Born: 26 August 1881, Canada
Died: 15 April 1964
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Canada’s first female geologist, Alice Wilson, was eligible to begin her PhD in 1915, but she had to fight for more than ten years to get the necessary paid time off from her employer, the Geological Survey of Canada, to complete it. Although the GSC did grant paid absences at the time, she was repeatedly denied, even after her supportive new boss, Edward M. Kindle, began supervising her in 1920. Even after she was awarded a scholarship in 1926 by the Canadian Federation of University Women, GSC leadership still didn’t want to give her leave, even though she had now been working for the GSC for more than fifteen years. The CFUW lobbied on her behalf and she was finally granted leave, graduating at age forty-eight in 1929.
It was not the only example of Wilson’s difficulties at the GSC, where she was the first woman granted a permanent position—and the only one, until 1970. Early in her career, she wrote two articles, documenting the discovery of two new species, a brachiopod and a bivalve. Yet she found she faced significant difficulty being included in other colleagues’ work. It didn’t help that the GSC did not allow women to work with men during fieldwork. Being the only woman, Wilson devised her own projects, mapping more than 14,000 square kilometres of the Ottawa St. Lawrence Lowlands completely on her own over the course of decades…
While at the Geological Survey of Canada, women were not allowed to conduct fieldwork alongside the men. So, she focused her efforts on local sites in Ottawa, studying the area on foot, bicycle and car for decades. Wilson eventually mapped more than 14,000 kilometres of the Ottawa St Lawrence Lowlands entirely by herself, producing the first geological publication about the region in 1946.