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Dr. Frieda Fraser
(30 August 1899 – 29 July 1994) Canada

Frieda Fraser

Physician and microbiologist

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Ethel Frida Fraser's birth was recorded in York, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Helene (née Zahn) 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 (U of T) and taught at the Upper Canada College before being appointed as a lecturer in Italian and Spanish at U of T. Her mother was a native of Germany and the couple's children, William Kaspar, Donald and Frieda were fluent in German and French.

Frieda 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, FraFriedaser 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, Frieda went to the United States in the summer of 1925 to begin her internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.

Soon after her arrival in New York, Frieda began a more intense correspondence with Edith Williams, who would become her life partner. Despite the desires of both women's families to keep them apart - Edith's family sending her to England and Frieda's family threatening that continuing the relationship would fracture her familial ties - the two refused to give up their relationship.

In 1928, Frieda returned to Toronto and took up her research post, simultaneously working as a demonstrator with the Department of Hygiene and Preventative Medicine. Edith, 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.

Frieda Fraser
Frieda Fraser

When Edith was bequeathed a farm near Aurora, Ontario, the couple believed it might become their haven, but when Edith 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.

In 1937, Edith was finally accepted into the Ontario Veterinary College and that same year, Frieda's mother died. Edith 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.

In 1959, the couple purchased a house together located on Burlington Crescent in Toronto, near Edith's clinic and lived there until their retirement. In 1965, both women retired and sold their Toronto home, moving to the farm house owned by the Fraser family in Burlington, Ontario. The farm was located in a very scenic setting on the Niagara Escarpment, near the Bruce Trail. Frieda, who enjoyed gardening, tended the ground and Edith, who was a fine cook, enjoyed cooking for their frequent guests.

Having become interested in mountaineering, Edith enjoyed mountain-climbing and both women enjoyed taking excursions which allowed them to be outdoors. In their archives are many photographs taken with groups of women on camping and canoe trips. Edith suffered a severe stroke near the end of 1976 and never fully recovered from it requiring repeated hospitalizations at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Frieda drove in daily from Burlington to visit Edith, who died in 1979, after a series of additional strokes and Frieda returned to the home in Burlington where she remained until three weeks before her death, when her family placed her in a nursing home.

Frieda's family donated the couple's papers to the University of Toronto archives. The correspondence covers the period from 1925 to 1941, the period when the couple were unable to live together. Until 2001, the collection was a closed archive and could only be accessed with family permission. The archive contains nearly one thousand letters and is "one of the largest known collections detailing the experiences of women's same-sex sexuality in early twentieth century North America".

The two women did not refer to themselves as lesbian, though they were familiar with the term. Given the cultural norm of their time which depicted same-sex couples as diseased, they referred to themselves as "devoted women", making the distinction that they were not depraved, but had chosen their partnership.

They used their letters to create and define their relationship and frankly discuss not only other same-sex partnerships, but to evaluate what they believed about their attraction. Both dismissed Freud and pseudo-scientific theories which argued for a natural order that governed human actions, instead believing that their attraction was biological and innate, and not influenced by promiscuous living or self-loathing. The collection of letters is an important archive for the historical study of how sexual identity is developed and acknowledged within the contemporary context of an epoch and is a unique collection in that most such archives have not survived.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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