Meet The Three Female Medical Students Who Destroyed Gender Norms A Century Ago

[ismnotwasm]

(What's with these misleading titles? These women are incredible, and are a part of history that we don't hear about because woman, but "destroying gender norms"? I think not. Still, a very compelling story--Love the picture)

From the Drexel University Archives and Special Collections.

The photograph -- doing rounds this time thanks to Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi, a Ph.D. student who posted the photograph on her blog after stumbling on it while researching 19th century ear surgery -- is remarkable enough to warrant the fuss. The three magnificently dressed ladies were students at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, snapped at a Dean’s reception, in 1885.

If the timing doesn't seem quite right, that's understandable. In 1885, women in the U.S. still couldn't vote, nor were they encouraged to learn very much. Popular wisdom decreed that studying was a threat to motherhood. Women who went to college, wrote the Harvard gynecologist Edward H. Clarke in 1873, risked “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system,” such as infertility. “Because,” went Clarke's reasoning, in a classic bit of mansplaining titled "Sex In Education," a woman’s “system never does two things well at the same time.”

So how did our seemingly non-hysterical trio wind up inside a medical school? And that too, from thousands of miles away?

In a report last year for PRI’s The World -- which seems to go viral annually -- Christopher Woolf credits unsung heroes for making the situation possible: the Quakers, “who believed in women’s rights enough to set up the WMCP way back in 1850 in Germantown.”

"It’s a reminder just how exceptional America was in the 19th century," Woolf writes. "We often spend so much time remembering all the legitimately bad things in U.S. history. But compared to the rest of the world, America was this inspirational beacon of freedom and equality."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/08/19th-century-women-medical-school_n_5093603.html

[geardaddy]

1. Excellent article

The first woman to gain a degree in medicine in the U.S. graduated from my college. Elizabeth Blackwell. She is held in high regard there.

[ismnotwasm]

2. And has her place in history right?

An inspiring women. Cool you went to the same college

[geardaddy]

3. She definitely has her place in history

It's unfortunate that they didn't name William Smith college after her instead.

[ismnotwasm]

4. ...

[redqueen]

5. Thank you so much for your editorial comment there...

I was ready to go all

[ismnotwasm]

6. I know right?

I've been seeing that sneaky crap more lately.

[redqueen]

7. PoMo is so popular.

Let's all just pretend not to notice that gender norms are quite often more firmly enforced here than they have been in decades.

[HockeyMom]

8. My very first OB/GYN back in the late 60s

was a woman in her 60s. She had a picture on her wall of her medical school graduation class. She was the ONLY WOMAN in that class. My guess it must have been from the 1920s? Goes to show not much changed in those 40 years.

[wryter2000]

9. There was also a medical college for women in Manhattan

http://www.homeoint.org/cazalet/histo/newyork.htm

The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women was incorporated by a special act of the legislature, under the University of the State of New York, April 14, 1863. The charter of this institution is still valid.

Dr. Clemence S. Lozier was the pioneer who made it possible for women to study medicine in New York City. Before this college was opened for women students, there was no place in New York City where a woman could study medicine.

[theHandpuppet]

10. Dr. Elizabeth Edmonston

This thread reminds me that while doing some unrelated research some time ago, I came across this article on a Dr. Elizabeth Edmonston of Hillsboro, Ohio. This article was published in a small quarterly magazine called “Ohio Southland”, dedicated to the history of a few southern counties in the Buckeye State. The subtext within will become immediately apparent.

I would post a link to the full magazine, which is available through the Cincinnati Public Library’s virtual library, but it is so image-heavy I don’t want anyone to have computer problems downloading it (I had to give it a couple of tries myself). However, if you really want to read from the original, pm me and I will send you a link.

A photo of Dr. Edmonston accompanied the article. The profile of the good doctor was but a small portion of this look at some trail-blazing women.

Ohio Southland
Vol I, Number 4
Fall 1989
“Women Are Here To Stay” by Elouise E. Postle

(excerpt)
But with suffrage, here came the Up-To-Date Woman – and Hillsboro women were not far behind. Ladies dared to venture from the safe haven of their homes to clerk, become typists, secretaries, telephone operators.
The 1920’s woman bobbed her hair, even rouged her cheeks and oh, you kid! She smoked a cigarette in public.
Such a progressive woman was Hillsboro’s first lady doctor, Elizabeth Edmonston. She must have given the establishment fits.
Dr. Edmonston was a native New Yorker; educated and admitted to medical practice in New York. In 1911, she came to Hillsboro to visit a close friend, Grace Gardner, whom she had met while Miss Gardner was studying voice, art and all those cultural things in New York. Elizabeth was so enchanted with Hillsboro and its people that she stayed. She passed the Ohio exams and was licensed to practice medicine in Ohio.
Dr. Edmonston was a plain-looking woman. Her eyebrow-raising manner of dressing lent a masculine, authoritative look to her large-framed, monumentally statuesque figure.
She wore a man’s long, black frock coat over her ankle-length skirts. Her white blouses, with stiffly starched cuffs, were ornamented with a man’s gold cuff links. And she smoked cigars.
Dr. Edmonston claimed that she had discovered a method of removing nicotine from tobacco while experimenting in her New York laboratory, and that several tobacco companies had sought to buy her formula. But she took her secret with her to her grave when she died in 1931.
Dr. Edmonston declined to write down her “recipe”, as she called her formula, “for fear she would leave out some important ingredient.”
Eccentric as the Doctor may have been, she was widely regarded as an above average physician “with a real doctor’s touch.” She paved the way for Hillsboro’s future women to seek careers in professions heretofore considered exclusively male domain.

[ismnotwasm]

11. I'd love a link

When you have the time

[theHandpuppet]

12. On its way

Just be aware that a lot of folks use the Cincy virtual library during the day so you might have better success in the evening. Also, the pdf is rather image-heavy so it will take a while to download.

[ismnotwasm]

13. Got it

Awesome!