must lead if marriage does not come."6 Johns believed that a woman's education meant
... [selfishly] an opportunity for culture ... and also the training that makes possible the ability to earn a living, again a selfish matter, but further ... it means the capability
of rendering a real service to the community.7
Johns, like many of the educational pioneers of the previous century and her contemporaries, found it necessary to
justify women's education in terms of gender social
expectations. Women's education that aimed at social
usefulness preserved the feminine attributes of motherhood and unselfish service. In this process 'motherhood* became more broadly defined to encompass the work of nurses, teachers and eventually home economists.
Education for women's social usefulness did not ease the acceptance of women into the fields of study traditionally
dominated by men. The few women who braved the force of public opinion to attempt degrees in the Applied Sciences faced
greater obstacles after graduation. Women were favoured for
"the routine drudgery of lab work" but in the words of one 166
UBC professor, "women do not make as good scientists as men... they do not have the same larger grasp of scientific problems and trends."8 Women in science tended to specialize in biology or bacteriology which fitted them for employment in hospitals and public health departments, albeit they were paid considerably less than men doing the same work.9
Women taking non-professional courses at UBC with no clear application to 'social usefulness' were open to attack not only
for competing with men for scarce resources within the
institution but also for renouncing their primary female obligations. During periods of economic stress women, particularly, were singled out for criticism. In the early
1920s the overcrowded conditions of the University housed at
Fairview precipitated rumours that student enrollment would have to be limited. One author of a letter to the editor of
Ubyssey proposed a solution that clearly showed the strain on
coeducational relations and an underlying resentment toward women taking "culture courses."
...Last year out of the 82 who were given their B.A. degrees, only 16 had the ability and the initiative to take Honours. Over 76% of those taking the Pass Course were women, and of these only a small minority graduated in Science ... who is the most value to the community, a graduate in French Literature or a graduate in Civil Engineering or Bacteriology? ...Is it right that a woman who is taking a pass course in, say, Philosophy, and who will probably be married within five years of graduation, and within ten will have forgotten all the Philosophy she ever knew, should be permitted to prevent some other student from learning the
fundamentals of his life work,n
Women defended themselves with a humourous response that 167 pointed out the absurdity of any admission policy that would attempt to discriminate against female students by assessing the use of their education in the future.11
In 1932, an economic crisis threatened post-secondary
education in B.C. and the Kidd Report delivered its unsympathetic conclusions about the fate of the University.''
Women were again placed on the defensive as disgruntled citizens questioned the value of their education. The writer
of a letter to the editor of The Province, September 25, 1932,
supported the Kidd Report and attacked a home economics
demonstration at an elementary school where he had seen "...a well nourished matron teaching a little girl how to mix dough, while another was making an apron. "-L-> His question, "where are
the mothers of these homeless children?" scarcely disguised his
implication that any woman not a housewife was derelict in her womanly duties and contributed to the unnecessary costs in education. This writer targeted women university students more
directly as an unwelcome expense to the taxpayer.
I invite taxpayers to ... watch the flight of students westward to the classrooms. Scores and scores of cars speed past, filled not with serious young men, but with chattering girls. Are these the youth to whom Mr. Weir states the taxpayer owes so much? Are they seeking an education or a thrill? Are Messrs. Weir and Angus running a university or a ladies'
college?14
In hard economic times the community displayed greater
hostility toward female students and women's work outside the
home. Because the purposes of educating women were not clear, 168
inasmuch as a university degree was not a prerequisite for homemaking, women's education was regarded as a luxury that might be curtailed to conserve resources. Many regarded the presence of women at the university as a demonstration of a kind of conspicuous consumption of an affluent middle class.
Indeed, it is commonly pointed out by sociologists and historians that a larger proportion of fathers of university
students tended to have occupations in a profession or business with a higher income and status than would be found in a
comparable age cohort in the regional or national population.15
This study does not dispute that universities may have been
less accessible to families of limited means. In this respect a daughter's education may depend to an even larger
degree than a son's on the availability of surplus family
resources. However, as indicated in table 2, the professional
and business occupations together accounted, at the most, for
only half of the students' fathers.1*' The remaining half were
representative of varied occupational groups.
UBC was founded on the principle that higher education
should be affordable to all social classes. The lack of
tuition fees at MUCBC and UBC before 1920-21 meant that prior
to this date families had only to consider the costs of
extending the period of dependence of their daughters and not
the additional burden of yearly fees. The parental occupations
of female students enrolled at MUCBC (table 2) shows that
female students whose fathers' occupations fell in the skilled
and semi-skilled categories benefited from this absence of 169
fees. The lower percentage of students from professional
families indicates, in all likelihood, that they were sent to more prestigious universities out of the province.
TABLE 2
PARENTAL OCCUPATIONS OF FEMALE STUDENTS ENROLLED AT McGILL COLLEGE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1907-14, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, 1949-50.
Occupational N=68 N=62 N=99 N=97 N=54 Category 1907-14 1919-20 1929-30 1939-40 1949-50
Professional 16.2% 25.8% 33.0% 22.0% 20.4%
Business/ Commercial 23.5% 29.0% 23.0% 27.0% 25.9%
Managerial 8.8% 4.8% 4.0% 9.0% 14.8%
Clerical 5.9% 3.2% 7.0% 3.0% 9.3%
Skilled 19.1% 16.1% 11.0% 10.0% 7.4%
Semiskilled 14.7% 12.9% 8.0% 11.0% 7.4%
Private Means* 11.8% .... 6.5% 14.0% 18.0% 14.8%
* This category includes widows, and households where the mother was a single parent who listed no occupation, and retired fathers.
In fact, UBC women shared religious affiliations to a
larger degree than socio-economic status (table 3) . Prior to
1929, Presbyterian families showed a greater propensity than
families from other religious backgrounds for educating their 18
daughters. Over the next twenty years this distinction
shifted to families who attended the United Church which
absorbed many Presbyterians, after church union in 1925. 170
TABLE 3
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS OF FEMALE STUDENTS ENROLLED AT McGILL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1907-14, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, 1949-50. N=100x5
Denomination 1907-14 1919-20 1929-30 1939-40 1949-50
Anglican/ Church of 14% 21% 26% 31% 35% England
Apostolic 1%
Bapt i st 12% 4% 7% 3% 1%
Brethren 2%
Christian Science 2% 1% 2% 2%
Congrega• tional 5% 1%
Episcopalian 1% 1%
Jewish 1% 1% 1% 1% 6%
Lutheran 1% 3% 1%
Methodist 24% 13%
None Listed 4% 4% 2% 6%
Presbyterian 37% 45% 10% 4% 4%
Protestant 4% 9% 17% 24%
Roman Catholic 1% 5% 5% 4% 6%
United 37% 33% 15%
According to the Canadian census for 1931, shown in table 4, women in the same age cohort as university students, ages 15-24 years, living in Vancouver were almost equally divided between 171 the Anglican and the United Church; but in 1929-30, 11 percent more female students registered as members of the United Church.
More men and women of all ages in Vancouver claimed to be
Anglicans in 1931 (table 4) although they were not the largest groups to educate their daughters until 1949 (table 3) . The next highest group in that year identified themselves only as
Protestants, perhaps an indication that, in general, church membership had declined.
