Catherine Dunlop MacKenzie ( – 24 October 1949) was a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

-born journalist who worked in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

Biography

MacKenzie was born in the small town of

Baddeck, Nova Scotia Baddeck () is a village in northeastern Nova Scotia, Canada. It is situated in the centre of Cape Breton, approximately 6 km east of where the Baddeck River empties into Bras d'Or Lake. Local governance is provided by the rural municipality ...

, around 1894. Baddeck was the site of Alexander Graham Bell's summer home, and towards the end of his life he spent increasing time there conducting experiments. For the eight years preceding Bell's 1922 death, MacKenzie worked as his personal secretary and research assistant. In 1928 she published a biography of Bell entitled ''Alexander Graham Bell: The Man Who Contracted Space.'' By 1929, MacKenzie had moved to

where she initially found work writing a series of newspaper and magazine articles about her home province of

Nova Scotia Nova Scotia ( ; ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland". Most of the population are native Eng ...

, which were paid for by the provincial government. She later became the parent/child editor of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', a position she held until her death. In 1947, she received the

Lasker Award The Lasker Awards have been awarded annually since 1945 to living persons who have made major contributions to medical science or who have performed public service on behalf of medicine. They are administered by the Lasker Foundation, which was ...

for her work on mental illness, in relation to her regular "Parent and Child" column. MacKenzie married the New York writer Edward Hale Bierstadt in 1926.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:MacKenzie, Catherine 1890s births 1949 deaths People from Baddeck, Nova Scotia Alexander Graham Bell Canadian women journalists American women journalists The New York Times editors Canadian women non-fiction writers