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This is the story of Anne Dagg. This is a noon chart.
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Anne Innis Dagg, pioneering giraffe researcher, dies at 91
After she was denied tenure by an all-male committee, she campaigned against sexism in science and higher education
By Harrison Smith
April 11, 2024
Anne Innis Dagg, a Canadian zoologist who broke new ground in animal research while studying giraffes in the wild, and who later campaigned against institutional sexism after she was denied tenure by an all-male committee and told that women belonged in the home instead of the academy, died April 1 at a hospital in Kitchener, Ontario. She was 91.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, said Paul Zimic, the executive producer of “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” a 2018 documentary about her life.
An exuberant researcher who seemed as comfortable in the field as she was in the lecture hall, Dr. Innis Dagg had a lifelong fascination with giraffes that began when she was 3, when she encountered the long-necked animals for the first time during a visit to the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. She later told CBC Radio that when she asked for a book about giraffes, she was told one did not exist.
“So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll learn about giraffes and then I’ll write one.’ ”
A few years before Jane Goodall began her field studies on chimpanzees in Tanzania, and a decade before Dian Fossey started her research on mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Dr. Innis Dagg went to South Africa to study giraffes in the bush near Kruger National Park. She was only 23 when she arrived in 1956, and was considered the first scientist to study giraffes in the wild — and one of only a few researchers at the time to study any animal in its natural habitat.
If you wanted to know about the species, you would watch it in the zoo or you’d study it by looking at the bones or looking at museum specimens, trying to figure out the taxonomy,” said Fred Bercovitch, a comparative wildlife biologist on the board of the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, a conservation and education group. Dr. Innis Dagg, he added, was “at the cutting edge” in focusing on animal behavior and ecology, doing research that entered the mainstream only in the 1960s.
For about nine hours a day over an eight-month span, Dr. Innis Dagg took notes on the way the world’s tallest land animals moved, ate, fought, socialized and cared for their young. She kept track of about 95 giraffes, using a 16-millimeter camera to film the peculiar way they walked and galloped. When one of the animals was killed, she conducted an autopsy of sorts, drying the intestines and measuring them at 256 feet.
For the most part, she tried to stay out of the way, observing giraffes from inside her car, a rickety Ford Prefect — bought for 200 pounds — that she called Camelo, after camelopardalis, a scientific name for the giraffe.
Dr. Innis Dagg summarized her findings in a 1958 scientific article, published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, that laid the groundwork for the book she had long dreamed of writing. Published in 1976 with co-author J. Bristol Foster, “The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior, and Ecology” was considered a landmark in the field, pulling together virtually everything that was known about the animals.
“Without her pioneering work, the study of giraffes would not have been as complete,” said Graham Mitchell, a zoologist and physiologist who drew on her research for his 2021 book “How Giraffes Work.” He called Dr. Innis Dagg “the doyenne of giraffe researchers,” adding in an email that through her research and writing, she “did much to make the world aware of these remarkable and threatened animals.”
But by the time Dr. Innis Dagg published “The Giraffe,” her academic career had been “sidetracked,” as she put it, “by the institutional sexism that was rampant in academia.”
She was working as an assistant zoology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, teaching, publishing and conducting research while raising three children with her husband, when she was denied tenure in 1971 and told that she would have to leave her job.
The school’s tenure committee said that her teaching was “not up to standard” and alleged that her more than 20 peer-reviewed research papers were not of a “desirable scientific sophistication.”
The only committee member to back her, zoology colleague Sandy Middleton, told the Toronto Star much later that he believed Dr. Innis Dagg had “ran into the old boys’ network,” which may have sought to punish her because of jealousy over her research.
Dr. Innis Dagg unsuccessfully appealed the decision, making headlines in Canadian newspapers after she accused the university of sexism. She noted that around the same time, two other women who had been briefly employed as zoology professors were denied tenure, in what she believed was a way for the department “to save money, having many large classes taught by academics hired at the lowest rate, then replaced by others also beginning at the salary floor.”