The religious preferences served as an eloquent indicator of the British and Canadian origins of the parents of women students that was borne out by their declarations of parental nationality included on the UBC registration cards for 1929 and 1939 (table 5) . The majority of female students were
Canadian born and lived in the Vancouver area in their parents' homes (table 6)
Irrespective of their family backgrounds, gender expectations determined that women shared similar experiences in higher education. The majority of female students enrolled in
Arts with a view to becoming teachers. Many of the McGill
College women completed one or two years before they went on to 19 Normal School. A survey of UBC Alumni in 1925 reported that some female graduates were working in medicine, agriculture, science, missionary and social service work, nursing, journalism, stenography, or were in business for themselves, but 20 most of them were teaching. Teaching was an acceptable occupation for women that provided them with the opportunity to travel, to find economic independence, and to finance their 172 continued education for an undergraduate or a graduate degree.
TABLE 4
RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION BY SEX AND QUINQUENNIAL AGE GROUPS FOR VANCOUVER IN 1931
Denomination Female Both Sexes Female Female All Ages All Ages 15-19 vrs 20-24 vrs
Adventists 235 415 25 14
Anglicans 35,630 71,739 3,424 2,991
Baptists 5,526 10,578 539 529
Brethren and United Brethren 313 628 37 30
Confucians and Buddhists 3,273 15,709 267 258
Christians 95 227 11 12
Christian Scientists 1,693 2,912 171 127
Jews 1,140 2,372 127 137
Lutherans 3,423 8,963 306 528
Presbyterians 16,796 35,366 1,620 1,493
Protestants 198 489 16 29
Roman Catholics 11,097 23,635 1,200 1,176
United 31,378 61,213 3,376 3,086
SOURCE: Census of Canada, 1931. Vol. III. (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1931), Table 22. 173
TABLE 5
NATIONALITIES OF PARENTS OF FEMALE STUDENTS ATTENDING THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 1929-30, 1939-40. N=100x2
1929-30 1939-40 Nationality Father1s Mother's Father's ' Mother's
American 0 1 2 5 Australian 0 0 0 1 British 1 2 7 7 Canadian 61 59 43 45 Croatian 0 1 0 0 Dutch 0 1 0 0 English 18 21 19 17 Finnish 0 0 1 1 French 0 1 0 0 Greek 0 0 1 0 "Hebrew" 0 0 1 1 Irish 2 4 3 4 Norwegian 0 1 0 0 Russian 0 0 1 1 Scottish 9 7 11 14 Swedish 0 0 3 4 Swiss 2 1 0 0 Welsh 1 0 0 0 Not Given 6 1 8 0
TABLE 6'
BIRTH PLACE OF FEMALE STUDENTS ENROLLED AT McGILL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1907-14, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1919-20, 1929-30, 1939-40, (1949-50 NO RECORDS). N=100x4
Birth Place 1907-14 1919-20 1929-30 1939-40
Vancouver 21% 24% 28% 37% British Columbia outside Vancouver 22% 25% 29% 26% Canada 31% 23% 22% 24% United States 7% 12% 4% 1% United Kingdom 3% 12% 12% 5% Other 4% 3% 2% Not Given 16% 2% 5% 174
Other courses that appealed to women were established slowly at UBC. Departments of Nursing in 1920, Teacher
Training in 1924 and Social Work in 194521 increased the opportunities for women to qualify for professional work in these fields. As discussed in a previous chapter, Home
Economics was long fought for by the women in British Columbia before it was established in 1942.22
After World War II, Pharmacy and Law initially attracted a few women; however, like Engineering, these fields were considered men's professions. Technically, all faculties and schools were open to women but in the early twentieth century
social contraints proved as strong a deterrent to women's participation as any formal prohibition.23
Women who entered a traditionally male field of study may have experienced more overt levels of sexual discrimination than other women at the university. This is not to say that female students integrated and assimilated more readily into
Arts courses. Segregated English classes and male professors who scarcely concealed their indifference to female students engendered a sense of inferiority in women.24 Women felt they 25 always had to be better than men to get recognition. Alternately, the "feminine" educational fields were assigned to 2 6 the lower ranks in the academic hierarchy. Female students personally suffered less hostility in these fields but
resistance and reservations were directed toward the
programmes. The low prestige of the fields of study may be ascribed to their relative newness as areas of systematic 175
inquiry, to perceived lower intellectual standards, or their
association with women, and thus the lower end of professional
salary scales.27
The underlying antipathy, which surfaced either as
indifference or hostility toward women in higher education,
remained rooted in gender expectations. After World War I
gender expectations were conveyed to a great extent by the
image of femininity that appeared in an increasing array of
media, much of it imported into B.C. from the United States.
In American films and popular women's magazines, standards of
femininity were considerably broadened over the span of three
decades following World War I. The picture of female
ingenuousness and innocence depicted in the early twenties gave way to a more rebellious image later in the decade when the new woman wore shorter skirts, bobbed her hair and rejected
traditional behavioral constraints. Clothing and cosmetics
became important items in determining femininity in the
thirties and forties as films and glossy magazines promoted the
American fashion industry. Women were portrayed in more erotic
less maternal relationships and their clothes accentuated
rather than masked their bodies.
The new image reflected changing ideologies that affected women's lives. "Educated motherhood" gave way to a new 28
emphasis on women's role as "wife-companion." The primary
relationship in a woman's life shifted from her children to her
husband. Femininity was thus measured by a woman's ability to
attract and please men. Although the changing image of woman 176 indicated significant shifts in social expectations of womanhood, the revised standards of femininity did little to nurture a public acceptance of women as credible, serious, ambitious students.
As the consumer potential of the university woman was discovered by the marketplace, the advertising features of newspapers and mass circulation magazines packaged potent images of femininity designed to appeal to female students.
The daily press called female students by the American appellation "coeds" and glamourized their activities in the society pages. Preferring their pulchritude to their profundity, * gossip columnists described the elaborate gowns
'coeds' wore to charity balls. City newspapers preferred to portray a stereotype to an individual experience and columns for women students were written under the pseudonyms "Betty 30
Coed" and "Fanny Freshette."
The standards of feminine behaviour and academic credibility made increasingly contradictory demands on female students. It was difficult for female students to be both 31 attractive to men and taken seriously. Women had few role models within the academic sphere. Their female professors who were career oriented were unmarried and considered different from other women. This 'difference' usually meant they did not conform to current standards of femininity. In fact, these women hoped their gender would play no obvious part in their success or failure. They wanted acceptance in the same terms as men and believed that only conformity to the status quo or 177
3 2 masculine standards would eliminate discrimination. These women were not necessarily feminists who wished to challenge a
system that treated women unequally; they were often
individualists who believed ambition was a personal matter.
They did not share the experiences of 'other' women.33
These academic women had to chart their own course and
they paid a high price for their nonconformity. They forfeited
attachments to the female spheres but were not included
entirely in the men's. Well into the twentieth century,
academic women struggled to win recognition within the male
university community.34 The rewards for a female scholar were
the freedom and responsibilities of autonomy that were
conventionally reserved for a man, and an identity that derived
from her own accomplishments and capabilities. But the choice
of nonconformity over femininity meant the denial of much that was recognized as female in a society where a career and
marriage were mutually exclusive activities for a woman.
