Moira Day, U of Saskatchewan
The Minister's Daughter: The Sterling Family in England and Ontario

In her public interviews, Elizabeth Sterling Haynes frequently identified herself as the daughter of a Methodist minister who had begun his ministry in England then moved to Ontario. In doing so, Haynes instantly "coded" herself, at least in the public eye as being the product of a "respectable" middle-class background founded on the twin pillars of religion and education. It was a "pedigree" that undoubtedly helped open doors for her in an educational Establishment that had deeply ambivalent feelings about the inclusion of women - and married women in particular - as professionals. What has been missed by most researchers, including myself, is the extent to which that "coding" may have diverted people from asking more searching questions not only about the true nature of that claim, but about the other public identities that may have characterized the younger Elizabeth. It is true that from the age of 10 on, Elizabeth really was "the minister's daughter" and raised and educated as such in rural Ontario. The other things that she - and the Sterling family were - in the years between her birth in 1897 and her father's ordination in 1907 is the topic of this paper. Based on new research done in both England and Ontario, this paper not only describes a remarkable personal odyssey barely touched on in Haynes's own accounts of her early life but speculates on the extent to which the term "the minister's daughter" may have consciously hidden as much as it deliberately revealed of the adult professional woman.