Fritz's writing on the fossil Bryozoa along with her research on the stratigraphy of Toronto and the surrounding areas were major contributions to the geological field.
[1][2] Fritz is considered one of the pioneering researchers on the Palaeozoic fossil Bryozoa, which is a type of sea creature that bonds together and builds joint skeletons composed of tiny chambers or tubes.
Fritz worked at The Royal Ontario Museum as an associate director from 1936 to 1955, and later became the Invertebrate Palaeontology Curator at the ROM from 1955 to 1957.
[3] After returning from her expedition with Alice Wilson, Fritz remained a teacher at Elmwood for one more year prior to deciding to enrol in the geology program offered at the University of Toronto.
Fritz officially ended her career with retirement in 1967, but she continued to research human evolution and origin of the Earth for the majority of her life.
[8] Fritz's career was a reflection of a successful female academic breakthrough in a field mainly dominated by males since it was associated with rugged work like mining and exploration.
[4] She broke barriers regarding female gender roles of getting married and raising children as a career, and instead pursued her graduate degree.
[4] Fritz continued these accomplishments through participating in field work and publishing numerous research paper's while actively maintaining her administration and teaching roles.
It is possible that Fritz may have been trying to encourage her protégées to pursue doctoral studies so that there would be a strong cohort of women trained to replace her prior to her retirement.
However, some female students may not have wanted to make the personal sacrifices that many of the early women in geology had made in terms of remaining single and focusing solely on their careers.
[1] In 1975, Fritz was one of nineteen Canadian female scientists honoured in a display at the National Museum of Natural Science.
[3] From 1922 to 1927 Fritz worked with Dr. William Arthur Parks alongside other students and paleontologists to compile an inventory of fossils from the Upper Ordovician stratigraphy found in the Credit River area.
[3] In 1937, Fritz authored a journal entry in the field of Palaeontology named "Multisolenia, A New Genus of Palaeozoic Corals" while at the University of Toronto.
[13] Madeleine Fritz wrote a paper on the redescription of Trepostomatous bryozoan types that came from the Upper Ordovician rocks of Toronto and its surrounding areas.
In addition, she redescribed type specimens from the Bryozoan Heterotrypa from Upper Ordovician rocks that came from the Credit River Valley area in Ontario.