Several UBC graduates fit into this pattern of
nonconformity as they eschewed the social expectation of womanhood to the benefit of their chosen fields. Undoubtedly
their choices were formed by their individual personalities,
special circumstances, and exceptional talents that bear closer
scrutiny. This paper seeks to clarify, however, that the
pressures of socialization may not be ignored in women's
experience in higher education. An outstanding minority were
able to withstand social alienation or isolation to achieve 178
their goals, but the majority of women were reluctant to cast off the company of their own sex or the trappings of their sexual identity.
Perhaps the easiest and most obvious choice for female
students at the university was to yield to the predominant
social expectations of womanhood, make the most of their femininity, and ensure that higher education would not endanger their marital prospects. Women tended to believe in the inter war period that the controversy over coeducation was behind them and they ignored or were oblivious to the more subtle evidence of discrimination.36 They felt confident in their womanhood and secure in the knowledge that their attendance at the university represented the social aspirations of their families. For perhaps nearly one third of the female students, these social aspirations formed the larger part of their own 37 ambition. Women's socialization did not begin at the university, after all, and the social expectations of the affluent middle class complemented the ideals depicted in the
American popular culture. Feminine conformity appealed, therefore, to a number of women who deemed it essential to obtain and maintain their social standing.
In their desire to emulate the ideal, feminine conformists on campus adopted a sophisticated look, wore dresses and hats from Madame Runge on Granville Street, joined sororities, and read the "women's page" in the Ubyssey, which reviewed the
latest fashion and grooming news and rated female students according to their poise, grace and flair for wearing clothes. 179
Women succumbed to the lure of the department store "fashion
revue" which invited female students to act as "mannequins" with the promise of fundraising profits to use for their own
purposes. °
This climate taught women to regard others of their sex as
competition for male approval. UBC "coeds" made news when
judged by a visiting male member of the University of Toronto
debating team "to be more handsome and healthy than the eastern variety." Although the senior class in 1934 did not permit
"a ridiculous ballot to decide the dimensions and other
characteristics of the female ideal,"40 by the 1940s college
beauty contests that sought the "Queen of the Ball" or "the
best legs"41 were considered standard entertainment on campus.
The popular 'image of femininity' became increasingly
preoccupied with female sexuality as masculine fantasies widened the distance between the feminine ideal and the female
reality. Student publications and activities mirrored this
trend. A full page photo portrait in the 1948 UBC Annual
identified a beauty queen "Sheila" as "The Freshette We Would
Most Like To Be Orientated With" because of her "sultry long- 42 lashed look." Female students dressed in bathing suits to collect donations for the March of Dimes — a charity fund 43
raising effort. In 1949 student candidates for Queen of the
Mardi Gras Ball were introduced to a crowd that had been warmed
up by "galaxies of bathing suits amply filled out" by the staff 44
of one of the leading downtown manufacturers. Elaborate
chorus lines of scantily clad female students formed an 180
essential part of dance programmes staged around "Mardi Grasf"
A C
"Arabian Nights" or "South Pacific" themes. The men students contributed by performing their own versions of a female strip tease routine.46
Feminine conformity served the priorities of social class
and the marketplace that were, in the long runr antithetical both to women and women's interest in higher education. This focus on women's physical attributes affected attitudes toward women in such unrelated activities as administering the student council. UBC yearbook editors described female officers as
"five pretty girls" and "the petticoat brigade."47 The woman who accidentally became, in 1951, the second only female
President of the AMS, Nonie Donaldson, was referred to as a
"pert commerce student" who "continually amazed and gratified
[the faculty] by the intelligent and mature way in which she 48 handled the most difficult of student offices." It would seem that the increased obsession with women's bodies did,
indeed, detract from the recognition of their minds and accomplishments.
The exploitative nature of the image of femininity to which women conformed in these decades is perhaps easier to
recognize in retrospect. The young women who lived these times accepted that the sexual attitudes allowed them greater freedom without forseeing that they would also lead to a greater discrimination against them. The low status of women at 49 universities in the twentieth century is well documented.
The basis of this discrimination lay in the stereotypical image 181 of social femininity. The image — more fantasy than real — of women's increased sexual availability undermined women's academic credentials. The disillusionment that women felt when they discovered that their adherence to standards of femininity was instrumental in their second class status eventually turned into the anger that sparked the women's liberation movement in the 1960s.50
The fact that university women mistook, what were essentially male, fantasies for a model of womanhood attests to the ambivalence women felt in their roles as students in the
1930s and 1940s. Middle class women were urged to obtain a good education but they were expected to work — "find something to do" was the expression — for only a few years before they fulfilled primary expectations of marriage. Women learned in and out of the classroom that their most important job was to be "interesting wives." Their eager conformity to an image so clearly designed to elicit male approval, nevertheless, reveals women's part in changing ideologies about marriage. Women's indulgent behaviour in these decades registers also an important stage in a woman's life-cycle — a period of semi-autonomy strongly influenced by the standards of 51 a peer group. At the heart of the peer society and highly supportive of feminine conformity lay the network of fraternities and sororities that controlled much of the group life on the 52 campus. At UBC sororities and fraternities were tolerated rather than encouraged from their first appearance in the 182
1920s. Neither Deans of Women, Mary Bollert or Dorothy
Mawdsley, entirely approved of sororities but they cooperated with them. Bollert exerted pressure to modify rushing
CO
procedures. J It was feared that members of these "secret
societies" would dominate the student society and undermine the
campus spirit. They were even directly attacked by members of
the provincial legislature in 1940 and charged with being C A
undemocratic. * In truth, fraternities and sororities
stratified campus society; their members did win student
council positions and campaigns were often fought on the basis
of fraternity vs. independent candidacy.
In contrast to the social service associations that had
attracted membership from their mothers' generation the
sorority fulfilled less altruistic functions for university
women in the inter-war years. It was an organization divisive
to female solidarity because of the selective criteria attached
to membership. Yet the sisterhood of the sorority nurtured
female relationships in a community where women's culture had
been considerably weakened since the dismantling of women's
reform associations. The sorority undertook philanthropic fund
raising but the chief emphasis was on the socialization of its
members to become the ideal professional wife-companion. In a
social climate that considered this to be women's most
important function, sororities facilitated women's attempts to
maximize their control over courtship and marriage prospects.
Sorority membership neither appealed to everyone nor could all
students afford it, but membership in a sorority offered one 183 strategy to lessen the conflict that many university women experienced as a minority whose purposes for higher education were ambiguous in light of social expectations.
Not all university women chose the blatant conformity to gender expectations that has been represented heretofore.
There were numerous student activities on campus that attracted less publicity than the glamorous balls and beauty contests but were more representative of women's attempts to acquire equal status and to alter rather than affirm social expectations.
Self government was established at UBC in 1915 with both male and female students eligible to vote and run for office. This egalitarianism was still not in evidence at McGill, Montreal, the parent institution of UBC and its Alma Mater Society, where women were not allowed to join or vote until 1931.56 However, it proved more difficult for a woman to be elected to the presidency of the AMS than it had been to assure her of that right.
