Ahead by a century – The life and legacy of trailblazer Lulu Gaiser (long read version)

Kristina Llewellyn turns a quick chat about Lulu Gaiser into an hour-long walk around campus to check out McMaster University’s other trailblazers and titans.

Llewellyn – a history professor with a PhD in Educational Studies – finds Gaiser fascinating. Born and raised on a farm in Huron County at the dawn of the 20th century, Gaiser went on to become an Ivy League-educated, history-making and barrier-breaking botanist. But finding 10 people today on campus who’d recognize Gaiser’s name would be a challenge.

“Dr. Gaiser’s a trailblazer who’s been lost to history,” says Llewellyn. “It’s time for us to revisit and retell her story.”

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of Gaiser becoming the first woman to join McMaster’s faculty. She was also the first woman to lead the university’s biology and botany departments in the 1930s and 40s and was appointed Mac’s first senior professor of botanical research. Gaiser was also the driving force behind McMaster’s first teaching and research greenhouse.

It’s what Gaiser didn’t do that also stands out for Llewellyn. “Women in the early 20^th century weren’t meant to get an education for their own personal ambitions. They earned a degree so they could be of future service to others.”

Those others were almost always husbands and children. While women were going to university in growing numbers, their opportunities were far from unlimited. Many became teachers and nurses, with the expectation that they’d quit their jobs once they got married and started a family. They could then put their “Mrs. degrees” to work in helping with their children’s homework and doing volunteer work in the community.

Gaiser started down that path, heading to teacher’s college after graduating from Western University in 1916. She taught at her hometown school in Crediton, Ontario, followed by a stint teaching at an experimental school for immigrant children in New York City.

But then Gaiser went back to university, earning a master’s degree in plant pathology from Columbia University in 1921. She worked in a research lab at Barnard College and a few years later joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.  She completed a PhD in cytology, also from Columbia, while working at McMaster.

“Dr. Gaiser was so far ahead of the times,” says Llewellyn. “Being a teacher was one thing. Becoming a researcher and competing with men for funding, equipment and students was something else entirely. Blazing that trail couldn’t have been easy.”

While walking and talking about Gaiser, Llewellyn asks about the names on campus buildings. None are familiar to Llewellyn – she’s new to the Faculty of Humanities and the Wilson College of Leadership & Civic Engagement after spending 15 years at the University of Waterloo.

Llewellyn says place names matter, especially on university campuses.  Think of the names on buildings as a hidden curriculum that helps define a university’s culture. “How we honour our past shows what we value today and aspire to become in the future.”

The impromptu tour ends at Chester New Hall. New was head of McMaster’s history department from 1920 until 1951. Hall and Gaiser were contemporaries for 24 years. According to former student Charles Johnston, Gaiser shared New’s love for teaching. “She didn’t enter a lecture hall so much as explode into it, with gown flying and black eyes (to match her black hair) piercing the assembled undergrads,” recalled Johnston in a history of McMaster’s biology department written by the late professor Stanley Bayley. “She was a dramatic and colourful lecturer, who obviously loved her subject. As a campus character, she was, in my opinion, in the same league as the legendary absent-minded historian Chester New.”

New has a building named in his honour. Gaiser got a plaque that’s moved a couple times around campus – it was part of a garden that was removed to make way for the Faculty of Science’s new teaching and research greenhouse. Discussions have started on how to have Gaiser recognized in connection with the greenhouse.

Llewellyn believes Gaiser’s overdue for commemoration on campus. Seeing Gaiser’s name on their way to lectures, labs and the library would send a message to students, says Llewellyn. “Honouring Dr. Gaiser is one way McMaster can support its aspiration for inclusive excellence.”

“THE FIRST INVASION OF McMASTER’S FACULTY BY A WOMAN”

Renee Twyford would be one of those students who definitely take notice. She graduates this spring with an honours bachelor of science degree in biology and is then staying on as coordinator of Nature at McMaster.

Like Gaiser, Twyford’s passionate about all things flora and fauna. As a kid, she loved botanical illustrations drawn by Beatrix Potter. In high school, she volunteered as a horticultural intern at the Cincinnati Zoo. In her second year at McMaster, she started volunteering at the greenhouse. She’s been there ever since, spending countless hours looking after hundreds of plants. She also pitched in when the greenhouse moved across campus to a new and larger home – carrying plants and filling flower beds with mountains of mulch. With Nature at McMaster, she works on environmental rehabilitation and restoration projects on campus.

