I went into grade seven and my sister Trish went into grade twelve.
That year, Nick Jones had an after class program in calculus, but limited to the boys. Trish wanted to take it too, but Nick gently said “no, girls couldn’t do math.” Trish was enough of a feminist to think this opinion was old fashioned, as she was very fond of Jones as an inspiring math teacher, it was hard to be cross about the exclusion.
The school sent four grade twelve students to compete on a competitive quiz TV show called Reach For The Top which was broadcast out of Kelowna. Trish was part of the team along with Ditmar Mundel, Gunnar Kuehn, and Rees Morgan. The group won every match against other high school teams. The prizes consisted of books for the high school library.
One of Trish’s friends was a very witty girl named Diane Hunter. Diane spent a lot of time at our house and was sort of part of the family. Diane didn’t want to call our mother “mom” which seemed too familiar, or “Mrs Smith”, which did not seem familiar enough, so she started calling her Auntie Kay and the name stuck, as my readers well know when I refer to Auntie Kay that I’m referring to my mother.
As Trish went through grade twelve she applied for scholarships to study at the University of British Columbia ( UBC ) in Vancouver, with the long term aim of going into law. When the scholarships were awarded she was able to have her first year largely paid for. Mom and Dad also contributed modest funds as well.
All together, though, the money was not nearly enough to cover all costs. She worked at various part time jobs in the residence kitchen at Fort Camp as well as the kitchen at the Faculty Cub. She also worked at the packing house in Oliver during the summers. Even with the scholarships, parent assistance, and extra work, the cost of law school was way out of reach. Her friends taking Law, all males, said it would be a miserable three years for a female, with not much in the way of prospects at the end. This seems outlandish now but that was the way it was then.
Trish’s field of choice then was philosophy, with biology “on the side”. While studying at UBC, she applied for a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh which was a school well known for work in Philosophy of Science. She won the scholarship and upon gaining her bachelors degree, she headed off to the United States.
The program in Pittsburgh was about three years, but after a short while she decided she really wanted to study at Oxford in England. She took a Terminal Masters Degree and won a British Commonwealth scholarship to study at Oxford.
The scholarship people arranged for all the Canadian scholars, about six from various fields, to travel out of Montreal by boat (the SS Franconia) to Southampton. That year was 1966, twenty one years after the end of the Second World War, and England was still putting itself back together, but Oxford and London were very exciting cities. Trish liked to regale her Oxford friends at sherry parties with tales of the woods in BC.
With her final degree in hand, she married Paul Churchland, whom she had known at UBC and also in Pittsburgh. He had a great job at the University of Toronto, but at that time it had “nepotism rules” meaning that it was illegal to hire both a husband and a wife. At York University, the head of the philosophy department told Trish he would never hire a woman, that ended the Toronto hope for employment.
Luckily, the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg had jobs open that year which was 1969. Paul resigned his Toronto job and they moved to Winnipeg. While teaching on the Main Campus, Trish also studied neuroscience at the medical school. Out of that effort, she and Paul launched the research program known as “Neurophilosphy”, which is the study at the interface of traditional questions about the decision making, consciousness and knowledge with new knowledge about the way the brain works.
While in Winnipeg, Trish and Paul had two children, Mark and Anne. After fourteen years, an opportunity arose to work at the University of California in San Diego which they chose and taught there for some thirty years.
When you put the name of Patricia Churchland in the search space on Youtube you will get videos of her.