Graduation Address

“Convocation Address Ceremony A” (October 1986). (UA Case 69, Box 2)

Lady Aitken, Dr. Downey, Members of the Faculty, Graduates, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I thank the members of the University Senate and Board of Governors for this great honor you have given me.

I feel most humble on being chosen for this occasion. I have done nothing famous, original or spectacular to deserve this. Nor do I have any special talents or gifts. I have to accept this honor in the name of all the women graduates from University of New Brunswick. Some have distinguished themselves in so many fields; many others, equally deserving, remain unsung.

The focus of this address is on the early struggle of women in their efforts to study and fulfill themselves in their chosen field. Gentlemen in the audience—please do not despair—I am no rabid feminist. Emily Parkhurst or Germaine Greer are not the lights of my life.

I fact, I want to stress that men from all walks of life have helped women fight for equal rights and especially in the field of education.

If I may speak personally, I could not have done without the support and encouragement of two very special men in my life.

My father, an extraordinary man of very ordinary means, working as a CPR Station Agent in the small town of St. George, New Brunswick, had the vision and faith that was most unusual for his time. He believed that girls should have equal opportunities for high education, and he as well as my mother had the courage to make the sacrifices necessary to enable me to pursue further education.

The other man is my colleague in medicine and my husband of 37 years. His sense of humor and constant encouragement, have smoothed the sometimes stormy course of handling both professional and family responsibilities.

This fall convocation honors women in commemoration of the centennial of Mary Kingsley Tibbits’ admission to the University of New Brunswick. At the age of sixteen she read in the Statutes of New Brunswick that 'any person who passed the matriculation examination, paid the dues, and signed the declaration pledging obedience to the rules of the university' was entitled to admission to the University of New Brunswick.

As inheritors of British political tradition, the early legislators of New Brunswick and the other provinces held the popular belief that women, along with infants, lunatics and aliens, were a group of lesser people and were not persons in the legal sense. Canadian women legally became persons only in 1929.

In 1885 Mary Tibbits sought legal advice from a leading lawyer, Mr. William Wilson, who fortunately was an enlightened man. He assured her that in law she was a person and eligible to enroll.

Mary Tibbits wrote the matriculation examinations and placed in the first division. She made a 'respectful request' to President Harrison to be allowed to enter the university. The issue of admitting 'Females to Lectures' went to the University Senate. Admission was delayed. A Senate Committee was struck, made up of the entire faculty and also Chief Superintendent of Schools, William Crockett, to debate the problem. While the Committee dallied, Mary studied Greek with Bliss Carmen.

When no decision was reached after a few months, Mary brought the issue to the public with the help of another enlightened gentleman, Mr. John Valentine Ellis, Member of the Legislative Assembly from St. John. At the spring session of the Legislature, as in past years, the grant for the University of New Brunswick came up for discussion. Mr. Ellis opposed the grant because the university had 'refused admission to a duly qualified student, one Mary K. Tibbits.'

This threat to its provincial funding understandably prompted a rapid change of heart on the part of the university. In June the Senate Committee reported "that females should be admitted to the privileges of the university." Mary Tibbits got admitted and the university got the grant.

Miss Tibbits was congratulated by the University Monthly and the comment: "We notice for the first time a slight bustle in the Freshman Class." Fortunately for the future female applicants she graduated in 1889 with a first class academic record. She was a pioneer who prepared the way for thousands of women students at the University of New Brunswick.

However, it was only fitting that this university early in its history would open its doors to women students. After all, it was a woman, Mrs. William Paine, who nagged her husband to draw up a petition signed by seven men in 1784 "requesting an establishment of a College of Learning, founded on the liberal arts." Mrs. Paine it seems "could not content herself until her children could be properly educated."

In the early 1800s education for women was at a minimum, the early schooling received by the two sexes unequal. It was thought that the "feeble minds" and "delicate constitutions" of young ladies could not handle the classical languages, science and mathematics. Instruction was offered for young ladies in Reading, Writing, Geography, Drawing, Needle and Fancy Work. In 1837 James Robb, the Lecturer on Natural History, noted in a letter to his mother in Scotland 'that the education of girls here is much neglected.' In 1870 President William Brydon Jack urged the people of Fredericton to "open a college or academy for the higher mental training of females." At the same time Acadia’s President Sawyer contended that "women were incapable of vigorous intellectual work and therefore their presence in college would tend to lower the standard."

When Mary Tibbits entered the University of New Brunswick there were sixty students. By the time she was in her final year women were becoming a familiar sight on the Campus.

A reading room, properly heated, on the second floor of the Old Arts Building and one stairway were provided for their exclusive use. Women students were expected to sit in the front of the classroom. In the same year, at Trinity in Toronto, a lone woman student had to sit on a chair separate from the male students.

As expected, there were problems for the women students. The male students, by vote, effectively eliminated them from participating in social and student activities. Some scholarships were limited to male applicants.