While she knows her invasive species from native plants, Twyford admits to knowing nothing about Gaiser. The McMaster trailblazer’s never been mentioned in any lectures or come up in conversations. She’s surprised to learn that Gaiser was the driving force behind McMaster’s first greenhouse, built when the university relocated from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930. Gaiser had threatened not to make the move if there wasn’t a greenhouse to support her teaching and research.

That wasn’t her only request. At one time, women weren’t allowed to study in the university library on Saturday afternoons – Gaiser forced the issue. She also wanted the university to hire more women faculty members and appoint a Dean of Women – something the university did in 1930. She was making these demands long before she became a full professor with tenure in 1937.

By all accounts, Gaiser was a demanding professor who held her students to high academic standards. There’s little chance she would’ve been the life of any party – if anything, she would’ve cancelled the party in favour of extra time for studying. In 1926, she wrote to the chancellor that outside speakers should replace class parties. “There’s a greater need for training our students rather than for little social parties only.”

Setting those high expectations paid off for her students. At least seven earned PhDs at American universities. Gaiser trained an entire generation of Canadian botanists, says biology professor Elizabeth Weretilnyk. “In the early days of the National Herbarium of Canada, all of the key people were likely trained by Lulu. From everything I’ve read, Lulu was an outstanding supervisor and mentor.”

One of her standout students was William Cody. Considered the ‘doyen of Canadian botanists”, Cody graduated from McMaster in 1946 and then worked for 41 years with Agriculture and AgriFood Canada. After retirement, he stayed on for another 21 years as an honorary research associate.  Cody was awarded an honorary doctorate from McMaster in 2007.

Another student supervised by Gaiser – Harold Senn – surveyed the trees in Hamilton’s Westdale Ravine and Cootes Paradise Marsh near McMaster’s campus and recommended the area as a future botanical garden. Gaiser was “influential in the first field botany project at the Royal Botanical Gardens”, David Galbraith, the RBG’s Director of Science, wrote in a 2024 tribute.

What doesn’t surprise Twyford was Gaiser’s less than collegial welcome. “Smart and strong woman don’t always sit well with some men.”

The signs of Gaiser’s undoing had been there from the start. In his history of the biology department, Bayley wrote that Gaiser was called the first invasion of McMaster’s faculty by a woman, difficult and prickly, increasingly erratic and a rabid and vociferous feminist.

“Gaiser arrived like a breath of fresh air – in the prime of life, energetic, enthusiastic – and demanding,” wrote Bayley. “Such attributes would be hard for many elderly men to take, especially coming from the first woman to join the faculty and in an age and atmosphere where male chauvinism prevailed.”

Twyford says she would’ve loved to have been a student in Gaiser’s classes and a research assistant in her greenhouse. “I would’ve had a great time learning from Dr. Gaiser. She reminds me of all the wonderful women I’ve had as professors.” The trailblazer and the protege would’ve had lots to talk about during office hours when it came to the men who tried – and in Gaiser’s case succeeded – in derailing their dreams.

“MISS GAISER SEEMS NOT TO BE BEST FITTED FOR UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING”

For Twyford, it was the high school science teacher who told her she had no shot at becoming a scientist and should drop her advanced science courses. When Twyford asked if he’d write a reference letter for her university applications, he refused. “He said he wouldn’t do it because he didn’t have anything nice to say about me. That was all the motivation I needed to do my best at Mac.”

For Gaiser, there was zoology professor Emerson Warren. Hired a few years after Gaiser, Warren started complaining to Chancellor George Gilmour. He said Gaiser had more student assistants in her labs, forcing him to rely on less experienced sophomores. And all the students were taking their problems to Gaiser.  “The same mill that grinds out good botanists seems to supress the development of good zoologists,” Warren wrote to Gilmour.

The lobbying paid off – in 1942, Gilmour split the biology department in half. Warren was appointed head of zoology with Gaiser as head of botany. “When the department was divided, Chancellor Gilmour had no choice but to appoint Gaiser head of botany although she could not have been an easy person for him to deal with,” wrote Bayley. And while Gaiser had been acting head of biology for five years, Warren was not appointed acting head of zoology.

Along with dividing the department, Gilmour began talking to other institutions about hiring Gaiser – without her permission or even her knowledge. He wrote to the National Research Council of Canada and Columbia University, knowing that Gaiser had already turned down an offer from Harvard’s Weaton College. After her mother’s death in 1936, Gaiser became her father’s primary caregiver. He still lived in Crediton which was only a couple hours away from McMaster.

According to Bayley’s history of the department, Gilmour wrote to his counterpart at Columbia that “the problem of us [is] that the University is not primarily a research institution and Miss Gaiser seems not to be best fitted for undergraduate teaching. I am coming to feel she will find her greatest happiness and usefulness if a research post can be found for her.”

