Elizabeth Monk
Canadian lawyer
Elizabeth Carmichael Monk (August 4, 1898 – December 26, 1980) was a Canadian lawyer and Montreal city councillor. In 1942, she became one of the first two women admitted to the Quebec Bar, alongside Suzanne Raymond Filion. In 1980, she was one of five recipients of the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case.
Early life and education
Monk was born in Montreal on August 4, 1898, to Alfred Monk, a lawyer, and Mary Elizabeth Monk. She studied at Montreal's High School for Girls. A Governor General's gold medallist, she graduated from McGill University in 1919 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in modern languages and won a scholarship to Radcliffe College, where she graduated with a Master of Arts. She won the IODE overseas post-graduate scholarship for the province of Quebec and proceeded to study at Somerville College in Oxford. She went on to study civil law at McGill University, where she obtained her bachelor's degree in 1923 and received the Elizabeth Torrance Medal, the first woman to receive this award.
Career
Early career and activism
Despite her academic achievements, Monk could not write the bar exam as Quebec did not allow women to be admitted to the Quebec Bar at the time. Instead, she worked as a researcher for a law firm.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elizabeth Monk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.