Torch - Spring/Summer 2019

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W hy need women be highly educated? It’s a question that seems rhetorical today, but in the years of Havergal’s founding, when its first “lady Principal” Ellen Knox used it as a title for one of her many messages, it may well have called for a straight answer. She gave several over the course of her various missives: to take up the vote (only granted in 1917 in Ontario), to start contributing to the professions and to take the way of life they had learned at Havergal to do good in the world. Knox also turned a meaningful phrase in reflecting on the accidental opportunity afforded by the First World War when she wrote that “the portals of professional life, hitherto sacred to men, creaked heavily upon their hinges, and girls, bewildered and delighted, sped eagerly along the new paths lying ahead of them.” Of course, by then Havergal’s delighted Old Girls had already started streaming through: Jean Hoyles Haslam was one of the first graduates to enter the University of Toronto in 1899 and the first Old Girl to graduate in medicine. Commemorative publication Havergal: Celebrating a Century highlights numerous women who followed, not only advancing to university studies, but also going on to pursue decades-long careers and win national recognition, prolific awards and honorary degrees for their professional efforts. In the early days, favourite fields included missionary work, medicine and nursing. But generalizing about preferences even at this early stage is ill advised: success stories and firsts abound in other fields, with Adelaide Macdonald Sinclair 1917 becoming the first woman to lecture in the University of Toronto’s department of economics, Helen Cleveland 1915 creating a women’s department at brokerage house Wood Gundy (the first in Canada) and Dora Mavor Moore 1899 helping to establish the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. In politics, Kaireen MacKay 1909 was Canada’s first woman to serve as senator. The list goes on.

TABLE OF CONTENTS | SPRING/SUMMER 2019 • TORCH 17