Gilmour eventually found a research post for Gaiser by creating one at McMaster. The Royal Botanical Gardens (RBG) was hiring a founding director.  The chancellor, who sat on the RBG board, recommended the director should hold a dual appointment at McMaster. When the RBG hired Norman Radforth – a former part-time assistant who’d worked for Gaiser years earlier – Gilmour made him head of botany. Gaiser was then moved into her new role as senior professor of botanical research. Three years later, Gaiser requested a year’s leave of absence with early retirement from McMaster at the end of August 1949 – the reason why remained private between Gaiser and the chancellor.

Gaiser returned to Crediton before heading to Harvard University. The Sept. 15^th edition of the Exeter Times-Advocate reported that “Dr. Lulu Gaiser, who has spent several weeks at the home of her father, Mr. William Gaiser, left last week for Boston.”

She worked at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University for the next five years before returning home again one final time.

“IMAGINE WHAT SHE COULD’VE ACHIEVED”

Much has changed since Gaiser made history at McMaster. In 1925, a third of the students were women. Few took science courses. Today, two-thirds of the undergraduates in the Faculty of Science are women. Across the university, women account for 55 per cent of McMaster’s 37,592 undergraduate and graduate students.

Gaiser was the first woman to join the faculty at McMaster – in 2023, there were 439 women in full-time faculty positions across the university. In the Department of Biology, there’ s an equal number of women and men in full-time faculty positions. Women also hold key leadership roles across the university. On July 1, Provost and Vice President (Academic) Susan Tighe becomes McMaster’s ninth President. The deans in the Faculties of Science, Engineering and Humanities are women. In the Faculty of Science, three of the four associate deans are women.

But in a meeting room on the third floor of the Burke Science Building, it’s nothing but men. From 1962 and until 2017, all 11 deans in the Faculty of Science were men. Their portraits hang on the wall.

Maureen MacDonald has looked at that photo gallery during many meetings. Her portrait will be added once her time is done as dean. She makes a point of telling students and colleagues that while she’s the first woman to serve as dean, she won’t be the last – many more will follow and the portrait gallery will start to reflect the diversity that’s already there among the Faculty’s nearly 9,000 students.

MacDonald’s appointment almost didn’t happen. David Wilkinson, who was serving as provost, asked MacDonald why she wasn’t applying. “I wasn’t willing to make my family a lower priority. I couldn’t spend nights and weekends working when my three kids needed me at home.”

Wilkinson said the dean’s job description needed a rewrite if qualified women weren’t applying. “David said the problem wasn’t with my commitments – the problem was entirely with the job.” The provost asked for suggestions on how to reimagine the dean’s role – MacDonald decided the best way was to do it herself. She applied and was chosen after an international search.

It’s not lost on MacDonald that Gaiser didn’t have an ally like Wilkinson. And Gaiser had none of the supports and resources that are now in place to support women in leadership roles, from coaching and mentorship to professional and personal networking to training and development programs. One of those supports – a life events support program in the Faculty of Science – was introduced by MacDonald early in her tenure as dean. The program covers the cost of hiring a postdoctoral fellow when a faculty member needs to step away from their research group.

“Based on everything I’ve learned about Dr. Gaiser, she was a truly remarkable educator, researcher and administrator. Imagine what she could have achieved if any of these supports had been in place? If she had allies standing with her and advocating for her when she wasn’t in the room? Would she have spent the rest of her career at McMaster? Could she have been a key contributor when it came to building our university into a research powerhouse?”

STUDENTS LEADING THE WAY

It’s not just institutions that have changed for the better, says MacDonald. Individuals have also come a long way. The change is most pronounced when MacDonald watches how students work together in her research group and on student government, clubs and committees. “The students treat one another with genuine respect. No one’s questioning or challenging anyone’s ability to lead based on their gender. This is one more area where students are ahead of us and showing faculty, staff and administrators the way forward.”

Not everyone’s following. There are still a few holdouts who’ve yet to come to grips with women in leadership roles, says MacDonald. They question women’s competence and test their authority in ways they’d never try with men in similar roles. “They’re the last bastion,” says MacDonald. “Their numbers are dwindling fast but it only takes one to ruin your entire day.”

And that one holdout can put women in a difficult spot. Do women offer some overdue feedback on how they’re being disrespectful and embarrassing themselves? “You hope that feedback gets received in the spirit it’s intended and they’ll change their ways. But you always worry that you’ll be accused of overreacting, being dramatic and rude and then the conflict escalates. No leader has the time or energy to deal with that.”

