Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine

Women and the Profession: The Doctor as a Lady

What young woman in this large and attentive audience has not found herself on a higher plane of being, as she has listened to this recital of woman’s service for humanity and the Divine Master? ... They are not perhaps persuaded to become physicians, but they are persuaded that womanhood of the noblest type can rise to the full possession of all its powers, and yet lose nothing in sweet grace or womanly dignity, lose nothing in love of husband or of children, or of friends, friends worthy of the name of friends.... If it be true as our statistics have shown, that an earnest purpose in life transforms invalids into healthy women, if it extracts the sting from morbid grief, if it renders that unholy thing, a marriage of convenience, inexcusable, and leaves every woman free to enter the estate of matrimony from the purest motives only, then how desirable is the possession of such a purpose? ... Who shall say that they who have toiled in this good work, whose fruition in part, our eyes have beheld today, toiled in vain!

Rachel Bodley, 1880

The generations of women who entered the medical profession in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries struggled tirelessly with personal and professional problems from which their male colleagues were spared. Although they were not always conscious of the most subtle ways in which their womanhood colored their experiences, they knew that they were breaking new ground. Yet it is only the modern reader with the benefit of hindsight who can truly understand the variety and persistence of the obstacles that they faced. Certainly when one ponders the records of these women’s lives, one cannot help but be struck by their independence, determination, and patience.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, female medical educators began to take stock of their situation and progress. When statistics became fashionable they took a number of surveys on the status of women in the profession. Such reports boosted sagging spirits by demonstrating the success of female medical practitioners. It was no mere accident that Rachel Bodley, the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, delivered the first of these surveys in the form of a valedictory address to the graduating class of 1880. After all, pioneer female educators and their male supporters were championing an unorthodox cause; it was comforting to learn that early battles had not been fought in vain. Taking stock also became both a source for pride in past accomplishments and a reason for hope that the future would fulfill its promise. Finally, such surveys also sought to prove both to male colleagues and to a suspicious public that, as Dr. Marion M. Grady put it in a report to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania Alumnae Association in 1900, “Medical women are now accepted as a fact of civilization.”¹

Bodley’s survey on women medical graduates was the first to be completed. She found that of the 189 women out of the 244 polled who responded to her questionnaire, 166 were still in active medical practice and averaging an income of almost $3,000 a year. Eight had quit medicine because of the pull of domestic duties, six because of ill health, and one because of full-time involvement in philanthropic work. Three were retired. Sixteen of the women had some form of surgical practice; the others were general practitioners with a heavy emphasis on gynecology and obstetrics. Sixty were or had been employed by an institution—either a hospital, an asylum or a school for girls. About a third of the group were actively engaged as medical teachers, either as professors in women’s medical colleges, as popular lecturers, or as instructors of hygiene in girls’ schools. Many expressed deep gratification in such work. One hundred fifty of the respondents reported “cordial social recognition” in their communities, while only seven complained of discrimination. A little under half of the women belonged to one or more medical societies. Only sixty-one of the respondents answered Bodley’s last question, “What influence has the study and practice of medicine had upon your domestic relations as wife and mother,” although 129 were married. Ten found marriage an impediment to practice. Most cautiously expressed the opinion that medicine had enhanced their personal lives, but many admitted to occasional strain.

For Bodley, the results proved a matter for rejoicing. For the historian, the information gathered in these studies helps to paint a more accurate picture of women physicians’ collective experience. But statistics are useful only in assessing the larger picture, they paint meager and unsatisfying portraits of the substance of human endeavor. We may learn from the surveys that a high percentage of women doctors were in practice and doing modestly well, but we hear very little else about the texture of their lives.

Even women physicians themselves understood the poverty of statistical data. Their own special needs for mutual support and encouragement led them to keep abreast of each other’s doings as best they could. Friendships formed in medical school bridged the gulf of time and distance through faithful correspondence. Alumnae associations at the women’s medical colleges loyally kept records on colleagues and maintained ties with new graduates. Yearly meetings often served as a means of catching up on the news as classmates and teachers gathered in person for the exchange of personal and professional information and listened as the corresponding secretary read letters from colleagues and friends living too far away to attend.²

This kind of qualitative evidence can answer more personal questions. What attracted such women to medicine? How did family and friends react? Did their experiences in medical school differ, and what parameters determined their life choices when they graduated ? Were husbands supportive? Did women who chose not to marry condemn themselves thereby to a lonely and impoverished emotional life? Of course, the answers must necesssarily be personal and idiosyncratic. And yet the life stories of individual women physicians are at once unique and representative. Women entered medicine for a wide variety of personal reasons, but once they committed themselves to its pursuit, their lives were shaped by social options and conventions that moved well beyond personal preferences. Thus, every woman’s private choices were eventually monitored by what was socially possible in the climate of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America.

Impressionistic evidence suggests that generalizations about the experience of women physicians are indeed possible, even about the uniquely personal. But to say that the broad outlines of the lives of women physicians during this period exhibit characteristics in common is not to claim that their lives were the same. What is here revealed about women doctors will be more useful when compared both with similar studies for women professionals in other fields and for male physicians.

The number of women physicians grew from about two thousand in 1880 to roughly seven thousand in 1900. Common threads permit a few comments about their family backgrounds. Like their male counterparts, the majority came from the middle and upper middle class. In the years before 1880, most of these families were concentrated geographically in the Northeast until medical schools in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and the Midwest and West began accepting women. Quaker and reform families were also noticeably prominent, especially among the earliest generations. The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, it will be recalled, was founded in Philadelphia by Quakers who wished to give their daughters an opportunity to study medicine.

Because many such families held liberal attitudes on the position of women, a significant minority of women physicians received an excellent education for the time; some even attended college. Ida Richardson, for example, one of the founders of the West Philadelphia Hospital for Women and Children and an 1879 graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennyslvania (WMCP) studied at Wesleyan College in Delaware. Charity Jane Vincent (WMCP, 1882) gained a good classical education at Westminster College and then Franklin College in Ohio, where her father was the President.³ Edith Anna Barker (WMCP, 1897) attended Smith College. Emmeline Cleveland, the brilliant gynecological surgeon who was the first Chief Resident at the Philadelphia Woman’s Hospital and Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women at the Woman’s Medical College, graduated in 1853 from Oberlin College, as did many of her later students. Charlotte Blake Brown, founder of the San Francisco Children’s Hospital, attended Elmira College in upstate New York. The father of Mary Hancock McLean, a pioneer St. Louis woman physician, sent her to Vassar for two years before she matriculated at the University of Michigan medical school in 1880. Other women physicians studied at female seminaries and respectable preparatory schools. By the beginning of the twentieth century, more and more of them were meeting the rising standards of at least two years of college preparation.⁴

Not infrequently, there was already a physician in the family, usually a father, brother, or uncle, but, as the century wore on, occasionally a mother as well. Agnes Margaret Gardiner (WMCP, 1899) and Cordelia Greene, one of the first women to graduate from Cleveland Medical College in 1856, both read medicine with their fathers before seeking formal training.⁵ Harriet A. Kane, whose mother had attended the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia in 1854, entered the school twenty-seven years later, settling in the city accompanied by her mother and two brothers, both of whom simultaneously attended Jefferson Medical College. Mary McLean’s father, a zealot regarding his daughter’s education, was one of the first physicians to open a practice in Washington, Missouri. And finally, the fathers of Jeannie Sumner, Eugenia Reyburn, and Clara Bliss Hinds, all graduates of Washington, D.C., medical schools in the 1880s and 1890s, were prominent medical professional. ⁶

Besides providing important educational opportunities, families could be supportive in other ways as well. Charlotte Blake Brown, who studied medicine in Philadelphia after having married and given birth to three children, managed to leave her home and family in California in the competent and willing hands of her mother. Even her grandparents supported Brown’s decision to study medicine, and in 1872 Daniel Farrington registered his approval of his granddaughter’s venture in a letter to his daughter. “I hope,” he wrote, “she may be prospered in her great undertaking & be the means of doing a great deal of good in her chosen walk of life.”⁷

Anna Broomall, Professor of Obstetrics for many years at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia, originally had expressed an interest in the law, perhaps because her father was a lawyer and a congressman. When such a professional course proved unfeasible, it was her father who encouraged her to “be a good doctor.”⁸ Similarly, Anita Newcomb McGee’s father Simon Newcomb, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory, took great pride in his daughter’s intellectual accomplishments and enthusiastically supported her decision to enter Columbian University Medical School in 1889, despite the fact that she was already married and the mother of a small child. Cornelia Kahn (WMCP, 1887) enjoyed like support from her father, a wealthy businessman who was “particularly proud of his eldest daughter,” and enthusiastically encouraged her medical career. Mary Hood’s minister father longed to have one of his children become a doctor. When both sons chose the ministry he pushed his daughter into medicine in the early 1870s.⁹

Available correspondence between relatives and female medical students indicates that advice and emotional support proved significant. When Margaret Butler, later professor of otolaryngology at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and one of the first women fellows of the American College of Surgeons, became an assistant in Laryngology at the Polyclinic Hospital shortly after her graduation from the Woman’s Medical in 1894, her father wrote:

You need not pitty us when you think us at work and yourself idle, we expect you will be quite as closely employed at your Studies as we are at our business. You are now at the beginning of a career, either of usefulness—or Something worse, and as you labor, and build So will your life be, if you expect to be of use in this world, you will have to struggle to be above the common herd—but this need not alarm you as it is employment that makes life pleasant and useful, we were not created to rust out as drones, You know did we not plant and till the Earth it would bring forth noxious weeds and our beautiful country now verdant and covered with grain fruit and flowers became a desert, it is even so with the mind if not properly used for seeds falling will germinate and in after life bring fruit either of usefulness or bitterness. Remember that yours is the Springtime of life and as you Sow of the same kind will you reap. The harvest and Autumn is yet to come if you labor—you will be able to overcome all difficulties and may expect a bountiful harvest in after life, the Almighty, has not created us without a purpose. Try not to live in vain.¹⁰

Such parental interest eased the burdens of medical students, especially those far from home. Sarah Ernestine Howard, whose mother Emily Pagelson Howard had graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1882 and whose father was the superintendant of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, wrote chatty responses to her parent’s inquiries almost daily during the years between 1913 and 1917 when she attended Johns Hopkins. A favorite topic of discussion was the women students—how they were faring in the male world of professional medicine. The correspondence makes it clear that parental concern helped sustain her through the difficult times.¹¹

While a student in Baltimore at the turn of the century, Florence Sabin, the first woman to receive a faculty appointment at Johns Hopkins and later the first woman Fellow of the Rockefeller Institute, wrote often to a favorite uncle about Hopkins matters. Sabin had lost her mother when she was only a child and for a time lived with her uncle Albert and his family in Chicago. A teacher, a lover of music, nature, and good reading, this warm and urbane ex-New Englander gave Sabin the security and encouragement that she had missed by her mother’s early death. Years later it was with her uncle Albert that she discussed her frustrations, and it was Uncle Albert who always responded with love and encouragement. In 1907, for example, he wrote her in reference to a particularly discouraged letter:

I think you are grand. You have sized up the problem in all its dimensions and are not appalled. You will do your whole duty as you see it. You will be serene through it all. Whether you make or break with the faculty north, south, east, or west, your old uncle will love you still and believe you are the best of the pack.¹²

Familial aid often came regardless of parents’ initial reservations about their daughter’s chosen career. Despite his belief that medicine was a “repulsive pursuit,” especially for a lady, Mary Putnam Jacobi’s father rendered her invaluable emotional and psychological support. In 1867 she wrote to him, “You have always been such a dear good father.... The more I see of other people’s way of doing, the more highly I value the large liberty in which you have always left me. It has occasioned certain mistakes, but on the whole, the advantage has infinitely outweighed the disadvantage. I do not see how I could have lived without it.”¹³ Similarly, the parents of Martha May Eliot, subsequently director of the United States Children’s Bureau and a 1918 graduate of Hopkins with Ernestine Howard, had hoped that she would become a teacher. When she chose medicine instead, they continued their interest and pride in her accomplishments. Their enthusiasm did not go unappreciated. In 1918 Martha wrote gratefully to her mother:

This is to be a little private letter for you and Papa, to try and tell you in a very poor way, I am afraid, how very much I have appreciated what you have given me during these past four years. They have been, as really would go without saying, the most wonderful years yet for me and it makes me very humble when I think that it was you two working all the time at home who made it all possible for me. I can never thank you enough and I don’t really think you would have me try, for it would be attempting what cannot be done.¹⁴

The positive response of at least some family and friends attests to the fact that a small but perhaps significant number of parents nurtured identical aspirations for both male and female children. Such evidence may suggest that historians must be careful not to view the socialization of girls in the nineteenth century as entirely uniform or monolithic. Less apparent and more difficult to glean from the evidence is an answer to why certain parents treated their daughters so evenhandedly.

