Margaret "Maggie" Lowe Benston was a professor of chemistry, computing science, and women's studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
10 Facts About Margaret Benston
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Margaret Benston was a respected feminist and labour activist, as well as a founding member of the Vancouver Women's Caucus, in 1988, the Euphoniously Feminist and Non-Performing Quintet in 1970, Simon Fraser University's Women's Studies Program in 1975, and Mayworks in 1988.
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For thirty years, Benston worked locally, nationally, and internationally writing articles, giving speeches, and lobbying politicians on behalf of the women's and labour movement.
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Margaret Benston obtained an undergraduate degree in chemistry and philosophy and a PhD in theoretical chemistry from the University of Washington in 1964.
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Margaret Benston joined Simon Fraser University as a charter faculty member in 1966 in the Department of Chemistry.
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Margaret Benston was one of the founders of Women's Studies program in the mid-1970s, and taught in the program part-time.
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Best known for articles such as "Infrared Spectroscopy" in The Annual Review of Physical Chemistry and "New Force Theorem" in The Journal of Chemistry and Physics, Margaret Benston continued as a practicing scientist throughout her life, but went on to be more involved in feminism and activism.
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Margaret Benston switched fields and received a joint appointment in the Women's Studies and Computing Science departments.
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Margaret Benston was the first to argue that women formed a reserve army of labour, a group that could be manipulated in a certain way because women are responsible for the reproduction of labour power.
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Margaret Benston argued that women's domestic and wage labour were essential to the flow of capitalist production and that women could not be fully integrated into wage labour without a full transformation in both of the forms of labour, which ultimately would mean a transformation of capitalism.