Her brother helped her circumvent this issue by leaving the door ajar and letting Douglas sit outside the classroom to listen to lectures.
Her brother George enlisted as an officer, was stationed near London, England and moved his family, including Douglas, with him.
Although bombs would fall close to her workplace, Douglas persevered and had the highest payout of all of the temporary women civil servants in the National Service.
[1] She went on to the University of Cambridge, working with Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and studying under Arthur Eddington, one of the leading astronomers of the day.
[8] She earned her PhD in astrophysics through McGill in 1926[1] and was the first person to receive it from a Quebec university, and one of the first women to accomplish this in North America.
[12] Collaborating with John Stuart Foster, she researched the spectra of A and B type stars and the Stark effect using the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory.
In 1947 she became the first Canadian president of the International Astronomical Union and represented Canada during a UNESCO conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, seven years later.
Douglas had a love of travel, and visited dozens of countries in her lifetime, including Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, and India.