When it was forthcoming, family approval and material aid eased the burdens of many aspiring physicians. But others struggled alone. Indeed, some families simply did not have the resources to finance a daughter’s unorthodox aspirations. Medical educators estimated that in the late 1860s a two-year medical course cost between six hundred and seven hundred dollars. The expense and duration of medical education reflected both its class and gender bias. Structured to suit the conventions of male experience, medical training was easier for men than for women to finance in the burgeoning economy of nineteenth-century America.¹⁵

Nevertheless, many women sought outside employment. Like many of her own future students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Emmeline Cleveland became a teacher in her district school in order to earn enough money to further her education. Hundreds of women doctors in the next several generations would follow her example. Teaching remained both respectable and accessible to young women in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that they earned only one-third the salary of men. As the century progressed, many of them, dissatisfied with the poor financial rewards or seeking something more challenging, opted for medicine as opportunities in the field began to open up for women in the years after the Civil War. Others saw teaching merely as a stepping stone to the long-cherished goal of a medical degree.¹⁶

For young women like M.S. Devereaux, studying medicine was the logical culmination of motives that had drawn them to teaching in the first place. In 1881 Devereaux wrote for advice to Dr. James B. Chadwick, a warm supporter of women physicians and a professor at Harvard Medical School. Her letter reveals thoughts that must have been common for many like her. She began by confessing that she had often dreamed of being a doctor, but hesitated chiefly because she was already a teacher. Yet she wished to utilize her teaching ability to “lift the cloud of ignorance and carelessness that hangs over the subject of hygiene and Physiology—especially among women. I am sure,” she continued, “that the subject should be presented in a thorough, simple and earnest manner in lectures and classroom work—especially with the interest and cooperation of physicians. There is sufficient sense of moral obligation to be arroused to the preservation of the health and strength of the body; and sufficient common sense to make people ready to listen.” The papers of Clara Marshall and Rachel Bodley, both deans of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, contain fascinating letters of inquiry of just this sort from other teachers wishing to study medicine.¹⁷

Some women moved from nursing to medicine. Cordelia Greene financed her medical education with earnings received from nursing jobs in several water-cure establishments. Annette C. Buckel nursed soldiers during the Civil War.¹⁸ Indeed, the resourcefulness of women students, faced with what Mary Putnam Jacobi termed “homely struggles,” gave, she believed, “a solidity, a vitality to the movement.”Women seeking a medical education have “starved on half rations ...”she wrote in 1891, and ”have resorted to innumerable devices,—taught school, edited newspapers, nursed sick people, given massage, worked till they could scrape a few dollars together, expended that in study—then stepped aside for a while to earn more. After graduating, the struggle has continued—but here the resource of taking lodgers has often tided over the difficult time.“¹⁹

Correspondence to the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennyslvania contains numerous letters of inquiry from potential students, all requesting financial aid or placement in part-time work to defray the expenses of medical study. Typical of the latter, for example, was a note to Clara Marshall from Mattie A. Long, writing in 1890 from Bloomington, Illinois, to inquire as to “whether I can do shorthand to pay my expenses.” Similarly, Rosa Dean, a senior at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, explained:

I have my own way to pay and do not wish to ask for pecuniary aid. The aid of some self-supporting work in the city which would allow me to take one course of lectures, or if such a thing were possible some work in connection with the college itself would be my desire. If such are not attainable, I must wait and earn something in other ways and places first.²⁰

Occasionally requests came, not only from potential students, but from interested friends and supporters. In 1891 Charles C. Thompson, a teacher, wrote Clara Marshall from Staunton, Virginia, on behalf of a former pupil, “a young lady who teaches as her only means of support and has made a good woman of herself by her own efforts.” Her people, he explained, were “honourable but poor.” The mother was a widow. When Thompson first met her, the girl was working for fifty cents a week “doing drudgery for a family.” Recognizing her ability he found her a teaching position. But, Thompson explained, “she ... wants to take medicine.” Voicing his own admiration for her courage and grit, he concluded, “If your college offered anything special to deserving women you cannot go amiss in her case.”²¹

It often happened that the dean was able to arrange employment for some of these women. Occasionally networks of female reformers willing to sponsor the medical education of young and poor aspirants came to her aid. Emmeline Cleveland had hoped to become a missionary, and as her plans crystallized while at Oberlin she corresponded with Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and the recently elected secretary of the Pennsylvania Ladies Missionary society. Hale advocated separate medical education for women, especially for the purpose of preparing them for missionary work. In the 1850s and 1860s, she loyally endorsed the founding of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania on the pages of her magazine and participated in coordinating a training program for missionaries at the school. Over the next decades she dutifully reported developments at the institution in her editorials, praising its aims and occasionally appealing on its behalf for money.²²

Similarly, Marie Zakrzewska received both material and moral support from the local Ladies’ Physiological Society, under the leadership of Mrs. Caroline Severance, while attending Cleveland Medical College in the 1850s. Later other networks of women, including Ednah Dow Cheney and Caroline Dall of Boston, facilitated Zakrzewska’s work there by helping to establish the New England Hospital for Women and Children. In New York Elizabeth Blackwell managed to enlist the aid of a group of Quaker women when she set up practice.²³

While some parents offered support, others discouraged their daughters’ efforts to gain a medical degree. The mother of Eliza Mosher, an early graduate of the University of Michigan and later the school’s first dean of women, stubbornly opposed her daughter’s aspirations, declaring that she would sooner see her shut up in a lunatic asylum. Maternal objections temporarily delayed Mosher’s plans for a medical career.²⁴ Anne Walter Fearn, an 1893 graduate of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania who spent a long and successful medical career in China, recalled that she had been raised by her Southern family to live the life of a social butterfly. Her mother threatened to disown her when she disclosed her medical plans.²⁵ Bertha Van Hoosen’s mother was moved to tears every time her studying medicine was mentioned, and her father, who had previously been open to her ambitions, refused to furnish the money for Van Hoosen to train for something that offended her mother so deeply²⁶ Such opposition did not prevent Van Hoosen from attending the University of Michigan and having a strikingly successful career as an obstetrician and surgeon in Chicago.

Another successful women surgeon, Rosalie Slaughter Morton (WMCP 1898), literally had to wait for her father to die before she could put her medical plans into effect. Although her two brothers became physicians, she grew up in an aristocratic Virginia family where her father felt scandalized at the idea of his daughter earning money. “It is essential,” he told her, “that society’s standards be maintained.... Your highest duty is to become a good wife and mother.” Similarly, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall, a contemporary of Florence Sabin’s and among the first women to attend Johns Hopkins, remembered with ironic humor that her mother was “upset” and her great aunts “aghast” at the idea of her studying medicine. “Aunt Tin, in all the years I was in Baltimore, always alluded to my being South for the winter’ ... and Cousin Rouel Kimball’s wife ... wrote my mother that she was sorry that she couldn’t entertain me ... intimating that my profession prevented further social relations with me.”²⁷

Such negative attitudes were common. Mary Bennett Ritter had spent three years teaching and saving before she began medical study in earnest in 1882. But not, she later recalled, before family and friends “brought out afresh” all their arguments against her plans. “Predictions of failure,” she remembered, “were universal but varied.... There were the usual caustic remarks about feminine unfitness ... woman’s lack of strength, her instability, natural timidity, and all the other hackneyed objections.... Beside all of the above reasons ... there came this blast: ... you will ‘up and marry’ and it will all be wasted.” A final argument pitted against her was financial: leaving a successful teaching career and incurring heavy debt promised at best an uncertain livelihood. “As to this predictions,” Bennett later remarked with a touch of self-righteous irony, “I can only say that in the first month of my practice I earned as much as the principal’s salary in the Fresno school, and after that ... my income soon equalled that of the highest paid university professor.” Her entire debt plus interest was retired in a few years.

“Women in any profession were having a hard time in those days,” remembered Anne Fearn, “but women physicians seemed particularly obnoxious to the average man and woman of the eighties and nineties. Study of the ills of the human flesh was a disgustingly unladylike occupation. The young woman student of medicine faced the reproaches of a “disgraced” family, social ostracism, and incalculable difficulties in the struggle to build up a practice.”²⁸ Family opposition could be painful. The majority of objecting parents, however, eventually became reconciled to their daughter’s choices, usually after a few years of demonstrated success.

Still, economic difficulties and social disapproval hampered some women to the degree that a significant proportion of them came to the study of medicine considerably older than their male counterparts. Before 1880 the average age of graduation among students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania for whom records are available was thirty-three years. Although among students after 1880 the age level dropped to twenty-seven years, the fact that many women medical students were already quite mature is nevertheless significant.²⁹ Male medical graduates were usually in their early twenties.

Another factor determining the older ages of some of these women is that a number of them were either married or widowed. Charlotte Blake Brown was by no means the only wife and mother to take up medicine; others did so as well. Hannah Longshore, a member of the first class at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, attended to her studies with the approval and support of her husband. In 1876 the University of California graduated its first woman, Mrs. Lucy Wanzer, a thirty-three-year-old school-teacher who had been married for ten years. A year later, Alice Higgins, forty-one years old, the mother of three and the wife of a doctor, became the first woman to matriculate at Stanford Medical School. Higgins even spent a year doing postgraduate work at the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia before she settled down to a successful practice in Anaheim. For Hannah Jackson (WMCP, 1881), studying medicine was a childhood dream. Instead she married Joseph D. Price, who was a second lieutenant of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, serving three years and three months in the Civil War. After migrating with her husband to Kansas and bearing him four children, Mrs. Price was widowed in 1872. Six years later she entered the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. By 1881 she was in residency under Anna Broomall at the Woman’s Hospital and, a few years afterward, had established a flourishing practice in Chester, Pennsylvania. Another widow, Cornelia Kahn Binswanger, entered the college in 1883, partly as a consolation for the loss of her husband and young child.³⁰

Women entered medicine in these years out of a variety of personal motives. Some, of course, came from “reform” families. A number of early women physicians, like Emmeline Cleveland, Eliza Mosher (University of Michigan, 1875), Amanda Sanford (University of Michigan, 1873), Cordelia Greene (Cleveland Medical College, 1856), Samantha Nivison (WMCP, 1855), and Angenette Hunt (WMCP, 1852), grew up in west or central New York, the famous “burned over district,” where unorthodox ideas pervaded the atmosphere in which they lived. Eliza Mosher’s father, for example, regularly kept her abreast of the newspaper accounts of women’s accomplishments, often putting down his paper with the remark, “There, now, Eliza, that’s what women are doing nowadays.”³¹

For many women who pursued medicine in the early period between 1840 and 1870, religious perfectionism and reform ideology meshed into a desire to contribute to the community welfare. Of course the notion that women, like men, had a moral and religious obligation to society could be relatively controversial if interpreted too broadly. Yet historians have long noted that religious piety often afforded the only means by which women could exercise power and autonomy.³² Although the doctrine of the Inner Light led Quakers to condone the greatest flexibility of all the protestant sects in defining the boundaries of woman’s role, women forged religious justifications for reform activity while subscribing to more orthodox Christian faiths as well. Female influence was particularly discernible in the evangelical fervor of the successive religious revivals which periodically swept New England and western New York in the first half of the nineteenth century.³³

We have already noted the importance of religious perfectionism in the thought of prominent health reformers. Many women physicians, Elizabeth Blackwell being only one of the most prominent, shared this outlook. Emmeline Cleveland, for example, entered medicine originally to become a missionary. The lives of other women physicians as well linked the “religion of health” preached by the health-reform movement with the formal entrance of women into the medical profession. For example, Cordelia Greene’s active interest in applied Christianity provides perhaps the most important clue to understanding her subsequent career. The eldest child of parents who were solid New England farmers—former Quakers turned Presbyterians—she grew up along the banks of the Erie Canal. There her father had purchased a farm shortly before her birth in 1831. Jabez Greene’s religious piety was matched only by his interest in progressive education, and his active role as a trustee in the local public school no doubt sparked his daughter’s life-long concern with self-improvement. Cordelia became a serious student, and her impressive record earned her a teacher’s certificate from the county while she was still in her early teens. As a girl she responded enthusiastically to the evangelism that periodically swept through western New York and shortly after her 17th birthday underwent a religious conversion, apparently helped along by the wife of the local Presbyterian pastor.³⁴

In 1849 Jabez Greene, who was also an avid health reformer, gave up farming and founded a health establishment in Castile, New York, known as the “Water Cure.” There Cordelia, manifesting both an interest and a penchant for the care of the sick, assisted her father. Lacking formal medical credentials proved no barrier to practice in these years; the originator of the modern water-cure system, Vincent Priessnitz, was himself a Silesian peasant. Hydropathy, in spite of its lowly beginnings, proved remarkably popular in the 1840s and 1850s in America, and water treatments of various kinds were usually combined with strict attention to diet and general regimen. Cordelia Greene’s later approach to medical therapeutics would always bear the influence of her early exposure to health-reform ideas.³⁵

While aiding her father, Greene read of Elizabeth Blackwell’s graduation from Geneva Medical College and decided to become a physician herself. In 1856 she graduated with honors—along with three other women—from the Cleveland Medical College (Western Reserve). The next six years were spent gaining confidence and clinical experience as the assistant of Dr. Henry Foster, also a graduate of Cleveland, who had founded Clifton Springs Water Cure in upstate New York. Although Foster was a serious-minded and professionally oriented regular physician who kept abreast of new developments in medical practice, he shared his assistant’s religious orientation and believed along with Greene that “a strong spiritual atmosphere has a mighty power as a curative agent. ”³⁶

Her father’s death in 1864 gave Greene the opportunity to manage her own sanitarium. Urged by her brothers to take over the “Water Cure,” she eventually consented, but only after much soul searching. In 1864 she was thirty-four years old, and she would remain the medical director of the establishment she renamed Castile Sanitarium until 1905, when she was succeeded by her niece, Dr. Mary T. Greene (Michigan, 1890).