Over the next few years, she tried and failed to secure another academic posting near her family in Toronto. She later said that a dean at the University of Waterloo “told me he would never give a married woman tenure because she had a husband to support her.”
When she was passed over for a teaching position at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and learned that the position went to a man with less experience, she filed a discrimination claim with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. The case didn’t go anywhere, she said, and she turned down part-time positions that she believed the university had offered in an attempt at “conciliation.”
Looking for ways to finance her research, she took a part-time job in 1978 at the University of Waterloo, where she became an academic adviser in the independent studies program. The job helped her continue to work as an independent scholar — she conducted research on homosexuality in animals, the locomotion of camels and the impact of human development on Canadian wildlife — even as she branched into other fields, calling out sexism in books including “Harems and Other Horrors: Sexual Bias in Behavioral Biology” (1983) and “MisEducation: Women & Canadian Universities” (1988).
With few exceptions, like an appearance on the American game show “To Tell the Truth” in 1965, she was largely overlooked by the general public until 2014, when the CBC broadcast an hour-long radio documentary about her work. The feature inspired Alison Reid to make a documentary film, “The Woman Who Loves Giraffes,” which followed Dr. Innis Dagg on her first return trip to South Africa in almost 60 years.
Dr. Innis Dagg, by then in her 80s, became increasingly in-demand on the academic circuit, attending conferences, accepting honorary doctorates and giving interviews in which she sought to promote science education, especially for women and girls. She also championed conservation efforts for giraffes, which have faced dramatic population declines in recent decades amid habitat loss and poaching.
In 2019, she was appointed a member of the Order of Canada. Earlier that year she had returned to the University of Guelph, where her academic ambitions had first been thwarted, for a screening of the documentary.
The dean of the university’s College of Biological Science announced that a research scholarship for women had been created in her honor. A letter was also read from the school’s provost and vice president, Charlotte Yates, who wrote that she was extending “an overdue apology for the ways in which you and other women were treated by the institution.”
“Isn’t it weird?” Dr. Innis Dagg told the Star, marveling at the crowds that lined up to shake her hand or give her a hug after screenings. “I’ve been ignored my whole life, and just to find out now that I’m actually a person and people really think I’m interesting — it’s pretty amazing.”
The youngest of four children, Anne Christine Innis was born in Toronto on Jan. 25, 1933.
Her mother, Mary Quayle Innis, was an American-born writer and historian who also served as dean of women at the University of Toronto’s University College. Her father, Harold Innis, was a communication theorist who became the head of the political economy department at the University of Toronto; he also helped inspire her love of nature, once making a canoe trip to the arctic to see beavers and bears.
After graduating from the Bishop Strachan School, a Toronto prep school, Dr. Innis Dagg studied at the University of Toronto, receiving a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1955 and a master’s degree in genetics in 1956.
Convinced that the best way to understand giraffes was to study them in the wild, she sent more than a dozen letters to African wildlife officials, looking for someone who might sponsor her research. The replies were not encouraging; some suggested that an unmarried young woman should not be traveling alone, and warned that she might encounter trouble from rhinos and other hazards of the savanna.
After she began signing her letters with a gender-ambiguous name, “A. Innis,” she finally found a sponsor: a rancher, Alexander Matthew, who invited her to stay at his property, Fleur de Lys farm, in apartheid-era South Africa.
By the time she arrived in the country, Matthew had realized from one of her subsequent letters that she was a woman, and concluded that it was improper, as a married man with his family out of the country, to host a “girl” at his house. He eventually relented, according to Dr. Innis Dagg, after she wrote him letters “every other day for two or three weeks.”
On her way back home to Canada in 1957, she stopped in England and married her fiancé, Canadian scientist Ian Ralph Dagg. He chaired the physics department at the University of Waterloo before his death in 1993. Survivors include their three children, Hugh, Ian and Mary; a brother; and a grandson.
