Born in Wingham, New South Wales, Australia, Gillett earned her bachelor's degree and a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney in 1950.

[6][8] Kehoe had formerly been employed at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, and when she decided to return to the United States, she asked Gillett to join her.

[8] Kehoe helped Gillett secure a scholarship in 1957,[7][9] which was offered jointly by the college and Altrusa International, Inc, to continue her education.

They sailed from Australia together, stopping in Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Rangoon, Calcutta, Delhi, Karachi, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Madrid, and Lisbon.

[8] Gillett completed a master's degree at Russell Sage,[3][9] with her dissertation Learned Ladies in Sixteenth Century England: As Reflected in Writings of the Time.

[10] In 1959, she taught briefly at a private girls' school in California,[3] before moving to New York City to complete her doctorate at Columbia University in 1962, with a dissertation on the Colombo Plan.

[18] Receiving a grant for a study, Gillett and her colleagues surveyed other staff members, and discovered that there were nine courses giving credit for classes focused on women.

The analysis, completed in December 1975, confirmed interest by various disciplines and faculties and recommended that an official women's studies programme be established.

[21][20] Although there were those who did not support creating the curricula,[22] an advisory board was established in 1976,[21][23] and after several years of lobbying, the proponents finally gained approval to begin offering an interdisciplinary minor in women's studies.

[4] Our Own Agendas edited by Gillett and Anne Beer and published in 1995, again provided autobiographical accounts of women, but differed from A Fair Shake in that contributors were more open about previously taboo topics, such as abortion, rape, and sexual orientation.

[34] While noting that some important figures were underrepresented and some details could have been omitted from the volume, Mowat said that it "successfully compressed an astonishing amount of information" into its 400 pages.

The book, according to reviewer Emma M. Cappelluzzo, provided a clear guide to codify and justify the elements of what should be included in the foundations of education policy.

It covered theoretical perspectives on education as a field of study and in-depth analysis of the purposes of scholarly inquiry and teacher training.

[37] Nancy M. Sheehan, a historian from the University of Calgary, commented on the difficulty of writing We Walked Very Warily, considering that the history of higher education in Canada had not yet been written.

[42] She acknowledged that Gillett's book was a pioneering work and hoped that it would lead to further "critical analysis of the role of higher education in Canadian society".

[45] A Fair Shake, according to reviewer Marjory Lang of the University of British Columbia, focused on some of the early McGill women students previously featured in We Walked Very Warily.

Lang said that in telling their stories, the women were able to show their successes, in spite of obstacles, and illuminate the precarious nature of their professional lives.

[29] A sequel to the previous autobiographical compilations, Our Own Agendas contained the stories of twenty-eight graduates of McGill from a broad spectrum of age ranges, cultures, professions with varying perceptions of feminism.

[31] Marianne Gosztonyi Ainley of the University of Northern British Columbia stated that We Walked Very Warily was an "eye-opener" and surprised many readers who did not know the history of women as students at McGill.