Margaret Gillett

Margaret Gillett (1 February 1930 – 19 October 2019) was an Australian-Canadian academic. She introduced women's studies to McGill University and founded the ''McGill Journal of Education'', serving as its editor-in-chief from 1965 to 1977. Born in Wingham, New South Wales, Australia, Gillett earned her bachelor's degree and a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney in 1950. She completed a master's degree at Russell Sage College in 1958, and a PhD in education at Columbia University in 1962. After working at Haile Selassie I University in Ethiopia as a registrar for two years, she was hired as an associate professor of education at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1964. She became a full professor in 1967 and worked at McGill until her retirement in 1994.

Gillett wrote two major works on education, ''A History of Education'' (1966) and ''Foundation Studies in Education'' (1973), before shifting her focus to women's studies. She offered two of the first courses on women in education at McGill University. From 1975, she advocated for the inclusion of a women's studies curriculum as an interdisciplinary minor, which was finally approved in the late 1970s. Her book ''We Walked Very Warily: A History of Women at McGill'' was a ground-breaking text as at the time it was published, there were no published volumes evaluating higher education in Canada or covering women who had acquired a university education. In 1988, she became the first director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women. Her pioneering role in creating a new field of study at McGill was recognized by her being honoured 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. Provided by Wikipedia