Description
Book SynopsisElizabeth Smith was a determined and ambitious young woman in Victorian Ontario, who set out to get a medical education against considerable opposition, and succeeded. The diaries begin when she was thirteen years old, in Winona, Ontario, and take her through the loneliness and dissatisfaction of life as a young teacher. They chronicle her battle for admission to the all-male medical school at Queen’s University, and the discrimination she met there as a woman from professors and fellow students. The diaries end as she begins her career as one of the first woman doctors to be educated in Canada.
A cautious feminist and an anxious Protestant, Elizabeth Smith was often introspective, and used her diary as a way of recording her progress and as a mirror to create within herself a more perfect example of womanhood. She was typical of her period in her concern with life as a struggle against the sins of physical indulgence and moral laxity. Yet she was no stern, pedantic blu
