Fonds P096 - Margaret Gillett Fonds

Margaret Gillett was born on February 1, 1930, in Wingham, Australia, and died on October 19, 2019, in Montreal. She earned her bachelor’s degree and a diploma of education from the University of Sydney in 1950, completed a master’s degree at Russell Sage College in 1958, and earned her Ph.D. in education at Columbia University in 1962. Gillett was hired as an associate professor of education at McGill University in 1964, after working at Haile Selassie I University in Ethiopia as a registrar for two years. She became a full professor in 1967 and worked at McGill until her retirement in 1994. Gillett is a founding editor of the McGill Journal of Education. She introduced women’s studies to McGill, and she wrote two major works on education titled A History of Education (1966) and Foundation Studies in Education (1973). Her work was often oriented towards the history and philosophy of education. She also wrote a novel on the life of the poet Francis Thompson in 1968, titled The Laurel and the Poppy. One of Gillett’s major interests was the status of women and women's history. She organized the McGill Committee for Teaching and Research on Women and has served as a member of the Senate Committee on Women and as a coordinator of the Women's Studies Minor. She also represented Canada on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. In 1981, Dr. Gillett published We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill, and in 1986, Dear Grace, a Romance of History. In 1988, she became the first director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women. Dr. Gillett was awarded with the Governor General’s Persons Award in 1996 and the Royal Society of Canada’s Award in Gender Studies in 2004. The Margaret Gillett Award for Research on Women has been granted by McGill University in her honour since 1994.