In 1916, Evelyn Story, one of the students responsible for drafting the AMS constitution, active in the Ladies' Literary
Society and the publication of the McGill Annual, ran for the presidency. Story believed she was capable of the task but she also felt it was her duty to serve when many of the male students were at war. A last minute campaign waged by the men in the Science faculty proclaimed Story a "self-seeking woman" 57 and she was defeated by one vote. The following year Nora
Coy, who had served as the Women's Athletic Association
President in 1916, became the first female President of the 184
AMS. Coy did not find it easy to gain the full cooperation of
either the Faculty Committee or the male undergraduates, and
she and other members of the Council were frustrated in their
C p attempts to amend the AMS constitution.
Coy's election did not automatically dispel prejudice against a female president. Like many of women's apparent
gains in wartime, the expectation that a woman would regularly
preside over the student body proved temporary.59 Not until
1951 did a woman again become President of the AMS when Nonie
Donaldson, elected President of WUS, replaced the male AMS president-elect who did not return to the University in the fall.60 Clearly, social custom and expectations about women's
roles continued to constrain women's participation in the activities they shared with men. Women's representation on the
student council remained limited to officers of their own organizations the President of the Women's Athletic 61
Association and the Women's Undergraduate Society, or to the traditionally female areas of expertise — the secretary.
The largest women's organization on campus, although it did not necessarily have the most active members, was the.
Women's Undergraduate Society (WUS) which represented all
female students. According to the student newspaper in 1916 WUS was established primarily to provide sandwiches for social 6 2
functions. Members of the WUS were quite willing to supply
refreshments for the Freshman Reception, Arts Men's Dances, and
Science Skating Parties, but one of the most popular events was
staged annually by WUS for women only. Facing a shortage of 185
men at the dances during WWI, the women inaugurated a masquerade attended by female "couples" dressed in male and
female costumes. The event included carnival games, humorous
skits, dancing, and prizes for the best disguise.63 Long after
the dearth of men ceased to be a problem, the women continued
to enjoy their own company at their annual "High Jinks". Every year men challenged their exclusion and attempted
surreptitiously to invade this gathering, but all imposters were discovered and unsympathetically evicted. The WUS annual
High Jinks was the most visible evidence of a female tradition at UBC that fostered a spirit of shared comraderie while
strengthening women's group identity.
The Women's Undergraduate Society helped women accommodate
themselves to the University. WUS furnished the women's common
room, identified the needs of female students and brought them 6 4
to the attention of the Board of Governors. In the mid
thirties WUS tried to combat the disruptive influence of the
sororities by developing a programme of activities to involve
all women. WUS assigned "big sisters" to all "freshettes" to
guide them through registration and initiation, welcomed
students from out of town with introductory teas, encouraged
inter class sport, started a women's gymnasium class and a
fencing club, and promoted women's participation in the Players .._ C C Club and on the Ubyssey staff.
In addition, Dean Mary Bollert and Clare Brown, WUS
President, founded in 1935 a UBC chapter of Phrateres open to
all UBC women "to promote social intercourse among women 186 students and to acquaint freshettes with campus life."°^
Phrateres took the shape of a vast, unlimited sorority which attempted to overcome the divisive effects of the Greek letter societies that fragmented the female population into social cliques. The social influence of the sororities remained powerful, however, well into the fifties, although the majority of the women students were not members.
In 1943, female students requested and the Senate and 67
Board approved, a war work plan for women. All female students were required to spend two hours a week at physical fitness, Red Cross Work, and first aid or home nursing. Senior students could also take courses in typing, motor mechanics, map-reading, measurements and instruments, and day nursery.
These courses could qualify a woman to be a third class army driver, an assistant in air raid shelters, an inspector in war factories, and to obtain a first aid certificate from St. Johns
Ambulance. An official university detachment of the Red Cross
Corps was formed on campus and sixty students took part in a weekly three hour programme. Female students wanted to provide 6 8
"useful" and essential services.
Attitudes toward women and women's work sometimes made it difficult for students to gain respect for their war efforts. During World War I, university women took the place of male fruit harvesters in the summer of 1917.6" Crews of female students picked berries at Gordon Head, Vancouver
Island. A Vancouver newspaper acknowledged their patriotism but the photo of women dressed like field workers was 187
accompanied by the headlines: "Looks like a beauty chorus in a
comedy."70 Amusement at the sight of women performing unaccustomed duties turned to impatience during World War II when students armed with knitting needles attempted to knit
during lectures. Professors strenuously objected to women's war work being carried out in the front rows of the
classroom!71
Ignorance and prejudice about women's capabilities
determined the contributions they could make to the war effort.
During World War II, the Ford Motor Company conducted a course
in motor mechanics for women but instructors were not prepared
to impart more than theoretical knowledge.72 when a blood
donor clinic was set up on campus, women were not allowed to
give blood because
... women are more difficult to bleed, their veins are not so prominent and they have lesser amount of blood ...if women were to be used as blood donors it would necessitate the establishment of a separate clinic, which would mean doubling the staff, space and expense.
Instead, women with nursing and stenographic experience were
required to do "women's jobs."74
WUS tried to ensure that although women comprised the minority of students their interests were not overlooked by the
University or the students' council. Members petitioned the
University for a Dean of Women, a residence for women, and 7 5 protested Council decisions that appeared discriminatory.
The responsibilities of self government often required WUS
to control the behaviour and image of women in accordance with 188
externally derived expectations. Criticism of female students
continued to serve as a gauge of public support of the
University and the students' anxiety to garner public approval
led WUS to recommend that women suppress certain of their own
preferences in the interest of the University. During WWI, WUS
tried to enforce "a dignified and suitable appearance of female
students" with a decree that "all students other than
Freshettes will be expected to wear their hair up" and seniors were encouraged to wear academic gowns. It was hoped that
these efforts on the part of women would relieve any impression
that the University was "a glorified form of high school."76
The issue of women smoking cigarettes on campus emerged in
the 1920s and again in the 1930s. Although male students could
smoke unrestricted except in the classrooms, female students
were not allowed to smoke anywhere on campus or at any function
sponsored by the University. WUS passed this resolution in
February 1931 because women smoking would harm the University
in the eyes of the public. They argued that at such a critical
period in the history of the University it was not the time to
alienate public opinion. These same reasons were given ten
years previous when students prepared their campaign to build 77
the University.
Clothing drives sponsored by WUS to assist the City's
relief efforts seem to have been largely overlooked by critics more eager to disparage the "young people with more money than 7 8
brains" who purportedly attended UBC. In an effort to avert
further attacks on "the gay and giddy coeds", WUS strongly 189 recommended in 1932 that female students should not take men to dinner at public places before the Coed Ball, nor to supper 7 9 afterwards. In addition, sports clothes, not formal dress, were to be worn to the dance in a similar endeavor to keep campus activities as inoffensive as possible during the
Depression. These attempts by WUS to set standards of behaviour and appearance for university women were guided by the conviction that the better reputation of the whole was compensation for any individual infringement of personal rights.80
WUS tried to bridge the distance between the purely academic goals of the nonconformists and the social rewards sought by the feminine conformists. The strategies of WUS were not very different from those of the 'sweet girl graduates' of the nineteenth century whose acceptance and success at the university was ensured only by their double conformity to the standards of the male educational system and the standards of 81
'ladylike' behaviour. In effect, WUS endeavored to establish a model of femininity that was appropriate for female students, and that would prove ultimately advantageous to women. WUS tactics were devised to win public confidence not challenge it; nevertheless, WUS did not aim at serving the status quo. The primary goal was the accommodation of female students and throughout the years of this study, WUS activities struggled to graft a feminist perspective on issues of educational and social interest at UBC.
