From intolerance to indifference : access to opportunity for women physicians, 1870-1925

Author

Jayne Crumpler DeFiore

Date of Award

12-1989

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

Susan D. Becker

Committee Members

Charles Jackson, John Muldowny, Charles Johnson, Suzanne Kurth

Abstract

This work examines the effects of changes in the medical profession between 1870 and 1925, the impact of World War I on opportunities for women in medicine, and medical women's responses to these changes. After a discussion of the conditions in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, which allowed women access to the medical profession and how women physicians kept access routes open, the effects of medical education reform on both male and female enrollment patterns in the early twentieth century are evaluated. World War I, while interrupting the process of medical education reform, opened new opportunities for women physicians abroad on a separate but equal basis as volunteers without official government sanction. An analysis of the degree to which opportunities persisted into the 1920s completes the substance of this study.

Sources include recent overviews of women physicians and primary sources housed in archives on women as well as archives devoted to women in medicine. The Woman's Medical Journal, the official organ of the Medical Women's National Association (AMWA) and the Medical Woman's Journal, which became the official organ of the Women's Medical Society of New York, provide ample primary material as well. Statistics on gender specific enrollment patterns were gathered from the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Education (1890-1903) and then from the educational numbers of the Journal of the American Medical Association (1901-1930). War materials are from the extensive collection of the American Women's Hospital Service.

This study concludes that medical education reform limited opportunity for women entering medicine by the middle of the 1890s, but that World War I once again opened the gates of opportunity. By the mid-1920s, opportunity once again stagnated until the 1970s. In fact, by the mid-1920s, intolerance of women in medicine had been largely supplanted by indifference.

Recommended Citation

DeFiore, Jayne Crumpler, "From intolerance to indifference : access to opportunity for women physicians, 1870-1925. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1989.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/11637