Dr. Innis Dagg received a PhD in animal behavior from the University of Waterloo in 1967, using her footage of giraffes for a dissertation on animal gaits. She said that because she was unable to get a tenure-track job and was busy raising children, “there was little opportunity” for a return trip to South Africa.
Still, she was able to conduct field work in the Sahara during the summer of 1973, when she studied camels in triple-digit heat.
“The Jeep I hired broke down in the desert,” she told the Star the next year, recalling her journey home. “I stayed with some nomads until I got a lift in a truck to the railway station. Then our train got derailed in a sandstorm.
“Apart from that, it was quite uneventful.”
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The curious, extraordinary life of Anne Innis Dagg
The Canadian woman who was first in the world to study giraffes in the wild — and is still considered one of the planet’s foremost experts on the species — is only now getting her due
Aug 13, 2019
By Alanna Mitchell
The first time I spotted her, Anne Innis Dagg was sitting alone on a small settee in the middle of a springtime party at a posh downtown Toronto hotel, oblivious to the glittering swirl surrounding her. While many of the other guests were in silks and heels, Innis Dagg wore slacks, sensible shoes and a short-sleeved yellow T-shirt decorated with giraffes. Rather than nibbling on canapés, schmoozing and sipping good wine, she was absorbed in a tattered newspaper.
That’s Innis Dagg in a nutshell: she marches to her own beat. And that has led her to a curious life of extraordinary scientific firsts and extraordinary obscurity. Widely considered the founder of giraffe science, she was the first to study the giraffe in the wild; the first zoologist to study any African animal in the wild; an inventor of the scientific discipline of behavioural biology; and, more than six decades and copious academic papers and books later, still one of the world’s leading experts on the giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis.
“You can’t be a giraffe researcher unless you’ve read her book,” says Fred Bercovitch, a zoologist who is executive director of the Texas-based group Save the Giraffes.
But partly because she has been in the vanguard — and partly because she chose to study an eccentric ungulate rather than a cuddly primate — those accomplishments have not brought her decades of fame. While generations of zoologists have relied on her scientific work and quoted her in their publications, the woman herself has lived resolutely out of the limelight in Waterloo, Ont. She has languished in part-time academic jobs with no tenure, applying her bacon-slicer of a mind to studies on everything from feminism to literature to camels to animal rights.
More curiously still, the trajectory of the giraffe has mirrored the trajectory of its first scientist. For the past 60 years, the giraffe has languished, too, largely overlooked by researchers while the fate of other African mammals has galvanized public outcry.
Until now. In 2016, the international scientific community discovered, to its astonishment, that the giraffe is vulnerable to extinction. As conservation scientists race to save the species — and several of the nine or so subspecies that are in terrible peril — Innis Dagg, now 86, is at last getting her due. And so is the giraffe.
Innis Dagg’s long love affair with the giraffe began in 1936 when she was three. The daughter of University of Toronto economic historian Harold Innis and writer and historian Mary Quayle Innis, Innis Dagg was on holiday in Chicago that year and went to the Brookfield Zoo.
While other toddlers were entranced with the panda bears and chimpanzees, Innis Dagg was riveted by the giraffes.
“Perhaps their height, especially from a small child’s perspective, impressed me; perhaps it was the rush of movement when something startled them and they cantered in a flurry of necks and legs across their paddock,” she writes in her 2006 memoir Pursuing Giraffe.
Obsession ensued. And endured. Once she got to the University of Toronto in 1951, she chose to study science, unlike her female friends who planted themselves firmly in the humanities. It was a strategy to study the giraffe. And once she got her first degree, armed with a gold medal in biology, she wrote to officials in Kenya, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and Uganda to arrange field studies. Among them was the famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who would launch Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees four years later.
No dice. Why would anybody want to study the giraffe? Even her professors laughed at her. Go to Africa? To study giraffes in the wild? As a woman? Not even men were doing that then.