One of the earliest projects arranged by WUS in the 190
twenties was a lecture series to acquaint female students with vocational options other than teaching. Teaching was the most
accessible profession for women, but many chose it for only
that reason and because they knew little about other choices
open to women. WUS sponsored in 1923 a three day vocational
conference in which women who were knowledgeable in different
fields spoke to the university students on careers that were
opened up to women in librarianship, clinical psychology,
physical culture, social welfare and settlement work,
laboratory research, nursing, YWCA work, journalism and
household science.82
WUS was equally concerned with the recreational and social
life of university women. The initiation rites and High Jinks were important annual events to establish unity and friendship;
but women wanted a building of their own where they could
gather for their club activities or a casual chat on an
informal daily basis. Even before the University moved to
Point Grey in 1926, women began to raise funds for their 83 "Women's Union Building." The women's groups in the city 84
were supportive and aided WUS fund raising programmes. UBC
women relied on rummage sales, candy sales, bridge parties,
teas, tag days, fashion shows, the Coed Ball and private • 85
donations to collect money for their project. During the
worst years of the Depression, WUS shelved their plan,
nevertheless, by the mid-thirties women had raised over
$11,000.86 In 1935 the men decided that more money could be raised if 191 they joined in the women's efforts; however, in exchange for their participation they wanted a Students' Union Building instead of a Women's Union Building. The dream held by female students over successive years at UBC was reluctantly conceded, along with the funds already raised, when they were persuaded that a Women's Union Building was not financially feasible in the near future.87
The Union Building became an issue in 1935 AMS election.
Peggy Wales, the AMS secretary for two years and the first woman to run for the Presidency since World War I, outlined an eight point programme including a plan to get a Union Building and playing fields incorporated in a public works programme.
Wales recommended seeking support for these projects from candidates in the impending federal election.88 Wales and the two other male candidates were defeated by Bernard Brynelson, a student in the Faculty of Science, whose campaign programme consisted of a longer noon hour and recess, and more playing 89 fields. President Brynelson was given all the credit in the following year for recruiting support from the federal government, the alumni, the Board of Governors, and the Senate to make the Student Union Building a project for the 90
University's twenty-first anniversary celebration.
Aided by $25,000 from the provincial government, $10,000 from WUS, and additional subscriptions of $45,000 construction began on the students' building in 1939. Using student labour in the summer, the new Student Union Building was completed and formally opened on January 31, 1940. It was named the Brock 192
Memorial Building in tribute to Dean Reginald W. Brock and
Mildred Brock who had offered support and friendship to student activities for many years before their death in an air crash at
Alta Lake in 1935. UBC women did manage to retain a room of their own in the new building — the Mildred Brock Lounge for 91 women.
Like the Women's Undergraduate Society, itself, the idea of the Women's Union building in the 1940s represented the vestigial remnants of a separatist strategy that had been integral to the strength of feminist politics in the larger 9 9 community in the first quarter of the century. Female institutions and women's culture had proved important to the 9 ? emergence of a feminist consciousness. Almost from the time women were granted the vote, however, women's associations were devalued. This trend was evident on campus as women's 94 organizations increasingly merged with the men's, and the plan for a Women's Union Building expanded to serve all students.
Social expectations continued to exercise a formidable impact and control on women's experience at the University both in and out of the classroom. The social climate and unequal sex ratio at UBC tended to reinforce socialization regarding women's roles. All of women's actions were potentially controversial in light of the conflicting demands of the social community with its expectations of femininity, and the educational institution with its expectations based on a masculine prototype. Intellectual aggressiveness, a 193 prerequisite for academic success, remained incompatible with 95
images of femininity and women's social role. Consequently,
much of the collective energy of female students was directed at combatting hostility and indifference to their presence, and mitigating the contradictory demands of femininity and
academia.
The notion that the university was a cultural legacy, or
entitlement, inherent in the literal translation of the UBC
Motto Tuum Est — "it is yours" — was, therefore, more
applicable to the male than the female student.96 in contrast,
the popular or lay interpretation of Tuum Est — "it's up to
you" — perhaps held greater significance for many of the women who attended UBC. This advisory message embodied the shrug of
indifference extended to women in higher education and also
indicated their responsibility to devise strategies to defend
their place in a "conquered", although not necessary compliant,
territory.
In the face of public ambiguity, female educators
attempted to formulate a consensus about the purpose of higher
education for women; but they continued to justify higher
education for women in terms of the expectations of womanhood.
Philosophies of education that enhanced a woman's preparation for
motherhood, social usefulness, and her role as wife-companion
reflected changing social expectations but did not transcend
them. Women were able to change their social roles but not the
fundamental attitudes that perpetuated women's secondary status
within academic institutions. 194
The accommodation of women students to those pressures of social control and institutional prejudice took the form of four strategies: nonconformity, feminine conformity, double conformity, and separatist feminism. Nonconformity to gender expectations brought a woman personal satisfaction that was not entirely socially acceptable. Women who excelled in their scholarly endeavors were obliged, sooner or later, to make a choice between marriage and their academic interests.
Conformity to standards of femininity promised the rewards of male approval and social fulfillment, but, rarely, academic credibility or equal status. Double conformity tried to balance the more conservative social expectations of feminine behaviour against the flamboyant manifestations in an attempt to protect women's rights in the male domain. None of these responses challenged the prevailing attitudes toward the education of women. Although the nonconformists established that women could fulfil academic roles they were regarded as exceptional or "different" women whose 'femininity' was questionable. Academic success for a woman implied social failure. Separatist feminism, on the other hand, sought to change the status quo to gain recognition of women's interests and ambitions in higher education, and to engage women in self-directing activities.
The significance of these strategies lies not in their comparative effectiveness, but in the recognition that the social image of womanhood continued to obscure the purpose of women's education and acted as an impediment to women's 195
achievement of full and equal status at the university. In
short, a woman's performance in higher education was ever
influenced by the incontrovertible fact of her gender.
Coeducation was not automatically a liberating experience for women but the opportunity existed for female students to alter
social expectations of womanhood. 196
Notes
1 Reverand W. Leslie Clay, in 1909, articulated "the need for educated men" and "cultured men" even as he addressed the Victoria Local Council of Women about the need for a provincial university. Victoria Daily Colonist, February 9, 1909, p. 7. Henry F. Angus, "Critical Review of UBC History," UBC Alumni Chronicle, V. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1956) pp. 16-17, saw the future in "men's" hands.
Angus, p. 17.
° See Chapter II.