Her memoirs make it clear that she felt her proprietorship was indeed a religious calling. “I have ever felt,” she wrote, “that each patient was sent by a providential hand with the injunction ‘Take this child and care for her for Me.’ ” According to her biographer, “hundreds of patients recall vividly Dr. Greene’s serene motherly face as she sat in the centre of her sick ‘children’ leading the evening prayer service.” Her message was the healing of both body and soul. “Holiness,” she used to say, “is simply wholeness. Righteousness is rightness—right doing.... Our first duty is to work the beautiful enginery of body, intellect, and will in such a way as to make the very best of all the powers God has given us.”³⁷ Typically, Greene’s first medical assistant was Dr. Clara Swain, a graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and the first woman medical missionary to India. Swain had a long and distinguished career in Asia. The two women remained close friends for over thirty years. When she retired, Swain returned to the United States to make her home in Castile.

Financially secure, Greene donated large sums of money to female social reform causes—homes and hospitals for the needy, the home and foreign missionary boards of the Presbyterian Church. Indeed, the Sanitarium had its own Missionary Society, and it supported numerous Christian Chinese girls through medical training at the Peking Union Medical College. ³⁸ Besides her interest in medical missionary work, Greene had strong ties to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She attended their national conventions and was outspoken in favor of temperance in her native Castile. Frances Willard and Mary A. Livermore, warm friends and supporters, came often to the Sanitarium to rest or to visit.

Cordelia Greene’s religious orientation was typical of many women doctors. Indeed, transcendental religious experiences were not uncommon among them or, for that matter, among other nineteenth-century women reformers who sought broader avenues of professional activity. Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Elizabeth Blackwell, Frances Willard, Margaret Sanger, and Dr. Ida Richardson, founder of the West Philadelphia Hospital for Women, were only a few of those who experienced mystical episodes. In the process the religious impulse was transformed into a social commitment and the pursuit of a profession. For many women these incidents, in which they viewed themselves as responding to the call of a higher moral power, helped to legitimate their deviance from prescribed female roles and strengthen their efforts to widen the paths of women’s work despite familial disapproval and social opposition. ³⁹

Protestant Christian idealism aided women physicians of Cordelia Greene’s generation in their pursuit of self-development in yet another way. Although many of them had to struggle to attend high school or college, it is also true that they managed, despite numerous obstacles, to gain access to education on a scale simply not available to previous generations of women. A central feature of this education was its infusion with Christian perfectionism. Female academies like Mt. Holyoke set the tone, but even coeducational institutions like Oberlin College applied Christian perfectionism to women in a particular and novel way.

Famous as a hotbed of abolitionism, health reform, and women’s rights, Oberlin College had been founded in 1833 by the followers of Charles Grandison Finney for training young ministers for a new type of Evangelical Manhood. Its faculty, however, was drawn from that liberal portion of the Presbyterian-Congregationalist clergy that interpreted the concept of Republican Motherhood to include the broadest moral and religious functions for women. Only three years before Emmeline Cleveland’s arrival at the school in 1850, the college had graduated with honors both Lucy Stone and her future sister-in-law and fellow woman’s-rights advocate, Antoinette Brown.

Oberlin’s policymakers defied the conventional wisdom that claimed that females should be educated exclusively for wifehood and motherhood. Instead they recognized women’s physical and mental capacity to pursue an academic program successfully. In almost a direct rebuttal of the most conservative interpretation of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” Finney’s administrative assistant and presidential successor at Oberlin, James Harris Fairchild, declared in 1852 that the “sphere of women is not so different from that of men” and that before young ladies were taught domesticity it might be “better to say, let them first be educated as human beings.”⁴⁰

Yet, as one historian has noted, Oberlin’s attitude toward women was distinctive “in degree rather than in kind.” The school’s leaders, like the large majority of nineteenth-century liberal reformers, still subscribed to the doctrine of separate spheres. As a result, the education of young women remained emphatically subordinate to the education of young men, and the presence of females at the institution was sanctioned partly because of the faculty’s belief that their companionship in an unconstrained atmosphere created a natural environment in which young male students could find appropriate wives. Thus, Oberlin aimed to prepare women for a life of usefulness, duty, and good works, but always, Oberlin’s official historian is quick to remind us, within a context of “intelligent motherhood and properly subservient wifehood.”⁴¹

The education these women received intentionally failed to relate them in any significant way to the larger occupational structure. Instead it trained them to be moral agents in a culture that generally defined women as passive spectators and consumers. Educated women were thus left to themselves to reconcile such contradictions, and for many of them medicine perfectly meshed personal ambition with ideology. They could pursue a career and reform society without overstepping too far the bounds of accepted propriety. Thus, for women like Emmeline Cleveland, being a medical missionary while one’s husband ministered to lost souls in foreign lands fit the model perfectly.

Indeed, Cleveland was not the only woman that Oberlin College sent to Philadelphia to study medicine. Nor was Oberlin the only school producing and inspiring women like her. Long after explicitly religious motives ceased to motivate them, women from liberal colleges like Oberlin retained a secularized desire to do good. Such institutions engendered a particular type of nineteenth-century womanhood which Cleveland embodied for many of her students and supporters. For example, contemporaries remember her as a “womanly woman” who, despite a heavy load of professional esponsibilities, never slighted her domestic duties. Dean Rachel Bodley left an account of her own first meeting with Cleveland, which provided “a key to the charm of Professor Cleveland’s character”:

She was descending the stair of the Woman’s Hospital, where at the time she was Resident Physician, bearing aloft on her shoulder, her baby boy, less than a year old. Unconscious of the presence of a stranger, they were beaming the brightest smiles each upon the other, and the laughing child and the happy mother constituted a picture fair to look upon.⁴²

The frequent references to Cleveland’s “womanliness” are particularly pertinent when contrasted with her reputed skill and courage as a pioneer surgeon. She was one of the first professional women ovariotomists in America, and the several abdominal sections completed at the Woman’s Hospital in the 1870s were the earliest known instances of major surgery performed by a woman doctor.⁴³

Though women physicians with Emmeline Cleveland’s and Cordelia Greene’s enthusiasm for Christian perfectionism appear less frequently by the turn of the twentieth century, they persist even into the progressive era, numbering among their ranks enthusiastic activists in agencies identified with the Social Hygiene Movement. Yet while one type of woman physician remained deeply religious, others can be found who were stubborn nonbelievers, choosing medicine out of a love of science or a sustained curiosity about people. Mary Putnam Jacobi, immersed in her medical studies in Paris, felt scientific study to be addictive, and wrote her mother enthusiastically that she couldn’t get enough of it. Harriet Belcher’s attraction was the physician’s opportunity for “the study of human nature.” Belcher would have loved to go abroad as a missionary, but she confessed that she could not manage “to hold my tongue on the subject of my rather heterodox religious opinions.”⁴⁴

Another especially feminine theme that recurs in the motivation of women towards medicine is a childhood or adolescent encounter with illness—either their own or that of a close friend or relative. Elizabeth Blackwell chose medicine after watching a friend die of uterine cancer. For Eliza Mosher, the death of a beloved brother in 1867 from tuberculosis brought on a religious crisis which strengthened her already budding resolve to become a doctor. Harriot Hunt, one of the earliest women physicians, took up medicine after failures by several male doctors in Boston to cure her sister’s neurasthenia.⁴⁵ Emily Dunning Barringer (Cornell, 1902) believed that it was the near death of her mother in childbirth that prompted in her the “desire ... to help the sick and suffering, which later was to lead me into medicine.”⁴⁶ Similarly, Anna Wessel Williams, a graduate of the New York Infirmary in the 1880s, experienced a startling confrontation with medical ignorance when her sister lost her baby and came close to death herself because of puerperal eclampsia and the incompetence of a rural practitioner. This incident catalyzed her decision to study medicine and try to push back the boundaries of ignorance. From then on she longed, she wrote, “to find out about the what, why, when, and where and how of the mysteries of life. This trait had increased with the years, and finally had become a passion.”⁴⁷

Josephine Griffith Davis (WMCP, 1877) originally practiced pharmacy. After several miscarriages, she turned in disappointment to medicine, hoping somehow to find a cure for her personal tragedy. She later specialized in cancer of the uterus and practiced in New York City.⁴⁸ Finally, Elizabeth Cohen, probably a graduate of the Eclectic Penn Medical University, settled in New Orleans in 1857 and was the first woman physician there. She began medical study, she recalled on her hundredth birthday, “to help mothers keep their little ones well” after she had lost a small son to the measles. ⁴⁹

Other women grappled with their own ill health when they were children or adolescents. Mary Wilson Case, who studied first at Vassar and then graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1881, chose medicine because of a delicate and frail physique.⁵⁰ Sarah McCarn-Craig’s health broke down when she worked her way through Antioch College. Putting herself in the hands of Drs. Rachel Brooks and Silas Gleason, the proprietors of the Elmira Water Cure, she remained their practically bedridden patient for four years. When her health improved, she read medicine with the Gleasons and then entered the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia in 1863. Upon graduation she worked for a time at the sanitariums at Elmira and Clifton Springs until, in 1866, she established her own practice in Rochester. Another sickly protégé of the Gleasons, Caroline Winslow, spent several months as their patient shortly before her thirtieth birthday. Their lessons in anatomy, part of their health program, so sparked her interest in medical study that in 1851 she entered the Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati. Winslow subsequently had a successful career as a physician in Washington, D.C., and edited The Alpha, a social-purity journal with feminist leanings. Similarly, Mary A. Stinson’s pursuit of medicine was prompted by several unhappy years of adolescent invalidism.⁵¹

But not all women physicians were either sickly as children or religious idealists. Many confessed openly to the power of sheer ambition, whether or not they identified consciously with the nineteenth-century women‘s-rights movement. Although Bertha Van Hoosen conceded that her choice of medicine may have been a response “to a call of the woman in me—woman, preserver of the race,” she listed as her most important motivations the pursuit of “social status,” “the opportunity for growth and advancement in an ever-expanding science.” Also of consequence to Van Hoosen was the chance to be her “own boss—to say as Father often did, ‘I can speak my mind on any subject... I am a free man’ ”⁵² Anna Wessel Williams confessed that her interest was enhanced by the fact that “I was starting on a way that had been practically untrod before by a woman. My belief at that time in human individuality, regardless of sex, race, religion or any factor other than ability was at its strongest. I believed, therefore, that females should have equal opportunities with males to develop their powers to the utmost.”⁵³

Anita Newcomb McGee also felt that she was “different from most girls.” She believed that talented women should pursue careers commensurate with their abilities; indeed, if they did not, she warned, “their unused energy” would degenerate into “neurasthenia.” She married a man who was willing to support her professional goals and entered Columbian University’s medical department soon after she gave birth to her first child. Many women, no less than men, longed at the end of the century for the high status and financial rewards offered by a professional career. In fact, Belva Lockwood’s confession in “My Efforts to Become a Lawyer,” an article she wrote for Lippincott’s in 1888, “I possessed all the ambition of a man,” could be easily applied to many women physicians.⁵⁴

Having attained the necessary preliminary education, a young woman was then faced with embarking on her medical studies. In the decades between 1850 and 1880, students often still read medicine with a preceptor before commencing formal study, although the custom was being discarded. Finding a mentor was not an easy task for the first generation of women because male physicians often refused to take them on as assistants. Thus, J. Ida Sheinman gave testimony to women’s difficulties when in 1876 she petitioned the faculty of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania for permission to take first-year exams without having attended the lectures. “I began private study in February, 1874,” she explained, “soon after graduation in Oberlin College. I studied leisure hours and during vacations from teaching until coming here in October, 1876. But I had no preceptor because in the places in which I found it was necessary to live, I could find no physician willing to give me preceptorship.” Accompanying Sheinman’s petition was a curious letter from Dr. John Linton of Garriavillos, Iowa, unabashedly confirming the accuracy of her statement by admitting that he had refused to teach her medicine and had tried to discourage her from her plans.⁵⁵

Already by the 1880s, however, networks of successful female pioneers began to clear a path for the younger women. Often beginners were welcomed as assistants to older women physicians already in practice. Bertha Van Hoosen spent the summer before she entered medical school with Dr. Mary McLean, a recent Michigan graduate, who had just settled in St. Louis. “Dr. McLean,” Van Hoosen later wrote of her friend and mentor, “was one of the first women to serve in any official capacity in any hospital in St. Louis. Her record was so exceptionally high and so unusual that few men in the profession did not know of her accomplishments as a skillful operator and an exhaustive diagnostician.”⁵⁶

In California Mary Bennett Ritter began her medical study by working with Dr. Euthanasia S. Meade (WMCP, 1869), who had been among the first women physicians to settle there and had a flourishing practice in San Jose. Bennett’s relationship with Meade was helpful in numerous ways. The younger woman accompanied her mentor in maternity cases and on her home visits, learning as best she could. Meade also took charge of Bennett’s health, putting her on an exercise regimen that was intended to strengthen her endurance. Both married and a mother, Meade provided a strong role model for her student. In addition, her support and encouragement were important to Bennett, as were her extensive social and professional ties to other women physicians in the state. Bennett later spoke of Meade with love, respect, and admiration.⁵⁷

Across the country in Boston, Eliza Mosher spent a year as clinical assistant to Lucy Sewall, one of the earliest attending physicians at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Sewall broadened Mosher both scientifically and culturally. Her father, Judge Samuel E. Sewall, was a prominent member of the reform elite. He was an abolitionist, an advocate of women’s rights, and an early supporter of women in medicine. Lucy Sewall had read medicine with Marie Zakrzewska and, after attending the New England Female Medical College, finished her education with a year of successful study in London and Paris hospitals. Upon Sewall’s death Mary Putnam Jacobi wrote:

Lucy Sewall is especially noteworthy, as having been about the first woman of family, and fortune, to study medicine in America. Her great contribution to our cause, is, that in conservative Boston she first caused medicine to be regarded as a respectable, as a dignified profession for women.... The New England Hospital was ... for many years, sustained by her girlish and singlehearted devotion to a cause, which she had learned to love.⁵⁸

Sewall took seriously the education of her young charge. Mosher accompanied her on hospital visits as well as on calls to private patients. The teacher often discussed diagnoses with her young assistant. Mosher learned the uses and dosage of various drugs so efficiently that she was well versed in materia medica even before she arrived at Michigan medical school. “Because of her studies in Paris and London, and the years of experience gained in hospital work,” Mosher wrote years later, “Dr. Sewall was one of the best educated physicians in Boston. She quickly acquired a large and very lucrative practice. I feel that I owe a very great debt ... which I must repay by assisting other students as she assisted me.”⁵⁹

Women’s hospitals and dispensaries also began to ease young women’s transition into medicine. In the 1860s and 1870s both the New York Infirmary and the New England Hospital accepted apprentice-interns before they sought more formal medical training. In fact, the year previous to her preceptorship with Lucy Sewall, Eliza Mosher had joined her friend Amanda Sanford—fresh from a year’s study in Philadelphia—as an intern-apprentice at the New England Hospital.

