Isabel Marion Weir Johnston

DU Elizabethan Society Crest

Johnston was born 25 November 1883 in Derry City, County Londonderry in Ireland to a Presbyterian family. Her father John Barr Johnston (1843 - 1919) was a knight, a merchant, as well as an alderman, mayor and justice of the peace from Tyrone. Her mother was Isabella Weir from Donegal. She had an older brother, John Alexander, who studied law, an older sister Margaret Chambers who became a secretary and a younger sister Kathleen Maude.[1][2][3][4]

TCD had struggled for some time with the issue of allowing women to attend lecture, take exams and receive degrees. The long serving Provost, distinguished mathematician George Salmon, had long opposed women receiving degrees from the University. He is alleged to have said that women would only be admitted to TCD as students over his dead body. He eventually agreed to dropping his veto in 1901 when the Board voted in favour of allowing women to enter the university. Coincidentally, immediately after his death on Friday, 22 January 1904, Johnston became the first woman undergraduate to succeed in registering at TCD, and by the end of year other women had done likewise.[5] She recalled, "When I arrived in Dublin 1904, I was informed that he [Salmon] had died that day, and the examination had to be put off until after the funeral."[6]

The women in TCD were closely chaperoned when they started and unable to attend lectures and were permitted only to sit the exams.[7][8][6]

Johnston was the first woman to enter TCD where she read English and French.[5] She was followed later the same year by the next women undergraduates, Ellen Tuckey and Avarina Shegog. She founded the women's debating society, The Dublin University Elizabethan Society, in 1905. Although "an active and able student" Johnston left before finishing her degree and married Fellow Stephen B. Kelleher, a mathematician and Catholic from Cork.[9][10] Kelleher was the only Roman Catholic Fellow in the university at the time.[11] Kelleher became the Erasmus Smith's Professor of Mathematics in Trinity for 1914-1917.[12][13] The family later moved to England where Johnston became a founder member of the London branch of the DU Women graduates association.