Item 0006 - Letter, 16 May 1896

Scientist and feminist pioneer, Carrie Derick grew up in Clarenceville, in Ontario’s Missisiquoi region. She was a was a stellar student in high school, studied at the McGill Normal School (a teacher-training institution), and enrolled in the McGill Faculty of Arts soon after the university opened to women. After graduating from the natural sciences program with first class honors and the Logan Gold Medal, she earned a master’s degree from McGill as a protégé of Professor David Penhallow. She then became the first woman to be hired on staff by McGill; she began as a full time “demonstrator” in the department of botany, a part-time job she had held for several years while studying, but at the insistence of Penhallow and the influential Donald A. Smith, chancellor of McGill, was given a post as “lecturer.” In 1901 she began a leave of absence to study abroad at universities in Munich, Berlin, and Bonn; however, even though she had completed the requirements back in Canada in 1906, the University of Bonn would not grant her a doctorate because of her gender. After eight years at McGill as a lecturer without a raise or promotion, she complained and was made an assistant professor in 1904. She filled in unofficially as head professor and chair of the department when Penhallow became sick in 1909, but an outsider was hired to replace him when he died the next year. She then received the first full professorship given to a Canadian woman, professor of morphological botany, a title that was changed after 17 years to professor of comparative botany and genetics. She retired in 1929, becoming Canada’s first professor emerita (as opposed to emeritus), and devoted her energies to activism on behalf of women’s rights; she served as president of the Montreal Suffrage Association, and in 1913 contributed a “General Report on Women’s Work” to the report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education. She wrote many articles on both science and women’s rights and filled leadership positions at numerous organizations and volunteer associations.