Innis Dagg slogged through a master’s degree in mouse genetics at the University of Toronto, still searching for a way to study giraffes, when luck struck. Through a husband-and-wife pair of academics in South Africa, she heard of a cattle farmer, Alexander Matthew, whose spread was home to wild giraffes. He was open to having a researcher look at them. The hitch: he assumed she was a man.
Undaunted, Innis Dagg, then 23, set sail for London, then South Africa, dashing off a note to Matthew at the last minute to explain that she was female. It was 1956. She had little money. No backers. No institutional affiliation or academic supervisor. No experience in field research or how to conduct it. No certainty that Matthew would accept her. No means of getting to his remote farm if he did. No understanding of how apartheid, recently enforced by the National Party, was playing out in South African society, including for an unaccompanied, unmarried white woman.
None of it mattered to her. Pursuing the giraffe was the only thing she cared about.
“I didn’t think I was a rebel,” she says. “I just know when I want to do something, and I do it.” She pauses, then adds matter-of-factly: “It’s quite a simple explanation.”
I have tracked Innis Dagg to the archives at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, where her papers, and those of her famous mother, are stored. We are waiting for the archivist to bring out the African notebook that describes her very first observations of giraffes in the wild.
In the end, the farmer — whom she still refers to as Mr. Matthew all these years later — finally gave in and allowed her to study his giraffes. She was so determined, he said. And so far from home. He also said she could live in his farmhouse despite worries that it would appear unseemly because she was unmarried and his wife and daughters were away. She bought a hunch-backed little green Ford, drove two long days to his farm and began six months of 14-hour days watching giraffes. It was, she says, heaven.
She was finally with the wild giraffe, one of evolution’s most extravagant pranks. The tallest land animal, a giraffe has legs so long that it can step over most humans. Their towering necks are not rigid, but flexible enough to coil around the throat of a competitor with the ease of a boa constrictor. The male’s skull weighs three times that of the female — the better to use as a battering ram against opponents. Their mighty hearts tip the scales at nearly eight kilograms. Comical, knobby horns stick out on top of their heads and triangular ears often point parallel to the ground. Their tongues are deep purple, tethered to the back of the mouth with a band of delicate pink and capable of curling around a twig the way a New World monkey’s tail clasps a vine.
Giraffes are diffident. Despite sharing the African savannah with so many other creatures, giraffes don’t behave as though they are part of a community. “They do what they want and couldn’t care less what others think,” says Innis Dagg.
In 1956, when Innis Dagg began studying giraffes, so little was known about them or other African mammals that her pipesmoking colleague Rosalie (Griff) Ewer of Rhodes University used to screech to a halt when she saw roadkill and load it into her truck, rotted or not, so she could study the corpses. When it came to giraffes, no one formally trained in science had actually sat still and watched the same individuals for months on end, trying to figure out the basics: what they ate and when, who they mated with, how the herds were structured.
Innis Dagg broke all that ground, discovering among other things that giraffes eat day and night, that they are constantly on the move but not migratory, that males spend a lot of time sniffing and sipping females’ urine to see whether they are keen to mate and that males are fond of homosexual sex. All of it transformed the way science saw the creatures.
The archivist arrives with a trolley of material. Here is the first notebook from 1956, a faded blue Tudor scribbler, its cover boasting an image of St. George, that fabled preserver of princesses, mounted on his charge, slaying a dragon. (Privately, I wonder if the image is one of Innis Dagg’s dry jokes; surely no 1950s maiden was less in need of rescue.)
Innis Dagg has written “GOOD GIRAFFE NOTES 1” in the upper right corner. Inside, the lined, yellowed pages hold the research she had fought so hard and travelled so far to conduct, starting with her first full day of careful observations. She was euphoric that day, she says.
Today in the archives, more than six decades later, her eyes fill with tears with the shock of seeing her words again after such a long time. Being in Africa then was her golden age. She was young. She had a whole continent to explore. A whole life ahead of her. She was doing exactly what she wanted.