MacDonald has yet to offer that feedback to any student – it’s never been necessary. “They’re our next generation of leaders. And from everything I’ve seen, we’re in very good hands.”

CAUGHT IN A DOUBLE-BIND

Count Marie Elliot among the handful of people at McMaster who knows all about Gaiser’s life and legacy. Elliot always thought the 100^th anniversary of Gaiser’s hiring at McMaster plus the official opening of the new teaching and research greenhouse marked the ideal time to honour the university’s forgotten trailblazer. She kept dropping hints to keep Gaiser on everyone’s radar.

Elliot gained a newfound appreciation for Gaiser as an administrator following her own appointment at department chair in 2018. While the department’s far larger with 900 undergraduate and graduate students, Elliot says she has far more support than Gaiser ever received.

There’s an outstanding team supporting the day-to-day work of the department, says Elliot. There’s a spirit of collegiality among faculty and staff. And Elliot’s never had to worry whether the dean or provost are asking other institutions to hire her.

“I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Dr. Gaiser to be an administrator with little to no support. She spent five of those nine years as an acting head of the department. I wouldn’t have lasted six months in those conditions.”

The description of Gaiser as prickly, erratic, demanding and difficult doesn’t sit well with Elliot. “I get the sense Dr. Gaiser was no less bold, decisive, driven and direct as the men she worked with and reported to. She didn’t seem to suffer fools gladly. And maybe that approach ran against the stereotype where, as a woman, she was expected to be nurturing and mothering, collaborative and consultative not just with students but with the grown men who were her colleagues.”

Erin Reid shares Elliot’s opinion. “It’s interesting that history sees Dr. Gaiser as ‘prickly and difficult’ and that she was treated as such by colleagues and leaders at the time,” says Reid, the Canada Research Chair in Work, Careers and Organizations and a professor of Human Resources and Management in the DeGroote School of Business. “She doesn’t necessarily sound more difficult than her colleagues. “

According to Reid, research on women’s careers in traditionally male workplaces – such as universities – shows that gender stereotypes can shape how people’s behavior is interpreted and responded to by others around them.

Gaiser likely faced a “double-bind”, says Reid. “To succeed in her academic role, she would need to behave assertively and aggressively and yet she was still likely expected by others to behave in ways that fulfilled feminine stereotypes. Behavior that might’ve been interpreted as appropriate for men could’ve been coded as ‘difficult and prickly’ for her.”

Elliot also thinks Gaiser may well have been frustrated at how little time she had for research. It was her lifelong passion – studying plants was something she did before, during and long after she left McMaster.

Again, gender may have come into play and appears to still be a factor to this day. Elliot’s just back from a meeting of biology chairs from across Canada. Of the 32 chairs at the meeting, 25 were men – that imbalance didn’t go unnoticed. “We have still have some work to do on that front.”

The chairs reviewed the results of a national survey of more than 200 biologists working in academia. A key stat jumped out for Elliot. According to survey results, men spend 41 per cent of their time on research, 38 per cent on teaching and 20 per cent on service. Women spend 49 per cent of their time on teaching, 30 per cent on research and 21 per cent on service.

“Dr. Gaiser was reminded time and again that teaching was her primary responsibility, and her administrative responsibilities would’ve left little time for research.”

DECADES OF CAREGIVING TAKE ITS TOLL

Women today continue to face the issue that ended Gaiser’s career.  She became her father’s primary caregiver when her mother died in 1936 just as Gaiser was taking on added administrative duties. Her older sister Lillian was married, living on Long Island, New York and working as a nurse. Bayley, in his history of the biology department, says Gaiser’s repeated requests for easing her teaching load were summarily dismissed. She continued teaching all of McMaster’s botany courses.

“I’m not sure how Dr. Gaiser managed it all,” says Allison Williams, a social and health geographer with McMaster’s School of Earth, Environment and Society. Williams has dedicated her career to improving workplace practices that support employees who – like Gaiser – are caring for older adults. Her life’s work is also personal – Williams and her two sisters provide care for their aging parents who are now in their mid-eighties.

Caring for older family members is a responsibility that continues to fall primarily on women – little has changed since Gaiser was making trips to Crediton to look after her father. In 2022, Statistics Canada found that 26 per cent of women compared to only 19 per cent of men provide unpaid care to adults with long-term conditions or disabilities. Women average 10 hours of unpaid care per week, while men average six hours. And the majority of women are taking on this added responsibility while working full-time and at the peak of their careers.

There’s also a marked difference in the care being provided, says Williams. Women are more likely to take on physically and emotionally demanding tasks, such as washing, dressing, feeding and helping with medical treatments and appointments. Men tend to focus on discretionary tasks like doing outdoor chores, handling home repairs and paying bills.