In 1869 Mosher was one of five intern-apprentices in Boston. Her quickness and maturity soon earned her the chance to do dissections in the hospital laboratory. In addition, she assisted Dr. Sewall at the outpatient dispensary, learned to compound prescriptions and attended operations and obstetrical cases. She also sought private obstetrical instruction from Dr. Helen Morton in order to prepare to deliver her sister’s fourth baby.⁶⁰

During this year at the New England Hospital Mosher formed lifetime professional and personal relationships with other women doctors and found worthy, if stern and serious, role models. For half a century after her stay, the hospital continued to provide an opportunity for clinical training to many prominent women physicians : Susan Dimock, C. Annette Buckel, Emma Call, Alice Hamilton, Josephine Baker, Bertha Van Hoosen, Lucy Sewall, and many others.

While Mosher apprenticed in Boston, significant opportunities for women to study medicine became available elsewhere. One day, Mosher recalled, while she and her four fellow-apprentices worked in the laboratory, someone read a newspaper article announcing the opening of the University of Michigan to women. The implications of such an event instantly became apparent and the interns spontaneously joined hands and danced around the table.⁶¹ Although Ann Arbor was the first state university to commit itself to the medical education of women, in the next several decades, a number of universities—Ohio State, Iowa State, Stanford, the University of California among others—followed suit. The tide appeared to be turning in favor of coeducation, and the crowning achievement of all came in 1892 when supporters managed to throw open the doors of Johns Hopkins to women.

Of course, the women’s medical colleges offered certain advantages not readily available at coeducational schools. Female faculty served as role models, and the significance to younger women of such exposure should not be minimized. Furthermore, the atmosphere appears to have been at once rigorous and supportive. For example, years later, students spoke highly of both the professionalism and the underlying warmth of their teachers. Anna Wessel Williams, while she took note of the impressive medical record of Professor Chevalier, who taught chemistry at the New York Infirmary, also recalled that Chevalier took “a personal interest” in her, giving her hints as to the way she should dress and as to how she should do her hair. Despite Mary Putnam Jacobi’s reputation as an energetically brilliant and demanding teacher, she too gave Williams support and advice and helped her through several crucial decisions. She often “exposed our ignorance,” remembered Williams, “but in such a way that we were not so much depressed as encouraged to make it less.”⁶²

Similar memories abound of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania faculty. Ann Preston, for example, concerned about broadening her students in all ways, often took them to lectures by Lucy Stone and Ralph Waldo Emerson.⁶³ Emmeline Cleveland combined calm, dignity, warmth, and femininity with undeniable professional competence to create a figure of quiet charisma for those students who knew her. Cleveland’s successor in the chair of obstetrics, Anna Broomall, a particularly “busy professor and practitioner,” also was remembered by her students for her compassion and her “loyalty to family relationships.” “This loyalty,” wrote Mary Griscom, “was consistently applied when the families of her assistants needed them. Work never pressed so hard, that we could not go to our families if illness or trouble came to our homes.”⁶⁴

Such personal concern carried over into the twentieth century. Rita Finkler, a 1915 graduate who had come to the college as a recent Jewish refugee from Russion pogroms, remembered much kindness from Dean Martha Tracy. Her mentor arranged a special course for her in chemistry in the first year to help Finkler make the transition to a new country and a new language. Before long, Tracy “noticed that I was near-sighted and could not see the formulas on the black-board. I knew that I had defective vision right along, but resisted wearing glasses out of vanity. I was marched off to Dr. Mary Buchanan and in a few days the world appeared clearer and brighter to me.” Similarly, Katherine Boucot Sturgis, who in 1935 was burdened with a recent divorce and two young children, remembers that Tracy’s main concern in her preliminary interview was what Sturgis fed her children, fearing that they were not getting enough protein.⁶⁵

Thus, the nurturing atmosphere at the women’s institutions contributed to easing women students over a difficult transition. On the other hand, female solidarity could be on occasion pitted unfairly against the fulfillment of individual goals. Anna Wessel Williams recalled an incident in her own career when she was pressured by the New York Infirmary faculty to give up a coveted internship. Standing first in her class, she had been offered a position at Babies Hospital in New York, subject to the approval of its founder and director Dr. Ernest Holt, the prestigious pediatrician. When Holt met Williams, he was pleased and sent word to her that she could have the position. “Then I had a shock!,” Williams wrote in her autobiography. Emily Blackwell and another member of the faculty, Dr. Davis, “a snip of a consequential woman whom I had tried to ignore,” called her in for an interview. Telling Williams that they had talked the matter over with Holt, they revealed that “they had come to the conclusion that perhaps Dr. Parry, the second candidate for the position, might fit in better because of her age (over 30), experience (social work), ‘presence’ (tall, dignified, assured) ... and ... I forgot other reasons, but the chief one was ‘she might advance the cause of women more.’ ” “That finished me,” recalled Williams. “I felt like throwing something heavy at them.” Later that week Dr. Parry herself came to Williams’s home to plead her own case. Disgusted but also defeated, Williams consented to stay another year at the Infirmary to work in the outpatient department, while Parry took the position at Babies Hospital.⁶⁶ Pressure to preserve female solidarity could thus also be irritating to those not similarly committed to larger feminist goals.

Women who attended coeducational institutions, however, faced special problems of their own. In the beginning there was overt social ostracism. The hostility could be painful in those pioneer decades. Harriet Belcher (WMCP, 1879) felt the mixed clinics she attended while a student at the woman’s college in Philadelphia to be an “ordeal.” Male students often made a “scene” with “yells, boos and hisses on all sides.” In Michigan, as elsewhere, such treatment had to be taken in stride, recalled Eliza Mosher. Townspeople occasionally refused to rent rooms to “hen medics.” Often male students either ignored the women or exhibited deliberate animosity. Even faculty members could not hide their disapproval. Mosher vividly remembered the hazing she and other women received at the lectures in organic chemistry—the one subject the faculty “seemed to think would not injure our morals or those of the men to listen to in the same classroom.” “We women,” she wrote,

gathered in a body and filed into the lower lecture room where chairs were placed in front of the Professor’s platform for us. It was an ordeal for even strong nerves to listen to the stamping the shouting, the cat-calls and general stampede our entrance elicited. The men behaved more like a set of lunatics than would be Doctors. The worst of it was that the Professor in the department seemed rather pleased than otherwise at the demonstration.

Bertha Van Hoosen, who attended Michigan a decade later, found that the greatest prejudice came from the women students. She recoiled at the epithet “hen medic,” calling it “dreadful.” “I have never felt the stigma as in Ann Arbor,” she wrote.⁶⁷

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall’s memoirs testify eloquently to the life of women medical students in Baltimore in 1900. One curious incident occurred during her very first day in the city. Anxious to visit the school, she took a streetcar.

There was only one passenger in the car besides myself, and I soon was aware that I was an object of interest to him. Almost opposite my seat on the bench that ran lengthwise of the car, sat a distinguished gentleman dressed in grey oxford morning coat, striped trousers, and wearing a silk hat. He was short, but so finely built and slender that he did not seem small. I noticed immediately the sallow, ivory-colored tone of his skin and the small hands with tapered fingers folded over a cane which he held between his knees. My appearance seemed to interest him for he literally stared me out of countenance—seeming to go over me from head to foot, as if he were cataloguing every detail for future reference. I decided that he was an oriental—this conclusion brought about by his color and the long, thin rattail moustach that he kept pulling as he inventoried my charms. I knew that he was a gentleman, so I was embarrassed but not alarmed. Thinking to avoid him as soon as possible, when the car stopped at Broadway I hopped out first, and walked quickly in the direction of the hospital gates a block away. He soon caught up with me, and walking along side of me, said very casually, “Are you entering the medical school?” I managed to gasp out that I intended to. “Don’t,” said he, “go home.” And to my amazement without another word walked on ahead of me and went up the long flight of steps leading to the hospital door. Well, thought I, he must be crazy. How would he know that I was going into medicine, or why should he advise me not to? I think this incident dampened my interest in the unprepossessing brick buildings of the hospital and the medical school, for after a very short stay, I found a return street car and took myself back to Miss Conway’s and my little room. No other incidents of my first day in Baltimore remain in my memory.

The following morning Mendenhall went back to the medical school for her interview. Waiting nervously with other freshmen to be called, she finally heard her name. Cautiously, she entered an impressive room in which several distinguished-looking gentlemen sat around an enormous table. Led by the dean, Dr. William Welch, the doctors began to question her. Suddenly, as she looked up, she noticed to her amazement the man of the streetcar incident.

I mumbled a reply. Dr. Welch rose and bowed and intimated that the interview was over, telling me to be at the medical school the next morning at 9 o’clock. I got up and not knowing what to do—backed out of the room, until I reached the door—feeling that this group represented to me—royalty. Once again in the ante-room, I said to a man waiting there—later known to me as my good friend Dr. Rusk—“Who was the gentleman sitting on the left of Dr. Welch?” He answered, “Why, that is the great Dr. Osler.”⁶⁸

Yet disapproval from male faculty was not universal. Despite Mendenhall’s curious initial encounter with him, she often spoke of William Osler in her memoirs as a friend. His distaste for feminism did not deter him from treating the women students, once they had arrived at Hopkins, with scrupulous integrity. “Of all the men I have ever known, or even met,” she wrote, “William Osler has always seemed to me to have the most vivid personality as well as the finest mind and character. He was the greatest teacher I have ever known; an inspiration to his pupils and colleagues, one of the great gentlemen and influences of his age in the profession.... To all of us he was an unfailing guide.” Mendenhall spoke similarly of William Welch.⁶⁹

At Michigan Corrydon L. Ford, the head of the anatomy department, was a great favorite with the women. “Professor Ford,” Eliza Mosher wrote to her family when still a freshmen, “is just as kind as he can be and has done more than any man living to raise my faith in men!” Michigan’s President Angell and his wife also did their best to ease the “hen medic’s” social adjustment.⁷⁰

Nevertheless, the women at coeducational institutions had their fill of embarrassing situations. Although Michigan managed to preserve a peaceful and chaste atmosphere by conducting separate classes, not all schools could afford such a luxury. Dr. Ida May Wilson, a Columbus, Ohio, physician who attended the Ohio Medical University in the early 1890s recalled her “first experience with seeing a naked man.”

One afternoon it was posted on the bulletin board that Dr. McCurdy was to hold a class of the whole college on regional anatomy.... So we all met at the amphitheater. As I was waiting in the hall for the classes to be through reciting, Johnson, a colored man who was janitor of the dissecting room, came upstairs and grinning at me said, “You all going to the recitation this afternoon?” I said yes. He just halted a few minutes, then grinned and went on. So we all gathered for the class, and after a very good lecture from Dr. McCurdy, he said, “Bring that man in,” and Johnson came in stark naked—a splendid figure, black and well developed. It was my first sight of a naked man; I had seen some operations on men in the operating room but most of them had been well covered. Well, I gave one look, then looked down in my lap. But when the Doctor began to lecture ... the men in the college thought it was smart to be annoying, so they began to throw beans at Johnson; and of course they stung his flesh. And though Dr. McCurdy tried his best to get them to listen and behave, it was no use; so he dismissed the class. A week after that he tried it again, but the men again threw corn and beans. Once Johnson jumped over the railing and slapped one fellow and choked another. Again Dr. McCurdy dismissed the class; and though he later had the recitation in orthopedic surgery, he never tried again to teach the location of the different organs on the human.⁷¹

Sometimes keeping one’s composure proved extraordinarily difficult. Mendenhall recorded one experience at Hopkins which “nearly sent me out of medicine.” As at any medical school there was both a hospital medical society and an opportunity to attend other evening meetings and lectures during the week.

