First female students at Mcgill were segregated

The gathering was probably the largest that has ever taken place in this hall, the platform, the passages and even the stairs being crowded. – Gazette, Tuesday, May 1, 1888

Molson Hall at Mcgill University was packed, and not just because Gov.Gen. Lord Lansdowne was attending that year’s graduation exercises. For the first time, the university would be granting degrees to women as well as men.

The objections to higher education for women being raised in some circles sound bizarre today. A woman’s place was in the home, managing the household and guiding the upbringing of children. Placing inexperienced, impressionable women in the way of exuberant young men invited all sorts of indiscretions. And, perhaps weird- est of all, higher education threatened a woman’s health.

After Grace Ritchie gave her valedictory speech on behalf of her fellow female graduates that spring day in 1888, she was enthusiastically applauded, by men and women alike. But as she sat down Richard Heneker, the chancellor of Bishop’s University who was in the chair next to her, quietly leaned over and asked, “And are you not very tired?”

There was no suggestion he was being anything but kind- ly. Yet there was a widespread view that, while women conceivably were as intelligent as men, they also had more sensitive nervous systems, putting them at risk of emotional breakdown.

That might explain why The Gazette felt it useful to report, “There was a good deal of curiosity as to how the girl graduates would bear their blushing honors. … They stood the test with becoming modesty and dignity, and showed, as their valedictorian said, that higher education was compatible with the most refined delicacy.”

Doubts about women’s grit were by no means universal among Chancellor Heneker’s generation. Higher education would never have got started when it did at Mcgill were it not for Heneker’s near-contemporary, Sir Donald Smith, later Lord Strathcona.

Smith had become wealthy through enterprises like the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1884 he donated $50,000 to Mcgill to establish women’s education there. Women were admitted that year, and when Smith gave a further $70,000 a year later, the program’s financial situation was secure. In his honour, the women students came to be known as Donaldas.

There was just one catch: women’s classes had to be conducted separately from those for men.

This struck some on McGill’s faculty as absurd, and none more so than John Clark Murray. He was a professor of philosophy, gregarious, liberal-minded, deeply committed to social justice.

Even before Murray came to Mcgill in 1872, he had been fighting for co-education, so Smith’s donations put him in a quandary. Admitting women could only be seen as a first step, and Murray was not hesitant in saying so. His outspoken campaigning was embarrassing to Mcgill’s principal, Sir William Dawson, who had no wish to alienate wealthy benefactors.

Matters came to a head the day of the Donaldas’ graduation. At a Windsor Hotel banquet that evening, which Dawson did not attend, and at a private soirée the following evening, Murray spoke long and eloquently on the proper place of women in society, and in universities in particular – which for him, of course, meant side by side with men.

Dawson heard of this and was incensed. Murray’s comments were a gross flouting of university policy, “subversive of the morals and discipline of the university.” Murray was threatened with censure by Mcgill’s board of governors, whereupon he in turn threatened to “seek vindication before another tribunal.” Possible libel trials hung in the air.

Eventually tempers cooled. The enrolment of women grew rapidly; as early as 1889 they comprised a third of the student body. And though most were in segregated classes, some honours courses were co-ed. In this case, practicality trumped policy: there just weren’t enough professors to permit separate classes everywhere.

Over the years, segregated classes gradually fell away. But it was a surprisingly slow process. Only in the 1940s, with so many men – instructors and students alike – committed to the war effort and with the proportion of women on campus correspondingly greater, did the last of them finally disappear.