HISTORIAN WROTE DEFINITIVE BOOK
British Columbia was not yet 40 when Margaret Anchoretta Ormsby was born at the mining camp of Quesnel. Yet her history of this province, published in 1958 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of both the gold rush that changed everything and the unilateral creation of a new mainland colony, remains one of the most important narratives of who we are and why.
Critics praised her elegant literary style, her robust attention to the detail and her meticulous sense of what made the province’s tumultuous, rambunctious history and of how our present emerged from it.
But she was more than a scholar with the ability to find the vivid anecdote that elevated her account above dry recitation. She was a feisty pioneer among female academics. She shattered glass ceilings and blazed a trail for the many remarkable women who followed.
She was born in Quesnel on June 7, 1909, to Irish immigrants George and Margaret Ormsby. Her father, on returning from the Great War, settled the family on a fruit farm beside Kalamalka Lake in the village of Coldstream, just south of Vernon in the Okanagan Valley. At 17, she enrolled at the University of B.C., completed an M.A. in 1931, and left for Bryn Mawr, a progressive women’s college in Pennsylvania, where she worked on her PhD dissertation about the relationship between B.C. and Canada.
She interrupted her studies for work as a teaching assistant at UBC. There were few jobs for female scholars and the Great Depression made it worse, so after earning her doctorate, she taught high school girls. But just as the Second World War cleared men from the factory floor and made room for Rosie the Riveter, the absence of men created other openings for women. Ormsby got a job at McMaster University as a lecturer, then took a similar post at UBC.
Despite the male culture that dominated history departments, her sharp mind, political skills and work ethic made it impossible to deny her growing stature as the leading historian of B.C. She was appointed head of UBC’s history department and held the chair from 1965 to 1974. Her book, British Columbia: A History, is still one of the most important on the subject. She retired to her family’s orchard and continued to write. She was appointed to the Order of Canada, the Order of B.C., and the Royal Society of Canada. She died at Coldstream in 1996.