DEGREES OF PROGRESS
In the 150 years since Mount Allison Wesleyan College opened its doors to female students, women have gone from outcasts to front-runners in Canadian higher education.
In the 1880s, the first female students graduated from Queen’s University and the University of Toronto in Ontario; Acadia and Dalhousie universities in Nova Scotia; and McGill University in Quebec. In 1883, Augusta Stowe of Victoria College in Cobourg, Ontario, became the first woman to earn a medical degree in Canada.
In 1920, seventeen per cent of Canadian undergraduate students were women. That rose to thirty-one per cent by 1945. During that time span, higher education was rare for both genders: less than five per cent of Canadians attended university or college.
Beginning in the 1950s, women flocked to university in ever-increasing numbers. By 1979, women made up forty-nine per cent of undergraduates. In the 2018 graduating year, women earned sixty per cent of bachelor’s, fifty-six per cent of master’s, and forty-eight percent of doctoral degrees in Canada.