Career
Ursula Franklin began her career during World War II, but was imprisoned in a Nazi work camp because her mother was Jewish. She spent the rest of the war helping to repair bombed buildings. In 1948, Franklin received her Ph.D. in experimental physics at the Technical University of Berlin and emigrated to Canada the following year. She completed post-doctoral studies at the University of Toronto (U of T) and worked for 15 years at the Ontario Research Foundation. In 1967, Franklin became the first female professor in the U of T's department of metallurgy and materials science.
Franklin was a pioneer in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to archaeology. She worked for example, on the dating of prehistoric bronze, copper and ceramic artifacts. In the early 1960s, Franklin investigated levels of strontium-90—a radioactive isotope in fallout from nuclear weapons testing—in children's teeth. Her research contributed to the cessation of atmospheric weapons testing. Franklin has published more than a hundred scientific papers and contributions to books on the structure and properties of metals and alloys as well as on the history and social effects of technology.
As a member of the Science Council of Canada during the 1970s, Franklin chaired an influential study on conserving resources and protecting nature. The study's 1977 report, Canada as a Conserver Society, recommended a wide range of steps aimed at reducing wasteful consumption and the environmental degradation that goes with it. The work on that study helped shape Franklin's ideas about the complexities of modern technological society.
Franklin was also active in the Voice of Women (VOW), now the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, one of Canada's leading social advocacy organizations. In 1968, she and VOW national president Muriel Duckworth presented a brief to a House of Commons committee asserting that Canada and the United States had entered into military trade agreements without adequate public debate. They argued that these commercial arrangements made it difficult for Canada to adopt independent foreign policy positions such as calling for an immediate U.S. military withdrawal from South Vietnam. In 1969, Franklin and Duckworth called on a committee of the Canadian Senate to recommend that Canada discontinue its chemical and biological weapons research and spend money instead on environmental research and preventive medicine. Franklin was also part of a 1969 VOW delegation that urged the federal government to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and establish a special agency to oversee Canadian disarmament.
In the 1980s, Franklin participated in an organized campaign to win the right for conscientious objectors to redirect part of their income taxes from military uses to peaceful purposes. Her 1987 paper, written to support the campaign, argued that the well-recognized right to refuse military service on grounds of conscience should be extended to include the right to refuse to pay taxes for war preparations. Franklin asserted that the freedom of conscience provision of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed this form of conscientious objection. Her paper was to be part of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. The lower courts had convicted those withholding part of their taxes of violating the Income Tax Act. In 1990 however, the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.
Following Franklin's retirement, she and several other retired female faculty members filed a class action lawsuit against the University of Toronto claiming it had been unjustly enriched by paying women faculty less than comparably qualified men. In 2002, the lawsuit was settled when the university acknowledged that many of its female professors had suffered from gender barriers and pay discrimination during their careers. As a result, about 60 retired women faculty received a pay equity settlement intended to compensate them for the lower salaries and pensions they had received.
Franklin continues to have a strong association with the University of Toronto's Massey College as a continuing senior fellow and senior resident. Her many activities include encouraging young women to pursue careers in science, promoting peace and social justice, and speaking and writing about the social effects of science and technology. Many of her articles and speeches on pacifism, feminism, technology and teaching are collected in The Ursula Franklin Reader published in 2006. Franklin is also the author of The Real World of Technology which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures broadcast on CBC Radio.
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