We heard the other students talking about going to the monthly meetings, and I was very eager to grasp every opportunity that would give me a better chance to do well in medicine.... I induced Margaret Long [the daughter of a former Massachusetts governor who became McKinley’s Secretary of the Navy] to companion me. We arrived before the crowd and took front seats.... I think that we were the only women present. The one woman interne and the women upper classmen, few in number, knew better than to attend this meeting. Simon Flexner presided, sitting at a table just in front of us. The speaker of the evening—Dr. Mackenzie of the nose and throat department—was introduced after some preliminary business. He talked an hour on some disease of the nose. But from the start he dragged in the dirtiest stories I have ever heard, read or imagined, and when he couldn’t say it in English he quoted Latin from sources not usually open to the public. Unfortunately, I had majored in Latin at Smith, and 7 years study made most of his quotations understandable to me. Nearly 50 years has passed since this night, but much he said is branded in my mind and still comes up like a decomposing body from the bottom of a pool that is disturbed. It seems impossible that on such a harmless subject a specialist could make it so pornographic.... Dr. Mackenzie spent most of his hour discussing the cavernous tissue present in the nasal passages and comparing it with the corpus spongiosa of the penis. We sat just opposite the speaker and the chairman, so that the flushed, bestial face of Dr. Mackenzie, his sly pleasure in making his nasty point, and I imagine the added filip of doing his dirt before two young women, was evident. I knew that we could not go out—not only should not, but I doubted that I could make the distance to the door without faltering.... I fastened my gaze on Simon Flexner and prayed that he would not laugh. Roars of laughter filled the room behind us at every dragged-in joke of Dr. Mackenzie.... Through it all Simon Flexner sat like a graven image, his face absolutely impassive like the profile on an old Roman coin. All my life I have been grateful for this man’s decency, which at the time seemed to be an anchor to buoy me through this ordeal.... I cried all the way home—hysterically—and Margaret swore.... The next few days I stayed at home ... debating with myself whether or not to leave the medical school ... I couldn’t make up my mind as to whether or not I was strong enough to rise above such defilement.... It is characteristic that Margaret Long was untouched—she put it down to the natural bestiality of man and ignored it entirely. Part of my trouble was that I couldn’t face my class, many of whom I had seen thoroughly enjoying themselves at the lecture....⁷²

Hopkins never allowed Mendenhall to forget that she was a woman. After several years’ effort and one or two more unpleasant and vulgar incidents, she finally settled on a behavioral strategy which worked well for the rest of her medical career:

I decided after much thought that as long as I was in medicine I would never object to anything a fellow student or doctor did to me or in my presence if he would act or speak the same way to a man.... But if he discriminated against me because I was a woman—tried to push me around, was offensive in a way he wouldn’t be to a man, I would crack down on him myself—or take it up with the authorities if he proved too much for me alone. On the whole, this was the right way to take the position of women in medicine in the 19th-century. It made life bearable, allowed me to make friends with some men who were not very pleasant persons ... and earned me the respect and friendship of many of my associates. It didn’t endear me to one or two I fell afoul of, and undoubtedly I developed an independence, even an arrogance, which was foreign to my original nature. I was distinctly not such a “nice” person, but a stronger one, after Johns Hopkins.⁷³

Although there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Mendenhall’s description of events like the one with Dr. Mackenzie, it is also true that an exaggerated sense of female propriety occasionally proved to be the problem. One of the things George W. Corner admired most about Florence Sabin, who was Mendenhall’s contemporary at Hopkins and Corner’s teacher for many years, was that “she was the first woman I ever met who was free from the prudery in matters of sex anatomy and physiology that was still prevalent in my student days. To hear a woman discuss these subjects before a class mostly of men, with professional detachment, was very instructive to me.”⁷⁴

Even well into the twentieth-century, female inhibitions could create unexpected embarrassment in the classroom. Writing to her parents in 1915, Ernestine Howard complained:

I got quite peeved at Dr. Stearns yesterday in Lab. We were studying various pathological lesions of the male reproductive system. He was supposed to instruct eight of us, so he got us together and as my name was the one he knows best he fired all the questions at me. It’s absolutely unheard of to quiz a girl on that subject here—I was perfectly amazed.... It’s perfect nonsense to make us study that subject. Now I’ve told you all my troubles—next week I’ll probably be very enthusiastic over the whole school again. No matter how coldly scientific one tries to be, the girl in me will pop up occasionally.⁷⁵

Some women were simply tougher than others. Mary Ritter loved to tell of an incident in her own student days which proved to her that women, no less than men, could develop thick skins. In her second year of school she attended an operation—“the most sickening one in my clinical experience:”

It was a case of cancer of the face. The result was a foregone conclusion, but the patient insisted on the attempt at relief. A facial operation of such magnitude is far more repellent than one on any other part of the body. As it proceeded, a student fainted. Soon another; and then a third. The three men were stretched out on the floor and no further attention was paid them. As the gruesome operation proceeded I gritted my teeth, clenched my hands, and held on. Next to me stood a senior woman student. I watched her turn a greenish white and sway a little. Contrary to the ethics of an operating room, where silence is the rule, I hissed in her ear, ‘Don’t you dare faint.’ She jumped, and flushing with anger, turned on me. In turn I flushed with embarrassment. But the return of blood to our heads by blushing saved the situation. The two women students did not faint and thus disgrace the sex. That three men did faint was merely due to a passing circulatory disturbance of no significance; but had the two women medical students fainted, it would have been incontrovertible evidence of the unfitness of the entire sex for the medical profession.⁷⁶

Small triumphs like these, when a woman had the chance to demonstrate her mettle, punctuated the struggle for acceptance. Eliza Mosher often retold an experience with the Dean of the Medical Department at Michigan, A.R. Palmer, one of the faculty members openly hostile to women in medicine. Palmer enjoyed announcing to his class that he could “not see how right-minded women can wish to study medicine with men.” One day he received a rare pathological specimen and asked Mosher to demonstrate it to the women’s class. Later Palmer met her in the faculty waiting room with the words, “Miss Mosher, you showed this specimen so well to your class, I want you to demonstrate it to the men’s class.” “Oh, I cannot possibly do it,” protested Mosher. “Do it to please me,” he responded in a most persuasive tone.

Like a flash [I remembered] his words “I fail to see how right-minded women can wish to study medicine with men.” The psychological moment had arrived to make him retract these words, and I determined to comply with his request. When I found myself before those 500 men, I longed for an abyss to open to save me. My pride, however, carried me through. Professor Palmer said: “Miss Mosher, has just demonstrated this interesting pathological specimen so well to the women’s class I have with great difficulty persuaded her to present it to you.” The place became still in a moment, and I was able to make myself heard I think by even the top row of students. I’m not sure but I romanced a little to make my story more impressive. When through I hurried out under a rousing clapping of hands—but not a foot was heard. Professor Palmer followed me joyfully exclaiming: “That’s all for you.”⁷⁷

Although such incidents fostered necessary inner strength and self-esteem and generated faculty respect and support for women like Mosher, one doubts whether the positive achievements of isolated individuals really altered the opposition of the A.R. Palmers of the world to the principle of women in medicine. Medical school simply demanded a seriousness of purpose that only rare, special, and emphatically resolute women could attain. When such women succeeded, they were often considered atypical. Indeed, many observers praised the “gentlemanly” character traits which supposedly distinguished many women students. Indeed, to be called masculine was to inspire disapproval, but to manifest manly strength of character, in contrast to the frivolity usually identified with women, could generate much admiration.

Dr. Walter B. Hinsdale vividly recalled his own initial opposition to women students which, he later admitted, was at least partially inspired by the fear that “they’d take away our patients.” His recollection of Mosher as a student, however, eloquently illustrates that she was able to change his opinion because she successfully managed to walk a tightrope—exhibiting both determination and pluck without tarnishing her femininity:

Eliza Mosher was a young woman one couldn’t resent. She was so sure of her calling, she went right ahead and never bothered anybody. She was a gentlewoman never aggressive, never freakish in dress as some were. She was quiet, determined, I should say eager to learn.... She didn’t show off her knowledge nor flirt with the men and distract their attention, which was one thing that was feared. She worked well with men. I presume you would say the men liked her businesslike manner.⁷⁸

Florence Sabin, probably the most successful woman student at Johns Hopkins at the turn of the century and the first woman to be appointed to their faculty, had a similar reputation for being “thoroughly businesslike,” a “hard worker” but also generous and warm. As one of her woman students remembered her,

Her appearance was not very feminine and she wore what one would think of as rather practical clothes. She said to a friend of mine, rather wistfully, that she wished she knew how to pick out pretty clothes but she guessed she wouldn’t look well in them anyway. It was a surprise to know she cared about anything so frivolous.⁷⁹

Similarly, at a memorial service for Dr. Frances Emily White in 1904 William Salter, director of the Chicago Ethical Culture Society, spoke of her “singularly virile intelligence,” and paid her what he sincerely believed was the highest compliment of all when he called her “^{a man} among men.”⁸⁰

The two qualities that Hinsdale remembered most in Mosher were that she kept her sexuality under wraps and “worked well with men” by dressing conservatively and maintaining an efficient manner and that she felt “so sure of her calling” that she never lost her self-confidence. Unhappily, not all women medical students managed such feats with equal success. Martha May Eliot (Johns Hopkins, 1918) complained of a fellow intern who was “a funny girl when you come to work with her. She hasn’t much tact and doesn’t know how to get along with men.” Similarly, Ernestine Howard wrote of a woman classmate, “I do wish Katherine Merritt would use her brain more in class. She does act so stupid in Dr. Winternitz’ class—we are the only two girls in the division, and he almost always makes me correct her mistakes—which is embarrassing.”⁸¹

Not only appropriate demeanor, but appropriate dress was important. Women remained ambivalent about the kind of image they should project. In 1913, Ernestine Howard wrote to her parents,

Katherine Merritt and I don’t approve of the frivolous clothes the fourth year girls and internes wear around the hospital. So Mary Wright and we two have decided to buy clothes alike next spring for wear in class rooms, etc. Don’t you think that a good scheme? We intend to wear white and avoid fluffy truffles.⁸²

In fact, proper clothes remained an issue even after medical school. Emily Dunning Barringer, New York’s first woman ambulance surgeon who interned at Gouverneur Hospital in 1902, agonized for days until she found suitable attire for ambulance duty—a suit that “would attract as little attention as possible.”⁸³ Similarly, Josephine Baker (New York Infirmary, 1898), New York City’s first head of the Bureau of Child Hygiene, confessed to be loyally grateful to the Gibson Girl for the introduction of shirt-waists and tailored suits into the conventional feminine costume. For her, she wrote, they provided “protective coloring.” “As it was,” she continued in her autobiography, “I could so dress that, when a masculine colleague of mine looked around the office in a rather critical state of mind, no feminine furbelows would catch his eye and give him an excuse to become irritated by the presence of a woman where, according to him, no woman had a right to be.”⁸⁴

A few women failed miserably to strike the delicate balance. While at Ohio, Ida Wilson learned quickly, but she recorded in her memoirs an experience with a woman who unhappily overstepped the bounds of appropriate dress:

A Miss Belau entered the class in the second year. She was a full German blond, hair of gold and very fair, and was quite loudly dressed the first day she came to class, she was in a vivid scarlet dress ... sleeveless of course ... the men could not keep their thoughts or eyes on the doings of the class. I remember [Andrew] Bonnett ... leaned over and said, “There comes a gay one,” and I felt sure a man of his age and place in life knew more than I did. So I never palled around with Miss Belau.

Maintaining one’s self-confidence was another nagging problem. Ida Wilson remembered another classmate at Ohio, Mrs. Jesse Smith, who was such a “perfect student” that “she took all the prizes that were offered” and “knew her lessons by heart.” Yet, years later, Mrs. Smith confessed to Wilson that “she could never make a living in medicine. She had no confidence in herself and the people seemed to know it.”⁸⁵ Bertha Van Hoosen, later a successful surgeon and the founder and first president of the Medical Women’s National Association, painfully wrote to her parents during her first year at Michigan, “I am so afraid I will not be smart enough and not do well. I am worried all most to death.”⁸⁶ Ida Wilson herself, discouraged by several lean years after graduating from medical school, considered retraining as a nurse, until her brother, also a physician, made her promise to “stick to it.”⁸⁷ Happily both Van Hoosen and Wilson overcame their doubts, but other women did not.