4 Isabel Maclnnes, "Address to the Women's Literary Society," in Anonymous, January 1917, p. 6. (Anonymous was a student publication that preceded the Ubyssey.)
5 Ethel Johns, R.N. "Education for Womanhood," Address given to members of the General Gordon Parent-Teacher Association. TheProvince, November 16, 1922.
The Province, November 16, 1922.
7 The "Province, January 1, 1923.
8 The Vancouver Sun, December 23, 1935. UBC Scrapbook #22, p. 1W.
9 Ibid.
10 Ubyssey, October 20, 1921. Letter "A Solution" from PINX IT.
11 Ubyssey, October 27, 1921, p. 5. This writer, "Tweedle Dum," suggested questions to be answered by female students in an effort to reduce registration of women. Are your intentions honourable? Do you propose to study Civil Engineering, Bacteriology, or other useful science? State precise value to community of your elective. 12 In 1932 a demoralized and debt-ridden Conservative government in B.C. sanctioned the appointment of a committee of business executives to look into the financial affairs of the province. The "Kidd Report" named after George Kidd, Chairman, recommended the curtailing of government spending, particularly in education. See Mann, "G.M. Weir and.H.B. King: Progressive Education or Education for the Progressive State?" in J. Donald Wilson, David C. Jones. 13 James R. Scott, West Vancouver, Letter to the Editor, The Province, September 25, 1932. UBC Scrapbook #19, p. 84. 14 Ibid. 197
ic - - - Barman; M. Patricia Marchak, Ideological Perspectives in Canada, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1975); John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965).
16 It was not possible to discover the educational background of the mothers of these students or to determine the impact they may have had on the decison to educate their daughters. However, Peter Z.W. Tsong, The UBC " Alumni, 1916-1969: Thoughts of 12.6% of the UBC Alumni (Vancouver: Canada Press, 1972) , noted that Home Economics graduates had the highest per cent of fathers and mothers with University degrees. This group also cited their parents' expectations as their reason for attending university.
See Appendix for notes on the occupational categories.
It is assumed that the religions of the female students reflected those of their families.
19 MUCBC Annuals 1910-15, UBC Annuals 1916-17.
20 In 1925 Mr. Van Wilby of the UBC Alumni Association surveyed 749 students who had graduated since 1916. The Sunday Province, April 19, 1925, UBC Scrapbook #5, p. 52. 1 "I The two year course for the Social Service Diploma founded in 1929-30 expanded to three years after 1935. From 1940-41 the Diploma Course was restricted to graduates only. Women's organizations petitioned the Board of Governors to appoint a full-time instructor to ensure a greater prestige to the programme: Miss Marjorie J. Smith, an experienced social work teacher and administrator was appointed in 1943 and became Head of the Department of Social Work in 1945. 22 Tsong reported that the ratio of men and women who enrolled in Education and the Humanities was balanced at approximately 50%. Male registration predominated in Applied Science at 99.28%, Forestry 98.14% and was a minority in Nursing at 1.6%, and Home Economics at 2.59%. Nevertheless, the first woman Rona Hatt, graduated in Chemical Engineering in 1922. Her reminiscences illustrate the ways in which women were discouraged from entering non-traditional studies. Rona A. Hatt Wall is, Taped interview, University of British Columbia, UBC Archives.
24 See Chapter IV. 25 This sentiment was expressed frequently by all subjects in taped interviews. 26 Gillett, pp. 333-4.
27 Ibid. 198
o q _ _ _ . See William H. Chafe, The American Woman; Her Changing Social, Economic and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), Chapter 4; Rothman, Chapter 5.
29 Student reporter Alan Morley wrote in his column "The Student's Angle," The Vancouver Sun, November 1, 1935, "I consider profundity a poor substitute for pulchritude."
30 "Betty Coed" appeared in The Vancouver Sun and "Fanny Freshette", in The Province.
31 Renate Bridenthal, "Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars," in Becoming visible: Women in European History. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977) pp. 422-444. •3 O For further discussion of the problems women faced in the male oriented academic sphere see David Riesman, "Some Dilemmas of Women's Education" Educationa1 Record, Fall 1965, pp. 422-34. Elizabeth L. Cless, "A Modest Proposal for the Education of Women," The American Scholar, Vol. 38 (Autumn 1969) No. 4, pp. 618-627.
33 Nemiroff, op. cit., pp. 3-19, reviews the developmental base of sex-role stereotyping to illustrate that the girl/woman who chooses educational success, and a career faces consequences of social criticism and personal conflict.
3^ The subjects of the interviews referred to throughout this paper confirm that female academics generally found their gender an obstacle to recognition and advancement. Dr. Dorothy Mawdsley, Dr. Dorothy Blakey-Smith, Dr. Isabel Maclnnes, Dr. Myrne Nevison, Taped interviews, UBC Archives. 3 5 To mention only the women who have been noted thus far in this paper, the list includes: Dorothy Mawdsley, Marjorie Leeming, Sylvia Thrupp. Dorothy Blakey-Smith married at age 44 after a teaching career at UBC. She ascertained from President Klinck that her teaching job would be secure before she decided to marry. Dr. Dorothy Blakey-Smith, Taped interview, UBC Archives. "3. An article in The " Vancouver Sun, April 27, 1932 compared two generations of female students from the 1900s and 1932. This column stressed that in the present "there were no barriers to women in new fields of advertising, commerce, and journalism. The old fields of medicine and law were opened up to women." UBC Scrapbook #19. 37 See Tsong, with regard to family expectations. 38 The Vancouver Sun, October 25, 1935. UBC Scrapbook #22, p. 87. See also Ubyssey, October 2, 1936 for the first "Society Page". "Shopping with Mary Ann" advised "for sorority cabarets go to Madame Runge ... to find what you want." 199
39 ; The Victoria Times, November 1935, UBC Scrapbook #22, p. 114. 40 The Province, March 26, 1934, UBC Scrapbook #21, p. 68.
In 1944, WUS sponsored a contest for the most beautiful legs. The winner was a third year Arts student who was "somewhat skeptical about the fitness of such a contest at an institution of higher learning." Dean of Women's Scrapbook, Dean of Women's Office, UBC Archives.
42 Totem,.1948.
43 Ibid., p. 310.
44 Tote1"/ 1949, p. 41.
45 Totem, 1948, 1949, 1950.
46 Totem, 1949, p. 43.
47 Totem, 1949, p. 33; Totem 1950, p. 21.
48 Totem 1951.
49 Canada, Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada Report (Ottawa, 1970); Women's Action Group of the University of British Columbia, A Report on the Status of Women at the University of British "Columbia (Vancouver : Talon books, 1973); Betty Richardson, Sexism in Higher Education (New York: Seaburg Press,1974);Jill McCalla Vickers and June Adam, but can you type: Canadian Universities and the Status of Women (Buffalo: Clarke, Irwin" 1977); Gloria DeSole and Leonore Hoffmann eds. Rocking the Boat; Academic Women and Academic Processes (New York: Modern Language Association, 1981). 50 See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1963) . 51 The importance of the peer group and the association of male autonomy with the period of their lives spent at the university is developed by Joseph F. Rett, Rites of Passage; Ado1escenee in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1977) . 52 On sororities see Rothman, and Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: AmericanYouth inthe 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) . 53 .... The Province, January 20, 1939. UBC Scrapbook #25, p. 4. 54 Mrs. Laura Jamieson (CCF) and Mrs. D.G. Steeves (CCF) urged the abolition of fraternities and sororities at UBC. The 200
News-Herald, November 28, 1940, UBC Scrapbook #26. 55 This was a particular concern to Jewish girls who consulted Dean Mawdsley about forming their own sorority. Mawdsley was surprised that they didn't chose to join a sorority that was without discrimination (some would not allow certain ethnic minorities) but they explained that a Jewish Sorority would ensure their meeting men from the Jewish fraternity and reduce the threat of intermarriage. 56 Gillett, pp. 186-9.