In the years since, she’s given birth to three children, outlived a husband and a subsequent partner, written more than 20 books and been stymied professionally. She earned her PhD at Waterloo in 1967 with the idea of becoming a professor and going off to Africa every summer to study the giraffe, as she might have done had she been born male.
But when it came time to find a permanent teaching job and tenure at any of the universities she applied to in southern Ontario, it was, again, no dice. Men got the jobs instead, even those who had not published as many papers. One science dean declared, in 1972, that he would never give tenure to a married woman. She made do with part-time work, scraping together money to continue publishing about the giraffe on the side. But in 1956 when she cracked open this notebook for the first time, all of this was yet to come.
“Things seemed so much easier then,” she says.
The 19th century was unkind to African wildlife. Europeans arrived with guns and trophy-lust. Nevertheless, in 1908 the British big game hunter Frederick Courteney Selous wrote of the giraffe: “Throughout the greater part of this immense range, these magnificent, strangely beautiful creatures will, in my opinion, continue to live and thrive for centuries yet to come.”
Not so. In 1800, South Africa alone had thousands of giraffes, but a century later, just as Selous was making his pronouncement, the animals were so rare there that Boers, who liked to use giraffe hide to make cattle whips, had to import skins from East Africa, Innis Dagg writes in her 2014 book Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation. They appear to have gone extinct in at least seven African countries.
In 2010, the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list of threatened species clocked the giraffe as a species of least concern for extinction. Just six years later, it was forced to downgrade the giraffe by two levels, saying the species is vulnerable to extinction. In 2018, they listed two subspecies (Nubian and Kordofan) as critically endangered.
Today, there are fewer than 100,000 giraffes, a drop of as much as 40 per cent in three decades. And those numbers continue to fall. Even now, giraffes are being poached, hunted for food and driven out of prime landscape by farming, settlement, war and mines.
Scientists missed the trend. Their attention was focused on other endangered African icons: lions, elephants, black rhinos, cheetahs, chimpanzees and Eastern gorillas. Even Innis Dagg was taken aback.
“In my wildest dreams I never thought there would be no more giraffe,” she says, quaintly using the singular to mean the plural. “I thought they would always be there. You just knew.”
I have caught up with Innis Dagg again, this time at the 2018 North American Congress for Conservation Biology on a sweltering late July day in Toronto. It’s a who’s who of scientists on the front lines of saving species from extinction. Pulled into action by the crisis, Innis Dagg has helped organize a symposium on the giraffe.
The message is tough. Despite the steep decline in giraffe numbers, fewer than 10 scientists in the world are “boots on the ground” studying the species, Francois Deacon, a wildlife biologist at University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, tells the crowd.
“We are running out of time,” he says.
Part of the recovery plan revolves around the resurrection of Innis Dagg’s story. Until about 2010, when the international community of zookeepers joyfully tracked her down and invited her to come to a conference in Phoenix to pick up an award, Innis Dagg had no idea there was a giraffology world, much less that she was a treasured part of it.
Soon, to her utter astonishment, it embraced her. In 2013, already in her 80s, she finally got back to Africa for the first time for the giraffe — she was there in the 1970s for the camel — taking in a conference in Nairobi. In 2015, when the IUCN’s shocking giraffe numbers came out, she went back again to visit scientists and the farm where she had worked in the 1950s, accompanied by Canadian filmmaker Alison Reid.
The result of that sojourn is Reid’s documentary about her life: The Woman Who Loves Giraffes. It has been shown in limited theatre releases and at festivals since September 2018, to consistent standing ovations, and will eventually hit the small screen (it’s available now on iTunes).
The recognition has led to calls for Dagg to get the Order of Canada and honorary degrees from the universities that denied her tenure. In February, the University of Guelph formally apologized for refusing to give her tenure and donated money to three of her favourite giraffe charities.