Self-doubt may have plagued the women attending coeducational institutions more often than it did those who matriculated at the all women’s schools. After Alice Hamilton graduated from Michigan in the early 1890s, she spent several months interning at the Northwestern Hospital for Women and Children in Minneapolis. This institution, founded in 1882 by a graduate of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, Mary G. Hood, modeled itself after the Philadelphia school’s Woman’s Hospital and staffed its clinics with so many Philadelphia graduates that its founders looked on it “as literally a younger sister” of the older institution.⁸⁸ When Hamilton arrived in Minneapolis, Hood still reigned supreme as senior attending physician, while Ella B. Everitt, a recent gradute of Philadelphia, served as chief of the house staff. Hamilton immediately perceived that “Philadelphia training is very different from Ann Arbor.” Although she deplored Everitt’s medicine as “desperately unscientific” and her surgery as “slovenly,” she admired the Philadelphia woman’s self-assurance: “She is so decided,” she wrote of Everitt to her cousin Agnes, “has such confidence in herself, such calm authoritarian ways with the nurses and such cheery indifference with the grumbling patients, that I constantly envy her.”⁸⁹

Another Michigan graduate, Eveline P. Ballentine, recalled that the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania had an allure for women at Ann Arbor. She wrote that when she was a student in the coeducational university, a great deal was heard about the woman’s school. Some had already attended there for a year, while others eventually left Michigan to take their senior year in Philadelphia. “There seemed to be a tradition,” Ballentine wrote, “that the medical education of a woman was not complete unless at least one of these terms was spent at the Woman’s Medical College.” When she herself graduated and visited the school for the first time in 1888 she was inspired by the atmosphere: “There was something in the spirit of the place ... that impressed me that there was a foundation for the tradition.... I confess that what I saw filled me with a feeling of loss and regret for some of the good things that had been left out of my student experience.” One surmises that Ballentine is here referring to the sense of fellowship and mutual support from both women faculty and students which remained the primary attraction of the woman’s school.⁹⁰

When the number of women students was large enough, students at coeducational institutions fought their isolation by coming together in support networks. Eliza Mosher’s letters home report a closeness among the women students which seemed essential to her sense of well-being. “We are all very fond of each other,” she wrote in 1872.⁹¹

At Johns Hopkins, the women students created a cohesive and flourishing social and intellectual life of their own. No doubt this was due in part to the influence of M. Carey Thomas and the Baltimore Women’s Committee, which continued a watchful scrutiny over the Hopkins women and obsessively monitored their successes. Of course not everyone was grateful for such attention. Dorothy Reed Mendenhall remembered that she and other women came to “know and dread invitations of Miss Garrett to her huge house on Vernon Place.”⁹² Yet Florence Sabin, a more unflappable personality than her friend, left no such record of annoyance. Indeed, in 1902, when Sabin had already begun to show promise as a researcher with the publication of two remarkable papers, the feminist network in Baltimore lobbied successfully to support her work with an award of $1,000 from the Naples Table Association, an organization dedicated to promoting scientific research by women.

Nor did Martha May Eliot find contact with the women’s committee unpleasant a little over a decade later. In 1916 she reported to her mother,

Yesterday there was a tea at the house at “104” for the Women’s Committee of the Medical school and all the dignitaries were there—among them Miss Thomas from Bryn Mawr.... She was quite sociable and apparently much interested in us and our welfare.... Ethel tried to impress Miss Thomas with the necessity for better living quarters for the girls and she seemed favorably impressed with the idea of a house large enough to hold a good many and with arrangements to provide good meals.... Several doctors wives came and it was very pleasant ⁹³

In the early 1900s the women at Hopkins founded a secret “fraternity,” Zeta Phi. All women students were invited to join. They met often and frequently prestigious older women physicians came to speak. They discussed journal articles together, joined in social activities and occasionally invited men students to teas. Martha May Eliot amusedly wrote home of one such meeting:

Friday night we had a meeting of the Fraternity and a wild one it was. Such a crowd as the “hens” are when they get together—and such scrappers! The birds don’t agree in their nest there are too many odd sticks among us.⁹⁴

From the very beginning women tended to room together, and by the second decade of the twentieth century they had their own house, equipped with housekeeper. Most women students gathered there for meals. “At that time,” remembered Marie N. Wherry, “our boarding house, called the Hen House, on Jackson place was notorious.” The women also had a “charming sitting room in the hospital and a comfortable rest and lunch room in the Physiological Building, the gift of Mary Garrett,” recalled Minerva Herrinton, who entered Hopkins in 1902.⁹⁵

Dr. Alice Ballou Eliot recollected more work than play. “We women kept pretty much to ourselves,” she wrote decades later. “We were so busy we had little time for anything outside our work.”⁹⁶ But occasional letters home contradict Eliot’s austere picture. Equally typical was this description by Martha May Eliot of a Friday evening’s activity:

Friday night all thirty hen medics went up the bay in a boat for supper and didn’t get back until nearly eleven. We had a fine time and fairly quiet for such a crowd of girls. I guess they were all pretty tired.

Dorothy Reed Mendenhall remembered examination time with particular amusement. “For the big examinations,” she wrote in her memoirs,

Florence Sabin, Rose Fairbank, Mabel Austin and I would get together the night before, coming prepared with a list of questions we had found most difficult to answer and posing them in turn to a jaded audience. Such an evening was very helpful, clearing up many hard knots and usually left us in a hilarious mood.⁹⁷

And yet Johns Hopkins did bring together many diverse personalities among the women—“odd sticks,” as Martha May Eliot had put it—and their forced intimacy, often as much a product of necessity as desire, occasionally created friction and resentment. Some of these ambivalent feelings are expressed in Dorothy Reed Mendenhall’s memoirs, especially in her description of the women of her class. Mendenhall entered Hopkins in 1900. There were twelve women in a class of forty-three, and Mendenhall, not a person to mince words, passed judgment on them all. Her memoirs, however caustic, give us an insight into the variety of ways women accommodated themselves to the coeducational situation.

For example, she recalled two Vassar graduates, “fine students, and well bred good-looking women” who were both “embittered and supersensitive from association with the men of their classes who made them feel they were not wanted.” Another “frump” by the name of Delia Wykoff “represented all that is undesirable in a professional woman.” Though she was bright and became an intern at the hospital—an honor extended only to the most promising—she let the men make fun of her and, as Mendenhall saw it, expected special treatment for being a woman. The men “told with glee how she took a day off every month to stay in bed when she menstruated, leaving them to do the work.” Such behavior infuriated Mendenhall, who was heckled with Wykoff’s failings when she herself appeared on the wards for a clinical rotation. “I determined, at least,” she recorded years later, “to ask no favors because of being a woman. ”⁹⁸ Thus, occasional tension in the atmosphere could pit women against other women.

Most of the other “girls” Mendenhall described as “plain.” Only Mabel Austin, “a graduate of the University of Minnesota,” and a “typical co-education product,” was “beautiful” and a “good student.” Mendenhall felt Austin knew how to handle men through her experience at a large midwestern university, but was also disappointed at Austin’s willingness “to get favors by boot-licking.” She was “hail-fellow-well-met” with everyone. With Mabel Austin’s help Mendenhall finally relaxed and found her niche. But it was clearly not easy. She later summarized her first year with the observation:

Both of us being good looking, well dressed, and evidently used to things socially were unusual in a crowd of plain women, introverted types, shy or self-effacing students, or freak personalities.... We drew on ourselves much attention, especially from upper classmenour own class, largely gentlemen, paid very little attention to us. Apparently the older students and some of the staff were dumbfounded to see attractive women in Medical School.⁹⁹

The underlying sexual tension in Mendenhall’s memoirs speaks to another difficulty women at coeducational institutions faced. Eliza Mosher’s quiet self-assurance gave her an advantage matched only by her asexuality. The same was true for Florence Sabin, of whom an acquaintance wrote, “She was more interested in a career than she was in having beaux. "¹⁰⁰ But other women achieved the acceptable affective posture with great difficulty. Women with Mosher’s or Sabin’s singleminded dedication to work, who refused to be seduced by romantic yearnings for husband, home, and family, managed to escape many of the conflicts that others, perhaps more easily responsive on an emotional level to the opposite sex, could not always avoid. Coeducational institutions could occasionally exacerbate the dilemmas of such women.

Again, Dorothy Reed Mendenhall is a good example. During her last year at Johns Hopkins she was drawn into an unhappy love affair that brought her enormous emotional strain and led to her decision to leave Baltimore and take residency training in New York. ¹⁰¹ Moreover, Mabel S. Glover, a promising Wellesley graduate and one of the three women to enter the first class at Hopkins, fell in love with the school’s new young anatomy professor, Dr. Franklin P. Mall, and gave up medicine to become his wife. Years later she wrote, “Dr. Mall always insisted that he made up his mind that first day that he was going to marry me as soon as possible.”¹⁰² A bit younger than Glover, Edith Houghton became engaged in the middle of her senior year at Hopkins to Donald Hooker, a fellow classmate and later professor of physiology at the school.¹⁰³ She too abandoned medicine. In 1916 Ernestine Howard wrote in some distress about a favorite fellow classmate, Irma Goldman, who had recently become engaged to a man she had known only for a very short time. The psychological stress had become unbearable for Howard’s friend and she feared that “Irma ... is on the way to flunk out.” Goldman began to cut classes, and became so worked up over Adolph Meyer’s clinics in psychiatry that she began to believe that “she has a psychoneurosis.” “All that in addition to getting engaged ... is too much for her. If she’d attend to business, I think she’d be all right, but the little idiot hasn’t got sense enough to do that.”¹⁰⁴

Finally, the tortured letters of Dr. Dorothea Rhodes Lummis Moore to her first husband reveal in rare candor the emotional tightrope walked by women who wanted marriage and a career. Dorothea Rhodes had met and secretly married Charles Lummis, later founder of the Los Angeles Southwest Museum and a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, when they were both medical students at Boston University in the early 1880s. For several years subsequently the couple lived apart as she completed her medical education and he pursued journalism while living with her parents in Chillicothe, Illinois. Although Dorothea’s letters were full of ambition and the determination to succeed in her chosen profession, they also make clear that she was a passionate woman who loved her husband deeply, often felt unsure of his reciprocal affection, and depended on his reassurances. Although she eventually achieved notable success in medicine and was elected president of the Los Angeles County Homeopathic Medical Society, her letters written between 1883-1884 reveal another, more private, side to her personality, suggesting that these years were trying ones, when she occasionally and tearfully regretted their decision to separate:

I wish I could say Hello to ye today. I am incomplete without you always. (20 September 1883). Dear Carl Boy! I wish you were here tonight, my mind wants ye, my heart wants ye, and my body wants ye. (5-7 November 1883). What a horrid world this is, anyhow. Everybody incomplete, except at a few moments of bliss. Here we be, sort o’loving and with young passionate bodies separated by a full thousand of hard real miles. (16-18 November 1883).¹⁰⁵

Although Moore handled her romantic longings by surrendering to them, other women fought against allowing their emotions to become engaged. Elizabeth Blackwell confessed in her autobiography to the “disturbing influence” exercised upon her by the opposite sex. She chose medicine, she admitted, in order to keep herself permanently distracted from the temptation to marry. Similarly, Anna Wessel Williams wrote of working hard to develop the quality of “detachment—detachment from all disturbing longings,” a quality she believed essential to the good physician. “I certainly had longings galore,” she recorded. Her diary suggests that dealing with them was for her a lifetime struggles. ¹⁰⁶

Two decades after Mendenhall’s time at Johns Hopkins the atmosphere surrounding male-female relationships seems to have become more relaxed. The letters of Ernestine Howard and Martha May Eliot describe a situation of reserved camaraderie. Occasionally the girls who lived at “104,” the unofficial women’s residence, would have “a ‘man’ party” and invite their fellow classmates to tea or supper. Often the men and women would see each other in groups. In 1914 Ernestine Howard confessed to her mother that “I think I’ve learned almost as much about boys this year as I have about anatomy—they certainly look at a great many things in an entirely different way from what girls do. "¹⁰⁷ And yet both Howard and Eliot hung back from anything more than friendly, superficial involvement, so much so that Howard was teasingly dubbed “Aunt Sarah” by some of her male classmates. She accepted the sobriquet good-naturedly, but there were times when having to monitor her own and others’s behavior caused her to lose her patience. “I’m mad at one of the men who will not keep his hands off me,” she wrote home in 1915. ”I’ve sat on him several times slightly—I guess I’ve got to squelch him good and hard. Sometimes I wish I were.n’t a girl—I think medical work would be simpler for a man. ”¹⁰⁸

While some women struggled, others were simply not much touched by the question of romance. One suspects that Eliza Mosher remained single less out of dedicated conviction, then out of a lack of real interest in marriage. Her intimate letters never reveal a romantic attraction to men, although she got along quite well with them, and she once confessed that she did not marry because she never found a man “who was to me the only man.” If such a person should ever come along, she claimed, she would have been glad to marry.¹⁰⁹ The fact that such an individual never managed to spark Mosher’s interest probably reveals as much about her own indifference as it does about the quality of her male acquaintances.

Still other women found the exposure to men at coeducational schools positively beneficial. Emily Dunning Barringer, who married a classmate, attended Cornell University for her premedical preparation and returned to Cornell Medical School in the last two years of her training when her own medical college-the New York Infirmary—merged with Cornell in 1900. “I learned,” she wrote in her autobiography, “to work side by side with men on an equal intellectual level; impersonally, if you will.”

