Frieda Fraser
Frieda Fraser was a Canadian physician, scientist and academic who worked in infectious disease, including research on scarlet fever and tuberculosis. After finishing her medical studies at the University of Toronto in 1925, she completed a two-year internship in the United States, studying and working in Manhattan and Philadelphia. Afterward, she conducted research in the Connaught Laboratories in Toronto concentrating on infectious disease, making important contributions in the pre-penicillin age to isolation of the strains of streptococci likely to lead to disease. From 1928, she lectured in the Department of Hygiene at the University of Toronto on preventive medicine, working her way up from a teaching assistant to a full professor by 1955. In college, around 1917 Fraser met her life partner, Edith Williams, and though their families tried to keep them apart, their relationship spanned until Edith's death in 1979. The correspondence between the two has been preserved and is an important legacy for the lesbian history of Canada.
Early life
Ethel Frida Fraser's birth was recorded on 30 August 1899 in York, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Helene and William Henry Fraser. It is unknown when her name began being styled as Frieda Helen Fraser. Her father was a native Ontarian who had graduated from the University of Toronto and taught at the Upper Canada College before being appointed as a lecturer in Italian and Spanish at U of T. He prolifically wrote textbooks which were used in the provincial schools for many years. Her mother was a native of Germany and the couple's children, William Kaspar, Donald and Frieda were fluent in German and French. Fraser was home schooled until 1914, when she enrolled in Havergal College. Soon thereafter, in 1916, her father died and her brother Donald became an encouraging influence for her. In 1917, Fraser entered University College to study physics and biology. During her college years, she joined the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority where she met Edith Williams. She completed her undergraduate degree in 1922 and enrolled in medical school, earning her Bachelor of Medicine in 1925. Hers was the first class that required students to complete six years of study and had quotas limiting the number of women who could attend. Because few hospitals would accept women doctors for internships, Fraser went to the United States in the summer of 1925 to begin her internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.Internship abroad
Fraser began her work in gynaecology and obstetrics in 1924, noting that the only internships available to her were in OBGYN or children's tonsillectomies. Much of her work required her to visit immigrant patients of the tenement houses of the Lower East Side. She had little understanding of the diverse ethnicities of her patients, their poverty and the conditions in which they lived. Fraser had been influenced by Eugenics studies, which caused her medical practices to be influenced by ethnic origin. She became convinced that there was inadequate information available about birth control available to both physicians and patients and she sought information from non-medical sources, becoming an advocate. Soon after her arrival in New York, Fraser began a more intense correspondence with Williams, who would become her life partner. Despite the desires of both women's families to keep them apart—Williams' family sending her to England and Fraser's family threatening that continuing the relationship would fracture her familial ties—the two refused to give up their relationship.Fraser's experiences as an intern convinced her that she would prefer medical research to actual practice with patients. When she completed her New York internship in 1926, she moved to Philadelphia, after a brief visit home to Toronto to visit her mother and her brother Donald. In Pennsylvania, Fraser began her post-doctorate training under the direction of Muriel McPhedran at the Phipps Institute for the Study, Treatment and Prevention of Tuberculosis in January 1927, specialising in bacteriology The experiences in her internships were markedly different in that in New York, she lived at the hospital and the staff was predominantly made up of women. In Philadelphia, she lived in her own apartment in the town and often had to struggle to be accepted as a doctor and be able to see patients. In March 1927, Fraser was offered a position in the Connaught Laboratories, a research facility dedicated to developing vaccines, where her brother worked. Accepting the position to begin at the end of her internship in October meant that she would not be joining Williams in England. Williams had hoped that Fraser would join her, where they might be able to live together, but recognized with the choice of going back to Toronto, that would not be possible.
Return to Canada
In 1928, Fraser returned to Toronto and took up her research post, simultaneously working as a demonstrator with the Department of Hygiene and Preventative Medicine. She was one of the founding faculty of the School of Hygiene at U of T. She made her home with her brother Donald; Williams, who had also returned from England, moved in with her own mother. Though the two women wanted to live together, raise children and continue their careers, they were unwilling to displease or fail in their obligations to their mothers. They also realized that though they were middle-class, working women, economic inequalities in their pay compromised their ability to support themselves and their need to remain in the good graces of their families for support. When Williams was bequeathed a farm near Aurora, Ontario, the couple believed it might become their haven, but when Williams applied for courses at the Ontario School of Agriculture, she was advised the courses were full. For the next several years, they lived apart but within a 30-minute walk from each other at various residences.By 1931, Fraser had successfully passed her medical examinations and become licensed. Two years later, Fraser became a part-time lecturer and then in 1934 was promoted to full-time lecturer in the department. Around the same time, in 1933, Williams moved to the farm full-time, returning to Toronto only on weekends. In 1937, she was finally accepted into the Ontario Veterinary College and that same year, Fraser's mother died. Williams graduated in 1941 and she began practicing as a veterinarian. For the first time, the two women acquired a home together, living in Toronto. They took in a foster child, Jenny Rodd, a war refugee from England, who remained with them until the war ended. Rising homophobia during the war-years, which carried into the 1950s and 1960s led the couple to hide the intimate nature of their relationship from their ward and present an ambiguous relationship to the greater society, limiting their social life to those who knew them best.