Franklin, Ursula M., 1921-2016

Ursula Maria Martius was born in Munich, Germany on September 16, 1921. Her mother was Jewish and an art historian and her father, an ethnographer, came from an old German Protestant family. Ursula studied chemistry and physics at Berlin University until she was expelled by the Nazis. Her parents were interned in concentration camps while Franklin herself was sent to a forced labour camp and repaired bombed buildings. The family survived The Holocaust and was reunited in Berlin after the war.
In 1948, Franklin received her Ph.D. in experimental physics at the Technical University of Berlin.
Franklin moved to Canada after being offered the Lady Davis postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto in 1949. She then worked for 15 years (from 1952 to 1967) as first a research fellow and then as a senior research scientist at the Ontario Research Foundation. In 1967, Franklin became a researcher and associate professor at the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science University of Toronto's Faculty of Engineering where she was an expert in metallurgy and materials science. She was promoted to full professor in 1973 and was given the designation of University Professor in 1984, becoming the first female professor to receive the university's highest honour. She was appointed professor emerita in 1987, a title she retained until her death. She served as director of the university's Museum Studies Program from 1987 to 1989, was named a Fellow of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 1988, and a Senior Fellow of Massey College in 1989.

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 was one of a number of scientists who participated in the Baby Tooth Survey, a project founded by Eric and Louise Reiss along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, which investigated levels of strontium-90—a radioactive isotope in fallout from nuclear weapons testing—in children's teeth. This research contributed to the cessation of atmospheric weapons testing. Franklin 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.

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.

Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology.

Ursula Franklin explains in a prelude to her 2006 collection of papers, interviews and talks that her lifelong interest in structures, in what she terms "the arrangement and interplay of the parts within a whole," has been at the root of most of her activities. Looking back after almost 40 years, she adds, "I can see how I have tried to wrestle with just one fundamental question: 'How can one live and work as a pacifist in the here and now and help to structure a society in which oppression, violence, and wars would diminish and co-operation, equality, and justice would rise?'" As part of the answer, Franklin turns to the metaphor of mapmaking to explain her intellectual journey. "Increasingly I found the maps of conventional wisdom inadequate for my travels," she writes. "I became unwilling and unable to orient my life according to national maps depicting the realms of 'them' and 'us,' of good guys and bad guys, of winning, defeating, and being defeated; in short, all those maps drawn up for travel towards private gain and personal advancement." Franklin concludes that she has been guided in understanding what she calls "the real world" by "the maps of pacifism and feminism".

For her, feminism meant a completely new point of view: "Feminism isn't an employment agency for women; it's an alternative way of ordering the social space, in which women are the prototype rather than men. It is based on collaboration rather than competition. As a youngster, I still remember my feeling of joy that one could look at the earth differently. That's feminism; everything is differently oriented. Seeing the same world with different eyes."

In 1952, Ursula Franklin married Fred Franklin (born 1921), an engineer of German Jewish ancestry who had been exposed to Quakerism while living in England, where he had been sent to boarding school to escape the Nazis in 1936 and remained until emigrating to Canada in 1948. They had no family in Canada and, after their two children were born, they searched for a spiritual home and joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) in 1964. Franklin spent her last years in a nursing home with Fred, who survived her. She died on July 22, 2016 at the age of 94.

In April 2013, Franklin donated her extensive collection of writings devoted to Chinese culture and history to the Confucius Institute at Seneca College in Toronto. The collection included more than 220 texts, books, publications, and journals interpreting Chinese culture and history from the perspective of Western scholars. It also contained some of Franklin's own working papers and files. The collection is stewarded by Seneca Archives and Special Collections, a service of Seneca Libraries.

Franklin received numerous awards and honours during her long career. In 1984, she became the first woman at the University of Toronto to be named University Professor, a special title which is the highest honour given by the university. She was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981 and a Companion of the Order in 1992. She was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 1990. In 1982, she was given the award of merit for the City of Toronto, mainly for her work in neighbourhood planning. She received an honorary membership in the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International for women educators in 1985. Two years later, she was given the Elsie Gregory McGill memorial award for her contributions to education, science and technology. In 1989, she received the Wiegand Award which recognizes Canadians who have made significant contributions to the understanding of the human dimensions of science and technology. In 1991, she received a Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Person's Case for advancing the equality of girls and women in Canada. The same year, she received the Sir John William Dawson Medal. She received the 2001 Pearson Medal of Peace for her work in human rights. She has a Toronto high school named after her, Ursula Franklin Academy. In 2004, Franklin was awarded one of Massey College's first Adrienne Clarkson Laureateships, honoring outstanding achievement in public service. She was inducted into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in 2012. She received honorary degrees from more than a dozen Canadian universities including a Doctor of Science from Queen's University and a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Saint Vincent University, both awarded in 1985.

In March 2020, the Toronto East York Community Council voted unanimously to have Russell Street renamed Ursula Franklin Street.