I probably would have never made it through the next ten years of my life, if I hadn’t had that day to day contact. It seems extraordinary, in the light of today’s mores, to have to labor that point, but women doctors in operating rooms, hospitals, laboratories, dissecting rooms were all but unheard of in those days; and breaking in with a group of men, who were also classmates in elementary biology, dissecting pickled embryonic pigs, was at least the most humane way of conditioning that young women could have had at the time for the later more difficult problems of a medical -career.¹¹⁰

Eliza Mosher agreed. Long after she graduated from Michigan she wrote: “My acquaintance with men both as Professors and students gave me a conception of the workings of men’s minds which has een most helpful in my dealings with them later in my life.”¹¹¹

And what of marriage? The decision to marry was not always an easy one to make. Certainly when a woman decided to study medicine in the nineteenth century, she was well aware that in many ways she challenged conventional definitions of woman’s role, even if she believed, as many did, that medicine was naturally suited to female talents and abilities. Conventional Victorian marriage neither promoted nor condoned a woman’s freedom to pursue personal goals. Often feminists pictured marriage as a dangerous impediment to underdeveloped women who ought instead to seek to live and think independently. ¹¹²

Many women physicians strived for creative means to overcome the fears and psychological strains inherent in the choice of a life of independence. Mary Wright, for example, a student at the Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati in 1854, explained to a friend how she had arrived at her decision:

Judging from my own feelings I thought it would be somewhat interesting to you to know what I have been engaged in since you heard from me. Well, I have not turned to be a woman’s right’s woman in the sense in which that term is generally received but have come to the conclusion that notwithstanding parts of the human family are women, that they and every member of this great family have a right to follow any occupation their tastes and feelings dictate, provided it does not interfere with the rights and happiness of others, and furthermore that no single member of this great body if he is a man and no set of men or women have a right to prescribe limits for the occupation of another. I have acted in accordance with this conclusion, and have stepped out of the beaten track marked out for woman to walk in, and have chosen an occupation which heretofore has been followed only by men, I speak of the study and practice of medicine. For nearly two years the most of my attention has been directed to that subject. On the 16th of October I commenced attending a course of medical lectures in Cincinnatti [sic] I like them very much indeed, there are sixteen ladies and about one hundred and eighty gentlemen attending the college I would like to be employed in something that will benefit the parts of the human family that has been oppressed and suffered wrongfully, to wit women. For I do think that they have had their feelings outraged, and suffered wrongs that are derogatory to the customs of an enlightened nation like our own. Afid I think the practice of medicine is just as much her sphere as it is man’s.

Wright concluded her letter by raising the question of marriage. “I am still enjoying a life of single blessedness,” she wrote, “and expect to during my whole earthly pilgrimage.” Staying single did not “grieve” her in the least. “I think,” she explained, “that the great object of this life is to prepare for another state of existence, and to do good to our fellow creatures, and enjoy as much pleasure as we can consistent with goodness. It appears to me that all of these ends can be accomplished as well without being married as to be.”“¹¹³ Five years later Wright was married, but she continued to practice her profession.

Examining the question of marriage for women physicians on the pages of the Woman’s Medical Journal in 1894, Dr. Gertrude Baillie rejected the arguments of alarmists who claimed that educated professional women were ruined for wifehood and motherhood. On the contrary, she claimed “it is an undisputed fact, among those in a position to know, that her intelligence, her familiarity with the laws of hygeine [sic] and physiology, enable her to do her part ... with much more efficacy, than her less fortunate sister.” Nor did Baillie agree that professional women preferred to remain single because of a “lack of physical impulse” as some critics claimed. Yet Baillie believed that the majority still chose not to marry, because they knew that “no woman can serve two masters” and had learned “to make their bodies subservient to their wills.” For every married professional woman with a family, she argued, the conflict between the two roles would eventually prove too grueling: “Either her work or her family will feel the neglect.” Women physicians, she concluded, who live “by and for the people” could “least of all” afford to take the risk¹¹⁴

Large numbers of medical women implicitly or explicitly made Baillie’s choice, devoting themselves to their work with singular passion. Emily Pope insightfully labeled the New England Hospital the object of Marie Zakrzewska’s “most intense affection, the child of her prime and of her old age.” Others viewed their relationship to their work as a kind of marriage. Harriot Hunt, who often spoke of herself as being wedded to medicine, celebrated her silver anniversary after twenty-five years of practice in the summer of 1860. Similarly, Harriet Belcher eagerly wrote to her intimate friend Eliza Johnson how much she wished the latter could be present at her graduation, which she termed “my ‘wedding day.’ ” Yet for many the decision to remain single exacted its price. In 1916 Ernestine Howard wrote home to her parents a bit sheepishly, “When you receive this I’ll be 27 years old! And not even engaged! I seem to be following in the foot steps of my Aunts pretty well—but there are folks who like me even in Baltimore.”¹¹⁵ Despite Howard’s discomfort at deviating from the norm, she cherished warm friendships with both men and women. Others experienced more painful degrees of emotional isolation. Anna Wessel Williams thought a great deal about marriage. When she rejected it for herself it was not without a tinge of sadness. “Marriage!” she once wrote in her notebook. “Of course I want it with the right one—but the right one?—that is the question.”

How can I be sure? Is there ever a single right one? I can’t believe it. Already I have had thrills and longings several times at different stages in my development which have been interfered with, diverted, stopped-or marriage would surely have resulted—and how happy I am that nothing came of them.... Rather a divine discontent than happiness through lack of knowledge.... I want—more than anything to know, not necessarily through actual personal physical knowledge, but through intellectual perception and realization. The actual experience might dim the perception.

Intimate friendships also came hard to Williams. In 1908 she recorded in her diary, “I was told today (by A.) that it was quite pathetic to think that I had no one particular friend. It’s too true and tho its probably largely my own fault, yet I do not know that I wholly regret it--considering the life I must lead.”“¹¹⁶

Clelia Mosher, a Hopkins graduate who became resident physician for women at Stanford University, was also plagued by loneliness for most of her professional life. Her notes and unpublished fiction suggest that she felt intensely the conflict between the needs and wants of the independent-minded professional woman, society’s prescriptions, and her own romantic longings. In the notes for one story about a beautiful and accomplished woman she wrote:

Bring out the struggle in the woman’s own soul of:

1. the right to her intellectual development

2. the overwhelming passionate love for a man who is her ideal

3. the claims of her motherhood

4. the intense religious element in the struggle—her vow to help the cause of woman’s intellectual freedom and the recourse of having technically broken that vow. The irresistable force of the affection for the man who is her husband, whose character and mind compel her absolute admiration: The power of his strong personality and his respect and yielding to her wishes; his loyalty; his firmness ; his respect for her point of view in which he does not believe. His willingness to give her intellectual freedom even in marriage.

6. he yielding to her love loses some of her fineness; irreconcilable in her soul and therefore makes her less fine.¹¹⁷

The pursuit of self-development could also engender guilt. Aware that the conventional role for women was to live for others, Harriet Belcher self-consciously caught herself after a lengthy and enthusiastic letter to a friend describing life at medical college. “This letter is ‘ego’ from first to last,” she apologized. “Well, I can’t help it, in these days I am wrapped up in myself to a most ignoble extent, but you who are living so in and for others write soon to tell me all the news.” A year later she commented revealingly to the same friend: “What a family you and Mary have on your hands, my dear! And yet you write as if you do not consider that you are doing much. Why, it seems to me a very heavy charge.... Thus far my professional life ... has been far less onerous to me than my old housekeeping days. ¹¹⁸

Very often women physicians like Mosher who chose not to marry satisfied their desires for intimacy by establishing relationships with other women, adopting children, or both. Elizabeth Blackwell, Emily Blackwell, Cordelia Greene, Eliza Mosher, Lucy Sewall, and numerous other single women physicians adopted one or more youngsters and raised them to productive adulthood. Greene’s six “offspring” called her “mother,” and when they married she continued to involve herself in their lives and in the lives of her grandchildren.¹¹⁹ Although not much is known about Eliza Mosher’s relationship with her daughter, whom she adopted from among the prisoners when she was the superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women at Sherbon, we do know that she looked to the accomplishments of “my girl” with pride. Regarding the adoption, Mosher once wrote to her sister that if she were never permitted to achieve anything more, “I shall feel as if my life has not been in vain.”¹²⁰

Helen Morton, for many years an attending physician at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, retained a close relationship with Mary Elizabeth Watson, even after her friend became Mrs. John Prentiss Hopkinson. Morton’s letters to Mrs. Hopkinson are full of expressions of love and emotion, and it is clear that she felt herself able to share through her friend in some significant “female” events. She often wrote of her patients who were babies: “I’ve got a beauty of a baby on my list.... The daintiest piece of perfection I ever saw. She’s etherial [tic] but she won’t fly away.... I wouldn’t miss seeing her for anything.” Morton delivered both Mrs. Hopkinson’s daughters, and sent her a long poem on the occasion of the birth of a son. “I wonder if you ever could know how I envy you your beautiful children.... You know I’m glad to hear all you tell me about your babies,” she wrote ¹²¹

Women physicians frequently formed lifetime relationships with other women. Often two women doctors lived together, practiced together, and shared work,‘leisure, and various degrees of emotional commitment. Some of these relationships resembled marriages in the degree of closeness and mutual obligation, like that of Lillian Welsh and Mary Sherwood in Baltimore, or Elizabeth Cushier and Emily Blackwell in New York. Many were undoubtedly homosexual. Others, like that of Eliza Mosher and her partner Lucy Hall, were less intense, and took on a configuration which might be best categorized as that of mentor and novitiate. Nevertheless, in their various forms such creatively diverse solutions to the problem of loneliness and the hunger for connection once again illustrate the presence of a wide spectrum of emotional options for women described so perceptively in recent years by historians.

The correspondence between Elizabeth Clark, an intern at the Woman’s Hospital of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1910, and her friend Ada Pierce, reveals the rich intimacy achieved by many women physicians who lived together. Clark shared the home of an older physician on the faculty, Dr. Emma Musson, and letters to their mutual friend Pierce, written between 1910 and 1913, are strikingly descriptive of a world in which men were generally absent and hardly missed. Clark’s newsy missives evoke vivid pictures of her medical work as they recount everyday experiences, revealing a satisfying life filled with work, love, play, and occasional disappointment. These women clearly knew how to enjoy themselves: the letters bristle with self-mocking irony, gentle humor, good-natured loyalty, and good times. Musson, for example, who was nicknamed “St. Juliana” by her friends, wrote to Pierce in 1910 that “E is a joy to one’s soul and a constant source of delight.” Dr. Musson, in turn, called Clark “Izzie.” Several other women physicians completed this lively circle of friends, but the primary central relationship remained that between Musson and Clark. When Musson died of pneumonia in 1913, Clark wrote to her friend Ada, “my old heart is clean gone out of me forever & forever.”¹²²

Many women thus found ways to reject conventional marriage without truncating their emotional lives. For them, the freedom could be exhilarating. They shared the exuberance of Marie Zakrzewska when she confided in her last public message to students and friends, “During my whole life I have had my own way as much as any human being can have it without entirely neglecting social rules or trespassing upon the comfort of others more than is necessary for self-preservation. "¹²³ Such freedom, for women who could tolerate it, was not easily exchanged for a wedding ring.

Others paid dearly in professional terms for the sense of connectedness they felt only a husband and children could bring. Dorothy Reed Mendenhall’s recollection of her own decision to marry suggests that she did so out of a desire to share her life with a congenial mate whom she could respect and with whom she could have a family. Although she never abandoned her medical career and, indeed, accomplished much working for the Children’s Bureau in the area of public health and preventive medicine, she clearly subordinated her medicine to her familial role. Her brilliant promise as a student in William Welch’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins, when she identified and isolated the “Reed cell,” important in the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease, seemed to her teachers to have been betrayed by her subsequent choices. For men like Welch, and singularly dedicated women like Florence Sabin, teaching ignorant mothers diet and hygiene could not compare favorably to the monumental task of moving medical science into the twentieth century. Nor did her significant achievements deter the hostile faculty members opposed to the admission of women to Harvard medical school in the 1940s from citing Mendenhall as an example of “an able woman who had married and failed to use her expensive medical education.”¹²⁴ Mendenhall herself considered such an accusation a “damned lie,” but she nevertheless harbored feelings of bitterness.

Other women physicians did choose to give up medicine entirely or were forced to do so by their husbands. Many of them argued that they had benefited from their medical educations, and quite a few from this group became active in charity and volunteer work. Elizabeth Bollins-Jones (WMCP, 1856), for example, married soon after graduation and had five children, one a daughter who became a physician. Although she surrendered her formal practice, she remained active in charitable work. Another important philanthropic worker was Frances Linton Sharpless (WMCP, 1886), who practiced medicine for four years until her marriage. She stayed active as a lay person in medical charity, remaining for a long time a member of the board of the Chester County Hospital and Training School for Nurses. Frances B. Tyson (WMCP, 1901) practiced for eight years after working her way through medical school until she was ordered to quit by her husband. In 1918, when doctors were desperately needed to handle the influenza epidemic, she went back to work, and refused thereafter to return to retirement. Other women practiced from two to ten years before marriage and children. ¹²⁵

Less pessimistic about the possibility of combining marriage with a career, perhaps because she succeeded so brilliantly at the task herself, Mary Putnam Jacobi managed to give the most balanced assessment of the problem. Ultimately, she argued, it was a matter of individual struggle and adjustment. “The question of marriage again,” she told her students in 1880,

which complicates everything else in the life of women, cannot fail to complicate their professional life. It does so, whether the marriage exists or does not exist, that is, as much for unmarried as for married women.... Many married women will lose all interest in medicine as soon as they have children, as many now fail to develop the full needed interest precisely because they have no other, and are dispirited by isolation from family ties. Many will interrupt their practice during the first few years after marriage to resume it later. Whatever is done, either with or without marriage, can evidently be well done only in proportion as more complete intellectual development and more perfect training enables the woman to cope with the peculiar difficulties in her destiny.