Frailer now, but game for more adventure, she is planning yet another trip to Africa. It is redemption, of a type.
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Anne Innis Dagg
Article by Erin James-Abra
Published Online August 23, 2019
Last Edited January 3, 2020
Anne Innis Dagg, CM, zoologist, feminist activist, author (born 25 January 1933 in Toronto, ON). Dagg is best known as a giraffe expert. In 1956, she became the first Western researcher, man or woman, to study the animal in the wild in Africa. Though better known, two of her contemporaries, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, followed in her footsteps: Goodall began her study of chimpanzees in 1960 and Fossey her study of mountain gorillas in 1963. Dagg was also a pioneer in the study of mammal gaits and homosexual behaviour. Later in her career she fought for equality between men and women, particularly in academia.
Early Life
Anne Innis Dagg was born to Mary Quayle and Harold Adams Innis in 1933. She has three older siblings: Donald, Mary and Hugh. Anne’s father was a pioneering economic historian and professor at the University of Toronto. His books The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries (1940) helped shape the study of Canada’s political economy. In 1964, 12 years after his death, Innis College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.
Dagg’s mother was also an author and academic. Her work An Economic History of Canada (1935) was used as a textbook in her husband’s courses. She served as dean of women at the University of Toronto’s University College from 1955-64. Mary Quayle Innis also wrote fiction, including a novel and short stories for national magazines such as Saturday Night.
When Dagg was three years old, her mother took her to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, Illinois. There, Dagg saw a giraffe for the first time. “It immediately became my favourite animal,” she writes in her memoir, Smitten by Giraffe. “I wanted to learn everything about it.”
Education
As a high school student, Anne Innis Dagg entered the science stream at Bishop Strachan School, a prestigious all-girls school in Toronto.
Dagg completed a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1955 and a master’s degree in genetics in 1956, both from the University of Toronto. In 1967, she received her doctorate from the University of Waterloo in animal behaviour. Her thesis analyzed the gaits of the American antelope, nine species of deer, and six species from the cattle family.
First Trip to Africa
In 1956, at the age of 23, Anne Innis Dagg made her first trip to Africa. From 1956 to 1957, she studied giraffes at the Fleur de Lys Ranch near Kruger National Park, South Africa.
In an effort to convince the owner of the ranch, Alexander Matthew, to let her come, Dagg signed all her correspondence with him as “A. Innis.” In doing so, Dagg knew Mathew would presume her a man, and therefore be more likely to let her come. There was a brief delay when Mathew, having realized Dagg’s sex, wrote to tell her she could no longer be his guest. Dagg’s persistence eventually persuaded him, however, and she continued her journey to the ranch.
Anne Innis Dagg's car, which she named Camelo, at the Fleur de Lys Ranch, South Africa, in 1956. Dagg sat in Camelo for hundreds of hours in order to observe giraffes.
Having arrived in South Africa by boat, Dagg drove to Fleur de Lys in a second-hand Ford Prefect she named Camelo, after the giraffe’s scientific name Camelopardalis. She made the trip alone — a dangerous journey for a single, white, foreign woman during the apartheid era. Dagg continued to make use of Camelo after arriving at Fleur de Lys. The car served as a hiding place, and Dagg spent hundreds of hours observing giraffes from within its sweltering confines.
Research
In 1958, Anne Innis Dagg published her observations of giraffes in South Africa in the journal Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. Her article, titled “The Behaviour of the Giraffe, Giraffa Camelopardalis, in the Eastern Transvaal,” was the first scientific article about an African mammal ever published.
In 1976, Dagg published her first book about giraffes. The book was co-authored with Bristol Foster, a former classmate at the University of Toronto, and titled Giraffe: Biology, Behaviour and Conservation. Zoologists around the world consider the book the “Bible” on giraffes.
