Helen Gregory MacGill

alt=Photo of an elderly woman with short hair and eye glasses. Helen Gregory MacGill ( Gregory; after first marriage, Flesher; January 7, 1864 – February 27, 1947) was a Canadian judge, journalist and women's rights advocate. She was one of Canada's first woman judges, and for many years the country's only woman judge.

Biography Helen Emma Gregory was born in Hamilton, Ontario, the daughter of Emma and Silas Ebenezer Gregory. Her maternal grandfather was Upper Canada barrister and judge Miles O'Reilly, who successfully defended the group accused of participating in the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion. She became the first woman to receive a Bachelor of Music from Trinity College, She then went into newspaper work, working as a journalist for Cosmopolitan.

MacGill first married in 1890; her first husband, F.C. "Lee" Flesher, died in 1901 from the consequences of an earlier knife attack from one of the patients at the Mayo Clinic, leaving behind two young boys, Eric (1891) and Freddy (1894). She married the lawyer James Henry "Jim" MacGill, a friend from her college days, in 1902. With MacGill, she gave birth to two daughters, "Young Helen" (Dr. Helen MacGill Hughes (1903), and Elsie MacGill (1905), a pioneering female aeronautical engineer and aircraft designer.

She died on February 27, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, at the age of 83. She also wrote several articles for the Toronto Globe, and wrote for other magazines and papers like the Vancouver Daily World and People’s Magazine.

Life as a judge As part of her political and social role, MacGill was involved in the legal and political realities of British Columbia. As chair of the Laws Committee of the University Women’s Club, she was concerned about the situation of domestic legislation in the province. This situation led her to learn on her own about the subject, and then she self-published the book Daughters, Wives and Mothers in British Columbia as a guidebook with the laws regarding the topic.