“Thy Name Is Woman”
Late-19th-century Canada had precise ideas about women’s “proper sphere.” Women’s roles were defined in terms of physiology and psychology, by legislation and by social standards. Although these criteria were the products of a patriarchal culture, many women accepted and even defended them.

Winds of Change
Some found it difficult to identify with Victorian definitions of womanhood. From the 1870s on, women began to enter universities and the professions. The trend was tolerated, if not always approved of, as long as women remained in appropriate fields, with their own subjects, their own classrooms and their own goals. But the entry of women into professional programmes challenged the notion of “separate spheres” for men and women.

Dr. Emily Stowe, the first woman to practise medicine in Canada, was refused entry to the University of Toronto and received her medical training in the United States. Despite such obstacles, women doctors gained acceptance before their counterparts in the legal profession, in part because they could claim they were safeguarding the “modesty” of their women patients. Women lawyers were perceived as invading a male domain. However, in some jurisdictions in the United States, women had been practising law since 1869.