Ahead by a century – the trailblazing life and legacy of Lulu Odell Gaiser

Lulu Odell Gaiser was born and buried in the same small town in Huron County. In between, the Ivy League-educated,and barrier-breaking botanist led a remarkable life and made history at McMaster University.

Born in June 1896, Gaiser was the second daughter of Salame Schwartz and William “Black Bill” Gaiser. She grew up on the family farm, one county line over from the Ontario town of Crediton.

Gaiser earned her first of three university degrees in nearby London – she was one of 10 women in Western University’s Class of 1916. A year later, she graduated from Toronto’s College of Education and worked as the principal for Crediton’s continuation school – at the time, elementary schools in smaller communities offered high school courses.

In 1919, Gaiser left to teach at a new experimental school for immigrant children in New York City. Two years later, she earned her master’s degree from Columbia University and took on a job as an assistant researcher in plant bacteriology at Barnard College.

Gaiser moved from New York City to Washington, DC in 1924, working as a plant pathologist with the United States Department of Agriculture.

She then made history at McMaster a year later, becoming the first woman to join the faculty when she took a job as lecturer and assistant to Roger Wilson Smith. “Miss Gaiser has proved herself to be a great acquisition not only to the department of Biology but also the University at large,” said Wilson.

Gaiser was also called “the first invasion of McMaster’s faculty by a woman” and a “rabid, vociferous feminist” in response to her advocacy on behalf of women long before she was granted tenure. At one time, women weren’t allowed to study in the university’s library on Saturday afternoons – Gaiser challenged and changed that decision. She also called for more women faculty to be hired and a Dean of Women to be appointed – something the university did in 1930.

The late Stanley Bayley, author of Biology at McMaster University 1890 to 1990, wrote that “Gaiser arrived like a breath of fresh air – in the prime of life, energetic, enthusiastic – and demanding. 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 were male chauvinism prevailed.”

Gaiser completed her PhD in plant pathology and cytology at Columbia University while working at McMaster. Her PhD dissertation – “Chromosome numbers and species characters in Anthurium” – was published the Royal Society of Canada, making it the first cytotaxonomic work to be published by a Canadian and earning Gaiser international acclaim as a pioneer in what was then an emerging field of science.

Three years after joining McMaster, Gaiser was appointed an assistant professor. She became an associate professor in 1930 and was made a full professor in 1936. That same year, her mother died and Gaiser became her father’s primary caregiver – her sister Lillian was married and working as a nurse in Long Island, New York.

Gaiser made history yet again at McMaster, becoming the first woman to lead the biology and botany departments and serve as the inaugural senior professor of botanical research. She taught all of McMaster’s botany courses during her tenure at the university.

Former student Charles Johnston recalled that Gaiser “didn’t enter the lecture hall so much as explode into it. She was a dramatic and colourful lecturer who obviously loved her subject.” Seven of her students went on to earn PhDs at American universities. One of her graduates – William Cody – was heralded as the doyen of Canadian botanists and received an honorary doctorate from McMaster University in 2007.

Gaiser was also the driving force behind McMaster’s first greenhouse when the university made the move from Toronto to Hamilton.  “Professor Gaiser especially wanted the greenhouse to help her develop a program in natural history, as a means of preparing women graduates for the nature study courses then sprouting in the local schools,” wrote Bayley.

After 24 years as a history-making educator, administrator and researcher at McMaster, Gaiser joined the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University as a research fellow in 1949. Her plant specimens can be found there to this day and in herbaria across North America.

In 1954, 58-year-old Gaiser left Harvard and returned to Crediton to care for her elderly father. While she no longer had a research lab, greenhouse or herbarium, Gaiser kept doing field work studying the flora in Huron and Lambton counties and collaborating on those studies with First Nations women – something that few scientists did at that time.

Gaiser would lose her sister and father in the span of four years. Lillian passed away in 1960 and her father died in 1964, just shy of his 100^th birthday.

After returning home from an extended vacation to California, 68-year-old Gaiser died in her sleep on April 7, 1965. She was buried in Crediton Evangelical Brethen Cemetery next to her parents, just down the road from the family farm where she’d been born and raised. Her floristic survey of Lambton County was published posthumously the following year.

On the 100^th anniversary of Gaiser making history at McMaster and on the eve of International Women’s Day, discussions are underway to honour Gaiser’s trailblazing life and legacy within the Faculty of Science’s new teaching and research greenhouse.