Providing more support to women who are primary caregivers is a social justice issue, says Williams. “We’ve been working so hard for how many years to gain gender equality at work and it’s all taken away because women are expected to provide unpaid care to adult family members? There needs to be a push to integrate and normalize work and life, so that caregiving responsibilities can be equitably accommodated.”

Williams is doing her part – she’s led a groundbreaking initiative called the Healthy Productive Work Partnership Grant, Mobilizing a Caregiver-Friendly Workplace Standard: A Partnership Approach. She brought together more than 25 national and international partners to build the case for carer-friendly workplaces, where employers support and accommodate their employees who are juggling unpaid care work.

According to the group’s research, carer-employees are at serious risk of burnout, depression and anxiety that can lead to negative health outcomes. Could this have happened to Gaiser?  Huron County historian and retired teacher David Yates wrote a newspaper column about Gaiser in 2022. “Her contribution to science and feminism make her one of Canada’s trailblazing figures whose legacy has yet to be properly recognized.” In looking back at Gaiser’s tumultuous final years at McMaster, Yates wrote that “Gaiser’s behaviour and demands became more erratic. Clearly, Gaiser was suffering a nervous breakdown.”

Williams isn’t willing to make that diagnosis. “I’m not qualified and I don’t know enough about Dr. Gaiser. But I do conclusively know from all of the research that being a primary caregiver to a family member for an extended period of time without support can lead to serious physical and psychological strain, exhaustion, chronic stress and burnout.”

“WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE PLANTS?”

Gaiser kept blazing trails during retirement. She lost her greenhouse but now had all of Huron County to explore when she wasn’t looking after her father. In 1957, with funding from the Ontario Agricultural College and the American Philosophical Society, she began a floristic survey of neighbouring Lambton County.

Her fieldwork took her to Indigenous communities on the northern and southern shores of Lake Huron. Gaiser enlisted the help of Indigenous women to identify and collect specimens at a time when researchers were known for showing up unannounced and leaving without sharing any of their findings or knowledge. Weretilnyk was unaware of Gaiser’s work with Indigenous communities but says those collaboration were in keeping with what she already knew about McMaster’s trailblazer. “Of course Lulu shared her knowledge. She was an exceptional teacher and mentor to the end.”

At the start of her career, Gaiser’s PhD dissertation on the cellular structure and genetics of plants was published as a book by the Royal Society of Canada in 1927. That book was the first of its kind to be published by a Canadian scientist and earned Gaiser international acclaim.

A Survey of the Vascular Plants of Lambton County would be Gaiser’s final publication and contribution to science. She was doing more than collecting specimens to be archived in herbaria for future researchers – Gaiser was on a mission to save flora and fauna throughout Southwestern Ontario. She foresaw the environmental damage to forests and fields caught in the path of urban sprawl. Grand Bend – a town 20 kilometers from Crediton that Gaiser and her family visited often – was now overrun with out-of-town vacationers.

“To one returning in the middle of the 20^th century after a professional career in botany, it became obvious that full attention should be paid to the flora,” Gaiser wrote in her book’s introduction.

“The question is clear: what will happen to the plants?”

Gaiser’s father died in 1964, just shy of his 100^th birthday.  After a three-month vacation in California, Gaiser returned to Crediton and died in her sleep on April 7, 1965. She was 68 years old. Her book was published posthumously the following year by the Canada Department of Agriculture.

A RURAL BATMAN ANSWERS GAISER’S CALL

Twyford’s giving a tour of the new greenhouse just days after she helped move the plants across campus from the old greenhouse and wheelbarrowed in 61,000 kg of mulch. There are no trailblazers here but there’s a titan arum. The plant takes years to bloom and when it happens over the course of just a few days, it fills the greenhouse with the stench of rotten meat. While it’s a crowd favourite, Twyford prefers the Dutchman’s Pipe with its heart-shaped leaves. The plant’s native to Ohio and reminds her of home.

Twyford’s ready to answer Gaiser’s call to care about plants. She jokes about becoming a rural Batman – “plant scientist and researcher by day and farmer by night.” It’s a career and a life that would’ve earned high praise from McMaster’s forgotten trailblazer who was born and raised in the heart of farm country.

“Can you imagine if I got to do my research in a greenhouse that honours Dr. Gaiser? That would be perfect. And I’d never get tired of talking about Dr. Gaiser’s life and legacy to anyone and everyone who asked why her name was attached to the greenhouse.”

Photos by Georgia Kirkos.

Lulu Gaiser plant specimen reprinted with permission from the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University.