The life of Elizabeth (“Elsie”) Muriel Gregory MacGill along with that of her mother Helen (1864-1947), mirrors much of the modern world’s social, economic, and political history.

The elder MacGill, as the pioneering female undergraduate at Trinity College in Toronto, achieved Canadian and British Empire firsts with her degrees. Subsequently, she was an adventure some journalist who travelled alone to report on the development of nineteenth century western Canada and on the first parliamentary Diet in Japan. Later, as a crusader for women’s suffrage in the United States and as British Columbia’s first and Canada’s third woman jurist, Judge Helen Gregory MacGill effectively promoted legislation that improved the condition of women and children in Canada, the U.S., and abroad.
 

Canada’s first woman electrical engineer, Elsie MacGill received her Master’s Degree, in 1929, from the University of Michigan where her professors proclaimed that she was the only woman in the world to hold a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering. [Photo, courtesy National Aviation Museum]

In a widely read biography, My Mother the Judge (1981), Elsie MacGill made it clear that her mother was her primary inspiration. Yet it is Elsie, born in Vancouver in 1905, who offers a particularly inspiring story. Struck with a form of polio, acute infantile myelitis, in 1929, in the final weeks of her final year of graduate school at the University of Michigan, she had to be literally carried about in the arms of her friends and then taken home, but she was awarded a Master’s Degree in Aeronautical Engineering anyway because of the quality of her prior work.

A University of Toronto graduate (1927) already recognized as Canada’s first woman electrical engineer, Elsie became, according to her American professors, the sole woman in the world to hold a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering at that time and the first woman to show any distinction in aircraft design.

Elsie MacGill did not allow the pain and permanent lameness to amount to anything more than a setback in her career. She spent her years of recuperation in her bed and in a wheelchair writing articles on aviation and working on aeronautical design. She realized her subsequent achievements, for the most part, while using a wheelchair or walking sticks.

When she recovered enough to walk with canes, she enrolled for further studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and there, in Boston in 1934, she made the contacts that led to a job as an aeronautical engineer. Fairchild Aircraft Ltd. in Montreal hired her to conduct stress analysis and help design the first all-metal aircraft ever built in Canada as well as other commercial prototypes.

Acting as her company’s representative during testing at the National Research Council of Canada’s new world standard wind tunnels in Ottawa and as passenger on all test flights she quickly earned a profile in her industry. These activities led to her election as the first woman corporate member of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 1938.

She left Fairchild that year to become chief aeronautical engineer of Canadian Car and Foundry Co. Ltd. (CCF), unaware that this new position would soon involve the supervision of thousands of workers engaged in a desperate drive to mass produce the Hawker Hurricane, an aircraft that would prove pivotal in the Battle of Britain and the as yet undeclared War in Europe. Under her supervision, CCF’s plant in Fort William (now Thunder Bay, Ontario) built almost 1500 Hurricanes which she helped improve by developing a “winterized” version that made it the first high-speed aircraft fitted with skis, propeller deicing equipment, and deicers on the main planes and tail surfaces.

Her time with Canadian Car and Foundry also included responsibility for the production, under contract to the U.S. Navy, of Helldiver bombers for the War in the Pacific.

These achievements followed what must have been a frustrating start with CCF. One of her team’s first projects at the firm was the design of the Maple Leaf Trainer, a two-seat, fabric-covered plane described by aviation experts as a beautiful aircraft. It was flown in Canada by a number of civilian pilots “who enthused over its performance,” and it earned a Certificate of Airworthiness, Acrobatic Category, in a record-breaking eight months.

However, the Commonwealth military had already committed to the purchase of other trainer aircraft and rumours were circulated that the Maple Leaf was not up to standard. Undeterred, Elsie and others convinced the CCF to bring the plane into production through its plant in Mexico where the national air force purchased these planes for a variety of uses at elevations as high as 7000 feet above sea level.

In 1943, Elsie MacGill moved to Toronto and set up her own business as one of the world’s first female consulting aeronautical engineers.

In the decades that followed, Elsie MacGill became increasingly active in the women’s movement as a major force in many women’s organizations. This led to her 1967 appointment as the “sole feminist” commissioner on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. While others on the Commission would also adopt more aggressive positions before they finished their work in 1970, Elsie still stood somewhat apart from the group by filing a Minority Report that would have its own influence beyond the changes prompted by the Commission’s main recommendations.
 

In 1938, Elsie MacGill left Montreal’s Fairchild Aircraft to become chief aeronautical engineer of Fort William-based Canadian Car and Foundry Co. Ltd. Her start there was frustrating primarily because the Maple Leaf Trainer II, a two-seat, fabric-covered biplane, which she designed, did not meet Commonwealth military standards. Nevertheless, this versatile aircraft, viewed here, was a huge success as a primary trainer for the Mexican Air Force at land elevation of 7000 feet above sea level. [Photo, courtesy National Aviation Museum]

Until her death in 1980 at the age of 75 (indirectly as the result of her paralysis), Elsie Gregory MacGill continued to compile professional honours and awards as what the Women in Science and Engineering organization called “the number one Canadian woman engineer to look up to.” Along with her 1971 Order of Canada, her Canadian honours included the Engineering Institute’s prestigious Gzowski Medal in 1941, not for aircraft design but rather for her work on manufacturing and mass production systems. In 1992 she was included as a founding inductee in the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in Ottawa after earlier having been added to the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame in Alberta.

In 1953 she had been the first non-American to be named “Woman Engineer of the Year” by the American Society of Women Engineers. Two decades later, at the age of 70, Elsie, who never did pilot a plane, was given the Amelia Earhart Medal by the International Association of Women Pilots.

Although her lame body would not have tolerated childbirth, Elsie MacGill did have a loving husband, E.J. Soulsby, a widower whom she met years earlier at Fairchild Aircraft, and stepchildren, Anne and John, who were 11 and 14 years old at the time of her 1943 marriage.

Throughout her life Elsie MacGill saw her gender and disability as hurdles, not barriers to achievement. Even though women were still being denied entry to some engineering schools and not offered courses in others, she was able to begin an October 1946 article in Saturday Night saying, without qualification, that “No particular barriers face women entering professional engineering in Canada.” In her view, if a particular school or firm would not open the door, one had only to knock harder or go around the corner to another one.
 

Praised as one of Canada’s most important World War II workers, Elsie MacGill took charge of all engineering work related to the production of nearly 1500 Hawker Hurricanes, as viewed here, so crucial to the allies during the Battle of Britain. [Photo, courtesy Brian Blatherwick]

Her family believed that her innate sense of humour helped her deal with her disability and made it seem to be “the least important thing about her” as her niece noted at Elsie’s Memorial Service.

Dick Doyle