It wasn’t a conversation I’d expected to have. I was visiting my mother-in-law Mary, who was 100 years old. This was in 2022, and she was ensconced in the apartment at the seniors residence where she’d lived since she’d turned 90. As we talked, she surprised me by speaking about her time in the math club at university.

Mary told me that she’d had two good friends there, two other women mathematicians. One had gone on to study under Alan Turing at Cambridge. The other had become a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute in New York. Both had enjoyed remarkable careers.

With the lockdowns a memory, Mary and I had started having regular tea visits, although I’d become “that nice lady who comes to see me.” Apparently the people who ran the residence had set up our visits to keep her occupied. She told my husband she enjoyed them, although they left her a little perturbed. The lady seemed to know more about her life than a stranger should.

That afternoon, I was a little perturbed as well. I’d gone to the drugstore earlier that week, lining up to fill 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 an 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.” 

It was a tiny incident. Miniscule. Yet it was far from the only time I’d had the c-word thrown at me since the start of the pandemic, and it was never for anything significant. I told my mother-in-law what happened, although, being a nice lady, I toned down the vocabulary. Mary had a very firm grip on the past, even though the present was getting a little hazy. I asked her whether she’d seen this type of response to stress before. Had peoples’ tempers started fraying a couple of years into World War II?

“I don’t remember any of that,” she replied. “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 smiled. Because in this case, she said, the changes were positive, opportunities opening up with men away at war. 

After Mary had graduated from North Toronto Collegiate, she went on to Victoria College at the University of Toronto. That’s where she joined the math club with three friends from high school. One of the women she soon lost track of. The other two were the ones who 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. (That’s her photo up top.) 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, although Mary said the family connections didn’t open doors for Cathleen. Before the war, all women hoping for a career in mathematics faced high barriers and a distinct lack of support. Even her father wasn’t keen on Cathleen becoming a mathematician.

Yet Cathleen Synge enjoyed a stellar career, 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 of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, where she became a professor. 

Eventually Cathleen was named the first woman director of the Courant Institute, and became the second female president of the American Mathematical Society. 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’s work on wave equations led to the improved design of wings for supersonic aircraft. She died in 2017, aged 94.

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 before. “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. Mary’s old friend died when she was only 50. She’d been the first woman computer scientist in Canada.

These were brilliant women, world-beaters. But Mary told me she felt it was that tiny break, the opening women were given with so many men away, 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 was $100 a month. “Cathleen was not a detail person,” she told me. “I was better in the lab.” 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 in a happy marriage of 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. 

Not that her experience was anything new, at least historically. Novelist Philippa Gregory details the waxing and waning of female empowerment in her magisterial non-fiction book, Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, which I reviewed not long ago. For most of the past 1,000 years, Gregory writes, women have advanced in times of calamity, then found themselves sent back home as life grew more peaceful and prosperous.

Take what happened during the first great bubonic plague, when tens of millions of people died around the world. Gregory writes that in the year 1300, England’s population was 5 million. By 1400, after waves of pandemics, there were only 2.5 million people left. 

So few priests remained that women were allowed to take confessions from the dying. They took over family trades, one woman becoming a noted architect after her father’s death. Girls soon made up a third of the apprentices named in medieval rolls, and graduated to roles as master craftswomen, paid the same wages as men.

Yet as England repopulated, and boys grew to adulthood, the number of tradeswomen and female apprentices began to drop, then flatlined, along with their wages.

Back and forth it went, right up to the end of the Second World War, and Mary’s dismissal from her job.

Not that she lived a retired life afterward. Mary’s position at the meteorological service was the last paid employment she ever held, but she was one of a generation of university-educated women who spent years volunteering. Mary’s work was largely in social services, a quiet critique of government neglect of the most vulnerable in our society.

After a move to Vancouver in the mid-1960s, she contributed her financial skills and leadership to the Neighbourhood Services Association and the Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia. Moving back to Toronto, she became a director of the March of Dimes and volunteered at both the Royal Ontario Museum and the now-demolished McLaughlin Planetarium. 

Mary also grew interested in her family’s history, tracing several lines of North American settlers back to the 18th-century British Isles, and leaving behind a tall bookcase full of research binders, now in my office, which detail the lives of dozens of ancestors. 

My novel, Mad Richard, was born when I opened one of those binders. 

Mary had discovered that her family was related to British painter Richard Dadd, who grew up with Charles Dickens in the British town of Chatham, Kent. Dadd was considered one of the country’s most promising young artists, and was hired by a rich benefector to be his camera in pre-Kodak days. Dadd sketched the sights as he accompannied the man on his Grand Tour of Eutope and the Mideast.

Unfortunately, Dadd suffered what we would now call a psychotic break while they were in Egypt. Believing that he was receiving commands from the Egyptian god Osiris, Dadd started to behave erratically, and the alarmed benefactor took him home to England. There, Dadd murdered a man he believed to be the devil, then fled to France. 

The pursuit and conviction of Richard Dadd was the O.J. Simpson case of its time, avidly covered in the press. After Dadd was caught and convicted of murder, the judge didn’t order that he be hanged. Instead, rarely for the time, he ordered Dadd to be incarcerated in Bethlehem Hospital. 

This was the famous madhouse Bedlam. Dadd the rest of his life there and in Broadmoor Hospital painting a series of brilliant and disturbing canvases that now hang in the Tate. He received at least one documented visit from Dickens, who also liked to re-enact the murder Dadd committed for guests at his country estate, which was located not far from the town where they’d both grown up. 

Dadd’s uncle, a pharmacist named Henry Martin, fled the notoriety and took his family to Canada. From that decision flowed the novel, the binders–and my family. Mary Knox, né Martin, was one of Henry’s descendants. At the Mad Richard book launch, I overheard my very proud and supportive mother-in-law tell a friend, “I feel like I wrote the book myself.”

In fact, the career that escaped Mary was in the meteorological service. During our post-pandemic talk, it took a couple of times asking, but finally she heard my question about whether she would have liked have been a meteorologist herself.

“Well, yes,” she said quietly, and looked aside.

Mary died a few months after that conversation. She was then almost 101 years old, and I still mourn her.

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

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Some of you might remember a version of this post from 2022. This is an updated version that I thought would make a good companion to my recent reviews of books about men and war: The Wounded Generation by David Nasaw and The Ghosts of Ortona by Ian Cosh.