I was in the drugstore the other day, lining up to pick up a prescription. There were a few people behind me in the line, but a guy ignored us and headed for the prescription counter. “Excuse me,” I said, “but the line-up’s over here.” He turned and answered in this overdone oily voice, “Oh, I’m very sorry. I didn’t see the line-up or I would have got in. My apologies for the mix up.” Taking his place at the end of the line, he pretend-coughed, saying very clearly with each cough, “Cunt. Cunt.”

The woman with him was so embarrassed she walked away and examined the bottles of painkillers on the shelf. The woman behind me met my eye and just faintly shook her head. I looked back at the guy in his black Greektown hat, staring at him for a long time while it seemed to me he smirked behind his mask. After I got my prescription, I stopped as I walked past him and said, “You know, that was a jerk thing to say.” 

“I was coughing,” he answered in his oily voice. “I just coughed. What’s your problem?” 

We’re all under stress. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding hard, War and Pestilence jockeying for the lead. It was a tiny incident, although I was ridiculously upset. Really shaken. But look at how many men in black hats are taking it out on women these days. 

A couple of weeks ago, CBC Radio Winnipeg aired an interview with a woman who had been having a smoke outside her workplace when she was harassed in obscene terms for wearing a mask by people belonging to the far-right so-called trucker convoy. Journalists have reported increasing number of threats themselves, many of the most foul made against women.

When I visited my 100-year-old mother-in-law on the weekend, I asked her if peoples’ tempers had frayed a couple of years into the Second World War. Speaking of living under pressure. Mary had once told me about running into three guys she had gone to high school with not long after they’d all graduated in 1940. All three were in uniform. Not one survived the war. 

This time she paused to think about the rudeness I’d faced. “I don’t remember any of that,” she said. “If you had to line up, you lined up. People got on with it. The changes were more subtle.”

Subtle how? And for whom?

“For women,” she said, and told me that in this case the changes were positive, opportunities opening up with men away at war. After Mary graduated from North Toronto Collegiate, she went on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she was a member of a math club with four women friends. One of the women she soon lost track of. The other two went on to distinguished careers as pioneering female mathematicians. 

The first, Cathleen Synge, lived a block away from Mary’s family in Leaside, their houses on either side of Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. Cathleen was the daughter of an Irish-Canadian family. Her mother, Eleanor Allen Synge, had some training in mathematics, while her father, John Lighton Synge, was a mathematician and professor at the University of Toronto. He was also a nephew of the Irish playwright, John Millington Synge. Obviously, there was a history of both math and accomplishment in her family, but Mary said that women trying to enter a career in mathematics were faced with high barriers and a distinct lack of support before the war opened things up. Even Cathleen’s father hadn’t been keen on his daughter becoming a mathematician.

The other woman was Beatrice Worsley, whom Mary called Trixie. Before they graduated from the University of Toronto, naval recruiters came to campus wanting to talk to anyone who had studied math. Mary remembered lining up for an interview, and caught a glimpse of what the Navy recruiter scribbled on her form: pleasant personality. “I didn’t have the marks,” she said, laughing gently. But Trixie Worsley did, and she was in her naval uniform on the day they graduated from Victoria College. 

“Someone had given her a big bouquet, an armful of red roses. She said to me, ‘Mary, will you carry my flowers for me? Because I can’t do it while I’m in uniform.’” Mary teared up, remembering her graduation day almost eighty years ago. “So I carried her roses.”

Beatrice Worsley would go on to work for the navy in Halifax. (That’s her picture up top.) According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, “Worsley performed data analysis related to degaussing ships, a process that reduced the ships’ magnetic signature to make them safer around German magnetic mines. After the Second World War ended in 1945, Worsley was the only member of the (women’s naval service) to remain at the NRE. She was promoted to lieutenant and began research on hull corrosion, which involved over 150 days of research at sea, often in harsh winter conditions.”

After doing her master’s degree in math and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Trixie returned to Canada and began work in the emerging field of computer science. In 1948, she built a differential analyzer, an early mechanical analog computer that could solve equations, using parts from a toy Meccano set. Then she went off to Newnham College at Cambridge University, where she did her PhD under the supervision of the legendary Alan Turing. Trixie later taught at the U of T and at Queen’s University, a pioneering coder before anyone even used the word. But Mary’s old friend died when she was only 50: the first woman computer scientist in Canada.

Cathleen Synge lived a much longer life, most of it in the U.S., where she added the name of her husband, chemist Herbert Morawetz, to her own. After doing her master’s degree at MIT, Cathleen Synge Morawetz did her PhD at the Courant Institute at New York University, where she became a professor of mathematics. She was the second woman president of the American Mathematical Society and the first woman Director of NYU’s Courant Institute. She was also presented with the National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the highest scientific honour in the US. Along with her other accomplishments, Cathleen Synge’s work on wave equations led to the improved design of wings for supersonic aircraft. She died in 2017, aged 94.

These were brilliant women, world-beaters. But Mary feels it was that tiny break, the opening women were given during the Second World War, that helped her friends toward their goals. 

As for Mary herself, she was recruited by Canadian meteorological service, where she worked with a group of other women organizing and mapping weather data from across the country. Her salary: $100 a month. “Cathleen was not a detail person. I was better in the lab,” she told me. In fact, Mary was so good with details that after two years at the meteorological service, she was invited to write her civil service exams and passed easily. 

“So I became a public servant. I had dotted all the I’s and crossed the T’s, and kept out of trouble, so they we were. But then I had the dumb idea to marry John,” a meteorologist and her husband for almost sixty years. “I was hired in wartime, but had to quit when I got married. It was just the way things were then. Didn’t make any sense at all. Just when I was getting good at it, I was gone.”

Maybe that’s why the differences of life in wartime looked subtle to Mary. Opportunities opened up for a few short years before they snapped shut again. It took a couple of times asking, but finally she heard my question about whether she would have liked to be a meteorologist herself. “Well, yes,” she said quietly, and looked aside.

I was talking about this last night with a friend who pointed out that my new novel, Time Squared, centres on the changing roles of women through the centuries. Maybe there’s an obsession here. I keep hoping we’re not moving backwards but I’m afraid we are, whether it’s a case of women staying at home with the kids during the pandemic or being called names in the drugstore. 

But for the moment, let’s celebrate Cathleen Synge Morawetz, Trixie Worsley and Mary Knox, pioneering women mathematicians. There are precious few positives these days. But here are three.