May Sexton
(??? -
1923)
Originally from New Brunswick, May Sexton was a science graduate of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
suffragette whose husband who shared her progressive views on women's equality. Frederick Sexton was the first principal of the
Nova Scotia Technical College in
Halifax, Nova Scotia - now the Faculty of Engineering at
Dalhousie University. In 1908, May Sexton spoke to the Local Council of Women of her vision that women should have equal access to the province-wide system of technical education that her husband was working on for the provincial government. The council took up this cause, lobbying the politicians, and making a presentation to a federal royal commission on technical education in 1910. The women achieved little success against the prevailing view of the time that women should remain in the home but - exactly forty years after that stirring 1908 speech, the first woman engineer, N. Eddy, graduated from the
Nova Scotia Technical College.
During World War I, May Sexton's efforts on behalf of the Red Cross were heroic. She worked tirelessly throughout the war, and made a gruelling speaking tour of the entire province to raise funds for the Red Cross war effort. She died in 1923 of uremic poisoning as a result of kidney disease.
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