JUST IN TIME
Overcoming Hurdles
}} The Life of Eleanor McQuarrie, DVM Life had changed in untold ways for Lindsay residents by the mid-1940s, particularly in terms of how they got around. Save for the odd wagon belonging to a milkman, internal combustion vehicles had long since displaced the horse-drawn traffic of years gone by. Scarcer still was the sight of someone riding about town on the back of a horse. Yet, that was exactly what folks living across the way from 17 Adelaide St. saw when teenaged Eleanor McQuarrie emerged from that house and mounted her steed during that decade. Later, when the family moved to 251 Kent St. — home to today’s Kent Inn — Eleanor spent many pleasant hours with her horse adjacent to Lindsay’s increasingly busy main thoroughfare. The youngest of Dan and Ada McQuarrie’s five children, Eleanor was born north of Argyle in 1930, shortly before the family moved into Lindsay where her father had taken up a job as Victoria County’s Registrar of Deeds. Eleanor’s uncle, Duncan McQuarrie, who died when she was six, kept horses on the 400-acre family farm. Hardly a photo exists of young Eleanor where she isn’t cuddling or soothing an animal of some kind, whether it be dogs, kittens or horses. Although she taught school for a few years, it was clear where Eleanor’s interests lay. In 1956, she became just the 33rd Canadian woman to graduate as a doctor of veterinary medicine. Eleanor McQuarrie was among the cohort whom Weekend Magazine reporter Jock Carroll called “a small, select group of pioneers.” After all, it wasn’t easy for women to get into vet school 70 years ago. As historians Kevin Woodger and Elizabeth Stone point out in their essay “‘One of the Boys’: Women at the Ontario Veterinary College in the Twentieth Century”, “Women — both those applying to and those who managed to gain entry into the veterinary program — were met with the masculine culture of veterinary medicine that viewed them as less than capable veterinary practitioners.” Sexism prevailed at the OVC during the 1950s and into the early 1960s, particularly among those who wished to specialize in the field of large animal medicine, which
IAN McKECHNIE Writer-at-large
was deemed to be a masculine profession. It was no wonder, then, that Eleanor and her peers described the five-year program through the alliterative “Five Ds:” disillusioned, disappointed, discouraged, disgusted ... and, ultimately, delighted, when they finally graduated. Asked by Weekend Magazine’s Carroll if she would do it all over again, Eleanor replied “I’d have to think about that, knowing what I do now.”
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Eleanor with horse.
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