Dagg spent the years between her first trip to South Africa and the publication of Giraffe researching the animal and tending to her young family. As part of this research she analyzed giraffe gaits, feeding the 16 mm film she had taken at the ranch through a projector perched atop a card table. In her memoir, Dagg writes, “The table was later made higher so that I could stand up while tracing the features of each of the hundreds of strides; this was because if I sat down one, or later both, of my small boys, Hugh and Ian, would scramble onto my lap to ‘help.’”
In addition to laying the foundation for scientific research on giraffes, Dagg’s studies were pioneering in other ways. She was the first, for example, to describe homosexual behaviour in the wild in an English scientific paper. Dagg did so in her 1958 article about giraffes. An earlier researcher, Murray Levick, had observed male homosexual behaviour in Adelie penguins in 1910-13; however, he was so uncomfortable with what he saw that he published his findings in Greek so that few could read them. Ongoing homophobia meant that, in 1984, when Dagg published a survey of homosexuality in 125 different species, she was still the only zoologist studying the subject.
Teaching Career
In 1962, Anne Innis Dagg began teaching as a part-time lecturer at Waterloo Lutheran University, now Wilfrid Laurier University. In 1968, she was hired as a full-time assistant professor in the zoology department at the University of Guelph.
Despite her experience and expertise in the field, when Dagg applied for tenure in 1971 she was denied. “One dean told me he would never give tenure to a married woman because she had a man to support her,” Dagg writes in Smitten by Giraffe. “Case closed.”
Shortly thereafter she applied for a job as a biologist at Wilfrid Laurier University. She didn’t get an interview. Later, Dagg discovered the all-male hiring committee had chosen one of their friends, someone with far fewer publications than Dagg. She took the case to the Ontario Human Rights Commission and eventually lost. During this time, she also applied for work at Western and York universities, and was turned away.
Dagg was never granted tenure. She did, however, work for 35 years for the University of Waterloo’s independent studies program, from 1978 to 2013. During this time she served as resource person, senior academic advisor, and academic director.
Feminism
The sexism Anne Innis Dagg experienced throughout her academic career informed her fight for equality between men and women. In her memoir, Dagg describes the moment she realized discrimination extended beyond her personal troubles. She writes, “I would no longer obsess over my own problems with sexism but fight for equality for all academic women, for women of all sorts, for anyone suffering from tyranny.”
Dagg’s activism took many forms, from advocating for women in universities to writing a newsletter about sexist language. The idea for the newsletter, founded in 1983 and called Language Alert Newsletter, grew from arguments with authors Pierre Burton and Northrop Frye over their use of sexist wording. In it, Dagg detailed the sexist language used in whatever she was reading at the time. One issue, for example, noted the World Wildlife Fund’s use male pronouns to describe the Peregrine falcon, while another focussed on the titles of university courses such as “Anthropology and the Future of Man.”
Her fight over sexist language in academia was part of a larger campaign to make universities more welcoming to women. In 1988, for example, Dagg, along with one of her students, Patricia Thompson, published MisEducation: Women and Canadian Universities. The book described the sexist culture at Canadian universities, and advocated for less government funding to those institutions with discriminatory practices.
Personal Life
Anne Innis Dagg married Ian Ralph Dagg (1928-1993) when she returned from her first trip to Africa. Ian was a physicist she had met as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. In 1959, the couple moved to Waterloo after Ian accepted a job at the University of Waterloo. They had three children: Hugh (1960), Ian (1962) and Mary (1965).
In 2006, Dagg published Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure, detailing her year spent studying giraffes in South Africa. Toronto-based filmmaker Alison Reid was inspired by the story. Her documentary about Dagg, called The Woman Who Loves Giraffes, was released in 2018.
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Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6_UVfr-HfI
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Her natal Lilith uis 15 Sagittarius, N.Node 1 Capricorn, S.Node 26 Taurus
Her natal Ceres is 20 Aquarius, N.Node 1 Gemini, S.Node 1 Capricorn,
Her natal Amazon is 2 Pices, N.Node 5 Taurus, S.Node 6 Sagittarius
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Goddess Bless, Rad