57 Stewart in Latham and Pazdro, p. 189
58 UBC Annual, 1917-18, p. 11.
59 In 1935 Peggy Wales ran for President of the AMS but was defeated by a male candidate. The previous two AMS elections had elected the President by acclamation. There was a noticeable tendency to round up candidates to oppose women who sought election and ensure that there would be a voting procedure. This was true also for the election of the Chancellor of UBC after Phyllis Gregory Ross was nominated. Although the Chancellor, except in 1916, had always been elected by acclamation, in 1961 Anne Angus was urged to run along with another male candidate who declined, to "ensure that the democratic process was enforced." Anne Angus, Taped interview, UBC Archives.
60 Totem, 1951.
61 Regrettably, the changing status of women's sports had to be omitted from this paper. It is anticipated that an article by this author will be forthcoming on this topic. Suffice to say, the women who were involved in athletics were constantly confronting prejudice and pushing against attitudes that constrained women's performance and potential in sports. Women's athletic teams experienced difficulty receiving funding from the University, even in 1930 when the Women's Basketball team had the opportunity to represent UBC at the Women's International Games at Prague. The Board of Governors granted them permission to attend "on the distinct understanding that this permission does not involve any financial responsibility on the part of the University." Board of Governors Minutes, April 28, 1930. The UBC women's team won the Championship of the Olympiad after the trip was made possible by funds received from a campaign organized by UBC graduates. 62 Anonymous, December 1916, p. 23. 63 UBC Annual, 1917-18. Also Maclnnes, Taped interview. 64 Anonymous, December 1916, p. 23. WUS petitioned the Board for a Dean of Women and residences for women. See Chapter IV. 201
65 The VancouverSun, November 17, 1934. UBC Scrapbook #21, p. TZT.
66 Totem, 1936.
67 UBC Board of Governors, Minutes of Meetings, May 31, 1943, Vol. 22.
68 Totem, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944.
69 This plan to fill the need for fruit pickers during the shortage of manpower, and to give employment to female university students was suggested by the Vancouver Local Council of Women.
70 UBC Scrapbook #8, pp. 20-1.
71 The_ Vancouver Sun, October 22, 1941. UBC Scrapbook #26, p. 105. The response of the students: "it is our patriotic duty and we intend to continue it unless someone stops us." 7 9 Dr. Dorothy M. Mawdsley, Taped interview.
73 The Province, October 6, 1941. UBC Scrapbook #26, p. 105.
74 Ibid. 75 For example, UBC student council decided 'coeds' may not shoot rifles in the campus rifle range because they might hurt themselves. WUS objected to this discrimination and obtained permission from the Canadian Officers Training Corps for women to use the campus range with instructors. The Council still refused to take responsibility of allowing women to shoot. The- Vancouver Sun, November 10, 1937 . UBC Scrapbook #24, p. 5. 76 Ubyssey, February 20, 1919.
77 The Vancouver Sun, January 25, 1925; Ubyssey, February 6, 1931.
78 Ubyssey, February 19, 1932.
79 Ibid.
80 Ubyssey, February 6, 1931. UBC Scrapbook #17, p. 79.
81 See Chapter I for origins of term "double conformity."
82 The Province, January 18, 1919; Ubyssey, January 23, 1919 in UBC Scrapbook #8, p. 50. TheProvince, November 20, 1922 in UBC Scrapbook #15, p. 19. The Province, January 31, 1923; January 19, 1923 in UBC Scrapbook #13, p. 75. 202
po _ The Vancouver Sun, November 10, 1925. OA Executive Minutes, University Women's Club, Vol. 4, November 28, 1927, Vancouver City Archives.
85 Ubyssey, October 21, 1930.
86 Ubyssey, February 4, 1936, February 7, 1936. Totem, 1940.
87 The Vancouver Sun, April 8, 1935. UBC Scrapbook #22; Ubyssey, January 24, 1936.
88 Ubyssey, March 8, 1935.
89 Ibid.
90 Ubyssey, January 24, 1936.
91 Totem, 1940. q o ^ For a discussion of women's organizations in this era, see Gillian Weiss, "'As Women and as Citizens:' Club women in Vancouver, 1910-1928".
93 Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930," Ferninist Studies (Fall 1979) 512-529.
94 For reasons why this occurred in campus organizations see Stewart, in Latham and Pazdro. The Ladies Literary Society merged with the Men's in 1920; the YWCA and YMCA merged executives after they became the Student Christian Movement. The most successful organizations that attracted male and female memberships were the Letters Club and the Historical Society which featured small seminars held in professors' homes. This format encouraged female students to take active roles. Other organizations followed the pattern of initial male and female membership that eventually became dominated by the men. 95 Cless, "A Modest Proposal ..." argues that intellectual aggressiveness, as a given basis for academic or economic success, is seen as a male virtue but a female vice.
96 The official Coat of Arms for UBC consists of the Provincial Coat of Arms as a base on which rests an open book, inscribed with the Latin words Tuum Est. This motto chosen by UBC's first President, Dr. Frank F. Wesbrook, was to express the idea that the educational institution existed to serve all the needs of all the people — "It is yours." Logan, op. cit., p. 53. 203
CONCLUSION
This study has focussed on the experience of women within
the coeducational framework established at the University of
British Columbia, and the process whereby women's education
became defined. In the regional context, the social, economic
and political forces that influenced the development of higher
education in the province held particular significance for
female students. Despite the importance of these factors in
effecting institutional change, it is difficult to consign the
role played by the women of the province to a secondary status.
Notable individuals, women's organizations, and female students
identified the issues and formulated the strategies to ensure
that the University of British Columbia accommodated women,
however reluctantly or imperfectly, according to the evolving
functions of higher education in the twentieth century.
This paper began with a review of the historical
literature pertaining to women's admission to higher education
in the nineteenth century. The literature provided a thematic
framework for this study because it raised some timeless placeless questions about the relationship of women's education and their status in the wider society.1 In this larger,
cultural context, women's interest and activity in establishing
specialized curriculum, personnel, and boarding arrangements -
in short, their feminism - may be understood as a reaction to 2
the male environment. Higher education reflected the thought
and scholarship of men, the values and prescriptions of men, 204 and the training that was offered largely anticipated the future life's work of men. The underlying demand of the feminists was the equal status of women in what remained a male pastime.3 In the first half of the twentieth century, the separatists were more active than the uncompromising in their efforts to redress the imbalance in coeducation.