For all the obvious problems that Jacobi so eloquently delineated in 1880, she herself never regretted her decision to marry, despite the fact that the union was punctuated by occasional stormy interludes. ¹²⁶

What is more, married women who ceased to practice medicine remained distinctly in the minority. Contrary to the assumptions of historians and women physicians themselves, available data suggests that the marriage rate for women physicans was disproportionately high in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until other professionals caught up in the 1940s. Between one-fifth and one-third of women physicians married in the nineteenth century, and by 1900 their marriage rate was twice that of all employed women and four times the rate among professional women. A significant number of them married men who were themselves doctors. Although most practiced in the United States, a nucleus of these women actually managed to carry out Emmeline Cleveland’s youthful dream and became medical missionaries together with their husbands in India, China, Korea, and Japan. While some studied medicine in order to assist or to share in their husband’s work, others met and married physicians after they themselves had graduated from medical school. As we have seen, a smaller number of women, like Hannah Longshore and Charlotte Blake Brown, left their families with the permission of their husbands in order to attend medical school. However most women physicians who married in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did so after they completed their educations and, judging from impressionistic evidence, were noticeably older than their female counterparts in the general population.‘¹²⁷’

Why did women physicians have such a comparatively high marriage rate? One obvious answer was the nature of the work itself. Medicine, unlike most other professions, still offered the opportunity for self-employment and allowed one to work out of one’s home, perhaps combining practice with a physician-husband. Such a situation provided greater flexibility for the woman who wished to pursue marriage and a career. Furthermore, there were neither social nor legal proscriptions against the married woman physician as there were, for example, for teachers.

Another factor which is indicated by the age of women in medicine compared to other occupations seems to be that women physicians were much less likely to abandon their work once they married. Age patterns for all employed women in 1900, for example, suggest that nearly half of them were twenty-four years of age or younger. Professional women follow the same pattern, one which signifies that most women worked only until they married. Hence, the percentages of working women grow smaller in each succeeding age cohort after age 15-24. If we consider that most women classified as “professional” by the census in 1900 were teachers, this pattern makes much sense, since married teachers were usually forced to leave their posts.

Medicine is the only profession in 1900 with an exceptional pattern. Whereas the numbers grow smaller in the successive age cohorts after ages 15-24 for other working women, including professionals, the last three age cohorts—25—34, 35-44, and 45+—remain equal for women physicians. This situation remained stable until after World War II, when professional women began to catch up (see TABLES 5-1 and 5-2)

Information on marriage patterns suggests that women physicians were a small and exceptional group, highly motivated and willing to lead unconventional personal lives. The fact that between 25 and 35 percent in the nineteenth, and 30 and 40 percent in the first half of the twentieth century married suggests that for such women medicine was not an insurmountable barrier to family life. This data is not necessarily incompatible with the conventional wisdom that medicine was an unusually difficult field to combine with marriage. Census figures for working women, after all, concern only those women who are actually working at their occupations. Thus, though the percentage of nurses who married, for example, was low relative to that of women physicians, such a figure does not mean that nurses were less likely to get married. On the contrary, it suggests that nurses were less likely to marry and to continue their work. Indeed, the age structure of working women in general indicates that women who worked in other areas of employment were more likely to get married than women who entered medicine. However, once married, most abandoned their work. In contrast, medical women seemed exceptionally committed to their profession—so committed, in fact, that even marriage and family could not deter them from it. ¹²⁸

TABLE 5-1 Women’s Marriage Rate in Selected Occupations 1900 to 1950 (Percent Married)

But were these marriages happy? Evidence suggests that many were quite successful. Some couples, indeed, managed to create models of egalitarian relationships which their modern day counterparts still struggle to attain. In 1945 Frances Ancell (WMCP, 1896) said of her own marriage: “TEAM WORK! ... Twenty-three years of happy life and work together!” Her classmate Mary Mellowdew Loog felt equally blessed. “I have loved my work and also my married life,” she wrote. ¹²⁹

TABLE 5-2 Women Ever Married in Selected Occupations 1900 and 1930

Sources Statistics of Women at Work, Based on unpublished information derived from the schedules of the Twelfth Census, 1900 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907); Fourteenth Census, of rhe United States, vol. 4: “Population, 1920: Occupations” (Washington, GPO, 1923): Fifteenth Cen.sus of the United States, vol. 5: “Population, 1930: General Reports on Occupations” (Washington: GPO. 1933); Sixteenth Census of the United States, vol. 3: “Population, 1940: The Labor Force,” part 1 (Washington: GPO, 1943); U.S. Census of Population, 1950, Special Reports: “Occupational haracteristics” (Washington: GPO, 1956).

The success of such marriages certainly depended at least in part on the husbands, who deviated in a number of ways from the classic partriarchal Victorian ideal. Interested not only in their wives’ work, but in their ability to develop their full range of talents, they took pride in their spouses’ achievements and showed a willingness to aid both materially and practically in their unorthodox aspirations. Thomas Longshore, a teacher and philosopher of religion, whose zeal for social reform, abolition, and women’s rights was well known, was one such man. When he married Hannah E. Myers in 1841 she had already expressed a desire to study medicine. Although financial considerations forced her to postpone her plans for several years, even the birth of two children did not deter her enrollment in 1850 in the first class of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania at the age of thirty-one. Longshore encouraged his wife throughout her long medical career. Hannah attended classes with her sister-in-law Anna, who came to live with the Longshores and helped them with household chores. Their daughter remembered that “Aunt Anna studied medicine at night and father helped.” He, in fact, was “very instrumental in urging them on. He hunted all the notes for Dr. Longshore’s lectures and wrote them for her.” Later on, “when Dr. Longshore got busy,” Mr. Longshore kept the books and compounded her medicines for her. Similarly, the son of Sarah Cohen (WMCP, 1879) remembered that his father “was quite proud of my mother. When she was teaching in medical school, she would dictate her lectures and he would copy them down in longhand for her.,,¹³⁰

Other women physicians had husbands who were equally supportive. A niece of Dean Ann Preston studied medicine at the Woman’s Medical College five years after she married her physician husband. After taking her degree in 1881 Florence Preston Stubbes joined her husband’s practice, concentrating on the diseases of women. For years she balanced work and family life, offering to some observers “an excellent example of what a medical married woman may do, at least in special practice, without neglecting husband or child.” When she died, her husband, Dr. H.J. Stubbes, paid her high tribute by pronouncing her a “true woman, a loving mother, a perfect wife,” whose professional competence was “ever a source of strength and inspiration to her husband.”‘¹³¹’ Dr. Esther Hawkes, an 1857 graduate of the New England Female Medical College had the full backing of her own physician husband, whom she had married when she was still a teacher. A friend wrote of their union: “Marriage to most women means an end to their individual careers. With our friend ... marriage was simply an entrance to wider usefulness and greater opportunities. ,,¹³²

In 1891, four years after Mary Bennett had begun to practice medicine in Berkeley, California, she married William Emerson Ritter, with whom she had fallen in love five years earlier while still a medical student. Ritter was studying biology at the university and, although they became engaged, it was not until he was well along toward the completion of a Ph.D. from Harvard and had received an appointment in the newly created Zoology Department at the University of California that the couple married.

At the end of her life Mary Ritter confessed in her autobiography, “My husband’s scientific enterprises have determined the course of our lives.”¹³³ Yet she managed to practice medicine for twenty-two years with his wholehearted support. By her account, the relationship, though childless, was a deeply satisfying one. The two shared many common interests and Mr. Ritter, who founded the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, had an accomplished career. The couple enjoyed friendships with several “medical marriages,” and moved in circles where professional activity for married women was not frowned upon ¹³⁴

A generation later Emily Dunning Barringer, who attended the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and was graduated from Cornell when the two schools merged in 1899, wrote of the encouragement she received from her husband, a surgeon whom she met when they were both medical students. Speaking of their initial encounter she mused:

Fate was certainly very kind to me. I have often wondered what would have happened if I had met an average man ... [instead of] the extraordinary one I had found.... I found him the aggressor in interest in my career. He was the one who crossed the boundaries, discussed, evaluated, and encouraged. And he did it, I found, not to please and flatter me, but because he was genuinely thrilled that the woman he wanted to be his wife was capable of that type of mental development. My life both medical and personal took on a perspective and depth, color and meaning from that day.... Ben’s love, pride and enthusiasm was the delicate adjustment needed to bring the machine into perfect timing and I settled down with a deep sense of power that brooked no opposition. ‘¹³⁵

Similarly, the pioneer social hygienist and associate of Hull House, Dr. Rachelle Yarros (WMCP, 1893) had complimentary things to say about her own mate, Victor. At the end of a long and full career she wrote to the dean of her alma mater, “I am glad and happy to say that my name is still Slobodinsky-Yarros.... I am very fortunate to have such a wonderful companion and inspiring and exacting partner during these long years. He helped me study medicine and in all my subsequent undertakings.¹³⁶

Supportive husbands were not drawn solely from the ranks of professionals and reformers. Maria Minnis Homet graduated with the first class at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She deliberately chose a rural practice because, as she later explained, “I thought Alma Mater would be glad to have this obstacle removed.” Settling in a small Pennsylvania village she soon met and became engaged to Edward Homet, a farmer and surveyor in the area. Something of the flavor of their courtship has been preserved in a single letter written by Maria to her fiance on 23 October 1856, one month before the wedding. The note, simple and straightforward, suggests the degree to which these “bold” women tempered their medical concerns with the mundane cares of a more conventional femininity:

Dear Edward:

I want to come see you on Saturday next. Can I come? I thought I would ask you to come down but when crossing the river yesterday, I saw you on the top of the house or on nothing, for I could not see what supported you, and I thought how tired you would be so I said to myself I will not ask him to come down. Then I thought I would like to know, at the close of the week, whether you had escaped all danger, and then at the risk of being called simple I thought I would ask to visit you. If it is not convenient send me a line. I have some business that way so it will not seem like going on purpose.

Miss Slatery sits at one end of the table making my dress. I think it looks quite well.

Tomorrow I calculate to make some fruit cake. It is better when made some time. Oh dear, I wonder if I can make it good enough for Aunt Milly and Aunt Amandy.

I have my hands full—if nobody would get sick for a week or two—but the sick must be attended to and as for other things I will do the best I can and if it does not suit everybody I will try not to cry about it. If you only keep well and no accident happens to you, I will put up with all the rest. But doesn’t your head get dizzy when up so high? Then it must make you lame, too. I think I will bring a little of the “medicine” you spoke of but you must take it at night or you might not be able to climb so well.

I am glad you are not afraid. If you were, there would be more danger of falling. Then everybody praises you, and then I feel proud of you and hope “all will be well.” But I must confess it made me tremble a little to see you up so high. But you are doing your duty and I trust no harm will come to you.

“Wal” I will not trouble you farther now and close with wishing you very pleasant dreams.

Yours as ever,

Maria¹³⁷

Maria and Edward Homet were married on 13 November 1856 and resided near Homet’s Ferry, Pennsylvania, for nearly forty years. In 1892 Maria wrote about her practice and her marriage to her friends at the Alumnae Association:

When I married ... it was much easier; my husband never allowed me to harness my horse, and if I had a call in the night he always drove for me. Eighteen months after my marriage my only child, a daughter, was born.... After practicing thirteen years, my family thought they needed me at home, and that I needed rest. I therefore gave up practice. I now go out occasionally but my visits are gratuitous. “¹³⁸

William Osier was once reputed to remark that “human kind might be divided into three groups—men, women and women physicians.”¹³⁹ Though Osier was known to be scrupulously fair to his women students, his comments reveal that for the most part women physicians were not easily welcomed into the medical profession, and, when not rejected entirely, they were at best tolerated as “different.” Their role marginality and role ambivalence, primarily imposed by male physicians, was both resisted and internalized by women doctors themselves. They wanted to be accepted into the professional fold, while they struggled to remain both women and physicians. They suffered from male discrimination in their role as Victorian women as well as in their role as Victorian women doctors. In this examination of the ways in which women physicians’ professional lives impinged on their womanhood, we have seen that they struggled valiantly to become creditable practitioners without either surrendering or denigrating their femininity. They sought as best they could to mesh the commonplace events of their lives as women with the demands of a professional life hitherto based solely on the male model. It was not an easy task at all, and many of them good-naturedly understood that society would continue to view them as a class apart, no matter what they accomplished. The next chapter will inquire about the ways in which their womanhood affected their adjustment as professionals. We will see that in spite of their unique handicaps, women physicians managed to accomplish a great deal.

Lillian Welsh loved to argue that “out of the mouths of babes and defectives come often current social opinions.” In support of her contention, she was fond of telling of an encounter she had with an inmate one Sunday morning when she worked in the Norristown Hospital for the Insane. Suddenly, while doing rounds with her friend Dr. Mary Sherwood, she was confronted with a female patient who “planted herself firmly in our way,” and, looking at Dr. Sherwood, asked, “Say are you a doctor or a lady?” “You look so young and pleasant,” the woman continued, “I thought you might be a lady.” Though public opinion might stubbornly question women physicians’ choices, evidence suggests that they managed often quite successfully to balance two identities with sensitivity and grace ¹⁴⁰