The Life of a Female Drifter: An Entomologist Remembers

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Margaret Rae MacKay, born in Saskatchewan in 1914, was the first female
entomologist to graduate from the University of Saskatchewan, but it
took some time before she found work in her chosen field. Her excellent
thesis drawings for her master’s degree landed her a job as an
entomological artist at the British Museum of Natural History. After
returning to Canada in 1940, she worked as a scientific artist in forest
entomology at the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa. There she began
to study the insects she was drawing—focusing on the larvae of
moths—and to publish her findings in scientific journals. She
subsequently earned an international reputation for her many
publications and, 15 years after her retirement, was told at the British
Museum of Natural History that no later publications had matched her
larval works. In 1969, she had her “15 minutes of fame” when she
found a head capsule of a moth larva in a piece of Canadian amber that
was 72 million years old. Her discovery was the first evidence that
moths existed so long ago.

Although Margaret MacKay was well paid and highly respected in Ottawa
and abroad, elsewhere in Canada she met a great deal of sexism in the
male-centric profession. She always fought back, and her stories remind
us of the struggle many women had 50 years ago to be recognized for
their talents.

She also writes honestly but discursively about her men friends
(nothing salacious), her mother (the author never married), her world
travels (complete with small photos), and her study of fine art in
Mexico after her retirement. She takes us here and there as she recalls
“drifting on the current of events,” but is reticent about her
personal life and sketchy in her travel accounts, which read more like
an itinerary than like a travel story.

It is when she talks of her work that she grabs our interest. The study
of insects is the adventure at the core of her story; many readers would
have liked to have had more of it.