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1921: Mabel Timlin
The University could not have
known how well it had chosen when in 1921, the Board of Governors accepted the
appointment of Mabel Timlin as a secretary, at a salary of $90 per month. Determined to pursue her education, she
earned her BA in 1929 from the University of Saskatchewan and her PhD in 1940 –
at the age of 49 – from the University of Washington, all the while continuing
full-time employment at the University of Saskatchewan. By 1941 she was appointed Assistant
Professor in Economics–quite possibly the first, and certainly one of the few
employees to have had a career progression from clerical staff to faculty.
Her PhD thesis, Keynesian Economics,
published by the University of Toronto Press in 1942, was a “pioneering
theoretical study” which clearly established her as a scholar of note. “It would have been easy to plough the field
of her dissertation for life,” but ‘Timmie,’ as she was affectionately known,
“was the kind of theorist...whose work related to the complex issues which
faced humanity, rather than a refinement of breakthroughs already made.” She continued to publish, including two
substantive studies, Does Canada Need More
People? (1951) and The Social
Sciences in Canada (1968).
Well-honoured, she was the first woman social scientist elected to the
Royal Society of Canada and was elected to the executive of the
American Economics Association. She was
named to the Order of Canada, and awarded an honorary degree by the University
of Saskatchewan.
As a colleague noted, “from some perspectives, Mabel Timlin’s career
must seem like a maze of contradictions.
She was a woman who achieved distinction in what was very much a man’s
world. She was a University secretary
who, late in life, became a University professor...She was without personal
wealth...and yet she never ceased to accumulate intellectual and cultural
capital and she never ceased to be optimistic about the future....most of all
she had great skepticism about what other people thought was possible. She exercised her own judgement of what was
supposed to be true.”1
| Related Collections |  |
M.F. Timlin fonds, MG 37.
G. Britnell fonds, MG 41.
V.E. Fowke fonds, MG 13.
| Images | |
1921a: Mabel Timlin. Photograph Collection, A-3256.
1921b: cover page, “Essay in Keynesian Economics,” 1940. M.F. Timlin fonds, file III.1.
| Sources | |
1. All quotes from A.F. Safarian convocation address, University of Toronto, 1976. Faculty Biographies Collection, M.F. Timlin file.
See also Spafford, No Ordinary Academics.
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