UBC’s trailblazing biologist, Dr. Gertrude May Smith
UBC Science’s first female professor was unceremoniously let go during the Great Depression — but her contributions live on in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum collections
By Ildiko Szabo
If you open the Beaty Biodiversity Museum cabinet containing rough-skinned newt specimens, the jar labels tell you the date and location collected. But the collector name neatly written on the label is cryptic: G.M.S.
“It was the style at one time to refer to people only by their initials,” says Christopher M. Stinson, mammologist at UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum. “We want our collector names to be as complete as possible in order to link specimens to a person’s body of work. Just using initials tells you very little about a person. Are they male or female? Is this a person of colour? An Indigenous contributor?”
So collections sleuths at the museum dug a little deeper into those initials and uncovered the story of the first woman professor to join UBC Science — at that point merged with the Faculty of Arts. G.M.S. was a trailblazer named Dr. Gertrude May Smith, hired as an assistant professor in 1930.
Dr. Smith was associated with UBC for over two decades, completing a BA in biology in 1923 and then working as a lab instructor while she studied towards her MA. As a master’s student, she observed and collected specimens of a salamander called the rough-skinned newt from Beaver Lake in Stanley Park, wetlands in the UBC Endowment Lands, and from a pond that no longer exists near 16th Avenue and Arbutus Street.
Dr. Smith opened her masters thesis, “The Detailed Anatomy of Triturus Torosus,” with the following explanation and synthesis:
This investigation was undertaken, on the advice of Dr. Fraser [Dr. Smith’s supervisor], because of its interest from an evolutionary stand point. As the investigation has shown, this form [rough-skinned newt] is much more nearly in the direct line of descent of higher vertebrates than is the frog, which, in comparison, is very highly specialized.
On graduation in 1926, UBC’s department of biology hired Dr. Smith as an instructor, a position that she held until she set off for the University of California (Berkeley) in 1928 to pursue a PhD, a degree UBC didn’t offer at the time. As a doctoral student, she completed a dissertation on “The Nasal Region and Organ of Jacobson in Some American Salamanders” in 1934. While at Berkeley, the biologist was invited to join two honorary American scientific societies: Phi Sigma (biological) and Sigma Xi (general science). She also taught courses in zoology.
A pioneering start and abrupt departure
In 1930, before she had completed her PhD, UBC’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences hired Dr. Smith as an assistant professor and its first female faculty member in the sciences. At UBC, she continued her work on salamanders, including a study of the decimation of rough-skinned newts as they migrated through Stanley Park to Beaver Lake across the new road to the Lions Gate Bridge. Her publications include studies of four species of clams, the interactions of phytoplankton and clams, decapod crustations in Saanich Inlet, a detailed anatomy of one salamander species, and the comparative anatomy of the nasal region of six salamander species. In this last study, her PhD dissertation, Dr. Smith drew connections between the structure of the nasal apparatus of the species and its habitat — aquatic, partly aquatic and partly terrestrial, or terrestrial.
While an assistant professor (1930–1940), Dr. Smith taught a wide range of zoology courses — general morphology, comparative anatomy of vertebrates, comparative anatomy of invertebrates, and embryology.
In 1985, Dr. Smith (then Dr. Gertrude Watney) offered the following recollections of her experience as a woman on faculty:
. . . there were very few women, in any field, on the faculty, and none in science, as I remember. There were several laboratory instructors and junior assistants, but no professors. However, I was not aware of doing anything unusual at that time. My colleagues in the Arts departments worked, as I did, together with the men on the faculty without any suggestion that we were out of place. We were not as conscious of “women’s rights” and “women’s lib” as many of the women are today, and I think that, in some ways we were happier for it, and perhaps accomplished as much.
UBC Library Archives
However, Dr. Smith’s time at UBC ended abruptly and without explanation. When the zoology department head, Dr. C. McLean Fraser, retired in 1939, the department and the Faculty of Arts and Science did not renew Dr. Smith’s contract. She only discovered that her position had been terminated when she went to the bursar’s office to collect her monthly pay cheque — and there wasn’t one.
“Nobody ever told her why her appointment wasn’t renewed,” says Dr. Muriel J. Harris, Dr. Smith’s daughter.
“Later in life, my mother speculated about why. She had married my father, Reverend Douglas Watney, a professor of theology in the Anglican Theological College at UBC in 1937. During the Great Depression it wasn’t uncommon for married women to lose their jobs to preserve them for men. Or it may have been that the department changed focus, shifting towards a study of ecology and away from comparative anatomy.”
In fact, the same year her employment ended, the zoology department hired an ecologist, Dr. Ian McTaggart Cowan.
It may also have been that Dr. Smith’s position was not renewed because she had not yet published the material in her PhD dissertation. In 1938, the editor of the Journal of Morphology returned her manuscript, saying that with so many illustrations (approximately 60) it was too expensive for the journal to publish.
“Whatever the reason, the protections of tenure did not yet exist,” Dr. Harris recalls. “But although she wouldn’t hold another academic position, she never lost her fascination with the natural world. My mother’s curiosity and enthusiasm for nature — for backyard birds, for invertebrates in marine tidal pools — were constant gifts in my growing up, and must have been major factors in my choice, in turn, also to study zoology, but with a focus on genetics and embryology.”
The Cowan Tetrapod Collection and three generations of UBC scholars
As such, Dr. Smith’s legacy at UBC extends far beyond her collection of rough-skinned newts. She inspired her daughter to pursue a research and teaching career. Dr. Harris joined UBC’s Department of Medical Genetics as a research associate in 1978 and retired as an associate professor emerita in 2006. One of Dr. Smith’s grandchildren, Dr. Colin Harris, completed a PhD at UBC in biochemistry and another, Dr. Douglas Harris, is a professor in UBC’s Peter A. Allard School of Law, extending the family’s connection with UBC to a third generation.
Over the course of two years, Dr. Smith contributed 107 specimens from the Lower Mainland of B.C. and Alameda County, California that are now part of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum’s Cowan Tetrapod Collection. Eighty-six were the subject of her master’s thesis on the rough-skinned newt.
She also collected and donated California slender salamanders, arboreal salamanders, Pacific tree frogs, and Columbia spotted frog specimens.
Additional material on Dr. Gertrude Watney (née Smith), including her UBC zoology lecture and laboratory notes, is available in UBC Archives. A published obituary appears in a 1986 UBC Faculty Women’s Association newsletter.