In 1894 women students formed their own Ladies Society to "arrange all affairs that concern the college girl as a whole." Two years later they were admitted to the Alumni Society and a woman, Anne Ross, was elected to the Executive Council. It took eighty-five more years before another became the first woman president of the Associated Alumni—University of New Brunswick’s own Becky Watson!

By 1910 there were two hundred women who had attended and or graduated from University of New Brunswick. The Alumnae Society was then formed. Their project for nearly forty years was a hard fought issue to provide, or force the university to provide residence for women students. Men students had had a residence since 1930. The first for women students was opened nineteen years later.

New Brunswick Normal Schools had opened their doors to women in 1849. It took an Order-in-Council from the Lieutenant Governor to admit the first woman, Martha Ham Lewis, to the Normal School in St. John. She was allowed to attend, on the condition that she enter class ten minutes before it started, sit in the back and leave five minutes before it ended. Also she had to wear a veil.

Mount Allison Wesleyan College had graduated in 1875 the first Canadian woman B.Sc. She was also the first in the British Empire. Her name was Grace Annie Lockhart.

In 1888 Saint John General Hospital began training nurses.

In 1905 Mabel Penery French graduated from the University of Kings College Law School in St. John, the first woman to do so in New Brunswick. The Barristers’ Society and the Supreme Court of New Brunswick ruled that Miss French was not a person and only persons could practice law. Four months later the Legislature passed a law which allowed women to study law and be admitted to the Bar. Miss French practiced law in New Brunswick until 1910. She moved to British Columbia where she had to fight the same prejudice, again wining her right to practice.

Despite all the accomplishments the prejudice against women was so deeply embedded and so little understood that it was not until 1929 that women were declared persons.

Mary Tibbits lived in an exciting time. The struggle for the enfranchisement of women was taking place in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. Dedicated women were fighting for the right to vote, to make reforms in society and law. They were helped by many great men. John Stuart Mill in 1867 had, unsuccessfully, attempted to have women enfranchised by the British Parliament. His work, "Subjection of Women" is the most eloquent, the most ambitious and among the most heartfelt pleas in the English language for the perfect equality of the sexes.

The most important contribution that English and American feminism made to Canadian women suffragettes was to provide them with a sense of connection to an entity larger than the admittedly small group working in any Canadian locality.

Although women in New Brunswick had been agitating the government for the franchise since 1784, it was not until nearly one hundred years later that Women’s Suffrage became a public issue. A lawyer and Member for York County of the House of Assembly, Mr. William Needham, introduced a bill with a section allowing unmarried female property owners to vote. Needham, however, held the Victorian belief that married women were "Nobody in law." From 1870 through 1914 every bill introduced for the enfranchisement of women was defeated. New Brunswick women formed an Association in 1894 and in that year there were twelve thousand signatures from all over the province to petition the House for Women’s Suffrage. Many of the members of the House were publicly sympathetic as were other prominent men in New Brunswick. During the First World War much of the energy of the suffragists was redirected to the war effort. By the spring of 1917 the anti-suffragists of New Brunswick were looking ridiculous since all the provinces west of Quebec had granted women the franchise. By 1911 New Zealand, Australia, the Scandinavian countries and five states of the United States had given women the vote. On April 15, 1919, after half a century of debating the issue, New Brunswick women were granted the right to vote.

The word "person" still had not been defined legally. Five energetic women from the prairies, led by Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung, decided to have settled once and for all the ambiguous meaning of the word "person" in the British North American Act of 1867.

Under Sector 24 of the BNA Act any qualified person could be summoned to the Senate. Five successive governments between 1917 and 1928, when pressed to appoint a woman to the Senate, took refuge in the ambiguity of the Act. The five prairie women presented a petition to the federal government asking that the Supreme Court of Canada be required to provide and interpretation of the word "person." The Court decided that "persons" did not include women. The decision was appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London and on October 18, 1929 it ruled that: "the word persons in Section 24 of the British North America Act includes both male and female members...and that women are eligible to be summoned to and become members of the Senate of Canada."

After fifty years of struggle two big issues for women had finally been resolved. Can you imagine the fury and frustration women must have felt in those years?

The next fifty years have seen gradual but steady change for the better in women’s issues. The feminists of the sixties and seventies have mellowed a bit. With the Canadian Charter of Rights women are receiving a more equitable share.

At this University, in this decade, women students make up 40 to 50 % of the full-time undergraduate population. They outnumber men in their traditional field of arts, education and nursing but increasingly are entering business administration, computer science programs, engineering and forestry.

There has been a tremendous increase in the number of women medical graduates in Canada. The days of 10% women admission to Medical School are over in most areas. Law Schools now have 30 to 50% women enrolled.

Challenging social problems affront the graduates of this decade. Two urgent ones concern women:

1. The single-parent family, ever on the increase, with usually the woman trying to cope.


2. The over 65 women, two thirds of whom live below the poverty line—older women are still the poorest of the poor in Canada

To improve the status of these women will take another great surge of women’s power, with specialized groups, men and women, to fight for social reforms.

One hundred years ago Mary Tibbits entertained no doubts about her role. I have no doubts that you, men and women graduates of this university will rise to meet this challenge.