Women's lesser status was seldom due to any formal prohibitions regulating their enrollment or academic choices but rather to the continued emphasis on women's social roles that obscured the purpose of educating women. In a social context that looked upon higher education for a man as preparation for his life's work, integral to his stature and identity in the community, and essential to his ability to support a wife and children according to middle class standards, education for a woman, although a right, was not regarded as a necessity. In the minds of many, education for women filled the interval in a woman's life between the time she was her father's daughter and her husband's wife. The woman not destined to be a man's wife might, if educated, retain some measure of social status and the qualities of womanhood in the teaching profession. But it was understood that a woman's first choice was marriage and any alternatives that continued past the marriageable age were tinged with a sense of failure, or worse, aberration. In a social climate that tended to reinforce socialization regarding women's roles, women on campus were, perhaps, tolerated more than encouraged in their academic endeavors. 205
Coeducation implied equal rights, opportunities,
obligations, and participation in higher learning. When it was
implemented eventually at the American state and Canadian
provincial universities, coeducation appeared, therefore, to
represent a commitment both to ideals of equality, and the
education of women. In fact, coeducation fulfilled primarily a
utilitarian function that was recognized as early as 1908.
When Julius Sachs from Columbia University, Teachers College,
addressed the Education Conference in Boston that year, he
pointed out that "coeducation was of no social or political
significance but merely the cheapest way of satisfying the just
demands of women that they be given every intellectual
opportunity."4 The women of British Columbia, in their vigilance and determination, endeavored to reinstate the social
and political significance of coeducation that had been envisioned by feminist educators in a time and place far
removed from the issues surrounding higher education in British
Columbia. 206
Notes
1 Chad Gaffield, "The Micro History of Cultural Relations: Prescott County and the Language of Instruction Controversy," Unpublished paper presented to the Canadian Historical Association, 1984, argued that the systematic analysis of relationships is essential in the explication of the historical process and begins with a timeless, placeless question. Conceptual tools and the methodology for this study were further provided by three historians who have been concerned to solve some of the problems associated with the writing of women's history: Gerda Lerner, "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History," in Liberating Women's History, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Hilda Smith, "Feminism and the Methodology of Women's History," in Liberating Women'sHistory; Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Women in the Renaissance and Renaissance Historiography," Feminist Studies 3 (1975), No. 3-4. i _ Janet Lever and Pepper Schwarz, Women at Yale (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971) conclude also that the rise of feminism among female students could be traced to a reaction to the male environment. -> Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History," History Workshop; Spring 1984, suggests that feminism's underlying demand Is for women's full inclusion in humanity. 4 Julius Sachs, "The Intellectual Reactions of Coeducation," Educational Review, Volume 35, 1908, pp. 466-475. 207
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCES CONSULTED
PART A: PRIMARY SOURCES
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B2: ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
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Hershberg, Theodore and Dockhorn, Robert. "Occupational Classification." Historical Methods Newsletter, Vol. 9, (Nos. 2 and 3 March-June 1976) .
Humphries, Charles W. "The Banning of a Book in British Columbia." BC Studies 1 (1968-69).
Kelly-Gadol, Joan. "Women in the Renaissance and Renaissance Historiography." Ferninist:Stud1es, Vol. 3 (No. 3-4 1975).
Lerner, Gerda. "New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History." History." In Liberating Women's History. Edited by Berenice A. Carroll. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
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B3: THESES AND UNPUBLISHED ESSAYS
Barman, Jean Alice. "Growing Up British in British Columbia: Boys in Private School, 1900-1950." Doctor of Education thesis, University of British Columbia, 1982.
Chestnutt, Maureen Sangster. "Origin and Development of Home Economics Instruction in British Columbia from 1870 to 1951." M.Sc. thesis in Home Economics. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 1975. This work gives only a chronology of events leading to Home Economics at the University of British Columbia.
Foster, John Keith. "Education and Work in a Changing Society: British Columbia, 1870-1930." M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1970.
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Hale, Linda Louise. "The British Columbia Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1917." M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1977.
Kilgannon, Anne Marie. "The Home Economics Movement and the Transformation of Nineteenth Century Domestic Ideology in America." M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1985 .
MacPherson, Elsinore. "Careers of Canadian University Women." M.A. thesis, University of Toronto, 1920.
Pencier, Marni Frazer De. "Ideas of the English Speaking Universities in Canada to 1920." Ph.D thesis, University of Toronto, 1978.
Ronish, Donna Yavorsky, "Canadian Universities 1869-1875: British and American Influences." Paper presented to the Canadian History of Education Association, October, 1983.
Soward, Frederic H. "The Early History of the University of British Columbia." Manuscript: 1930. University of British Columbia. The Library, Special Collections.
Stewart, Lee J. "'One Big Woman*: The Politics of Feminism in British Columbia, 1894-1918." Unpublished paper in the possession of the author. Written 1985.
Thomasson, Augusta Margaret. "Acadia Camp: A Study of the Acadia Camp Residence at the University of British Columbia from September 1945 to May 1949." M.S.W. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1951.
Weiss, Gillian. "'As Women and as Citizens': Clubwomen in Vancouver, 1910-1928." Ph.D. thesis, University of British Columbia, 1984. 220
APPENDIX
To compile table 2, the occupations of the fathers of female students were categorized to provide a general description of the socioeconomic background of the women in attendance at McGill University College of British Columbia in
1907-14 and the University of British Columbia 1914-49. These occupations were established from the Vancouver City Directory for the years 1907-14, 1919-20, 1949-50, and from the UBC registration cards in the years 1929-30 and 1939-40. The initial sort relied on the "occupational dictionary" compiled by Theodore Hershberg and Robert Dockhorn to aid historians in the classification of the occupational variable as outlined in
Historical Methods Newsletter, Vol. 9, Nos. 2 and 3 (March/
June 1976) , pp. 59-98. Analysis of the occupations was confined to the range offered by the Industrial (INDT) Code at its most aggregate level. The occupational data were thus classified into thirty-one of the possible forty-one industries. Three additional categories were added to reflect twentieth century occupational data.
The occupational categories were subsequently organized by function into a commonly recognized vertical classification scheme. Despite its twentieth century orientation, Bernard R.
Blishen's (1958) occupational class scale proved to be too sophisticated for the quality and quantity of data collected for this study. The occupational categories in Peter G.
Goheen, Victorian7Toronto 1900; Pattern and Process of 221
Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970) pp. 229-30, provided, with some modifications, a more viable model. The clerical occupations included government employees in the public service. A new category was necessary to accommodate the middle-management occupations: managers and superinten• dents. In twentieth century B.C., business executives appeared to belong more properly with the professional occupations than with Goheen's nineteenth century business occupations. The business category thus reflects general commercial occupations including real estate agents, merchants and salesmen. The unskilled occupations comprised a minute segment of the survey and were re-distributed into the semiskilled category (e.g., mariner, gardener, housekeeper). Agricultural occupations were also included in the semiskilled classification. In the sample for 1919-20 a small portion of fathers (1.6%) were on active service. This group was omitted from the occupational categories. The category "persons of private means" included widows and households where the mother was a single parent who listed no occupation, and retired fathers.