Kayleigh Kresse is a third-year undergraduate student at Grinnell College on the pre-med track, working towards a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Biological Chemistry. At the college, she is currently a co-leader on the Student on Health-Oriented Tracks committee, co-founder and co-leader of the Philippine United Students Organization (PUSO), golfs on the women’s varsity golf team, and is involved with the YGB Gospel Choir.
In 2000, women made up 24% of the medical field, and in 2003, more than half of U.S. medical school applicants and matriculates were women. These statistics are the results of two centuries of social reform and health movements led by female activists who believed that the woman’s role in society consisted of more than just her obligations and duties as a housewife.
Up until the nineteenth century, it was held that the woman’s occupation in the household was to heal and nurture, in order to maintain a healthy and sound environment for the family. Women utilized holistic techniques of folk medicine to carry out this traditional role of caretaker.
However, with “increased leisure accruing from technological advances,” women began to more often occupy themselves vocationally. [1] Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school in 1849, setting the wheels in motion for the opening of a few all-female medical schools and a slow, but steady acceptance of women into coeducational medical schools by 1880.
In the nineteenth century, while the number of women medical graduates increased from the hundreds to the thousands, female subordination was still perpetuated by the emphasis on the biological differences between men and women. It was thought that if women should be allowed to practice medicine, it is because only they possessed the virtues of female sentiment, (e.g. maternalism, spirituality, and female nurture) that male physicians could not provide. Mary Putnam Jacobi, who received an M.D. from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1864, was the first to assert that the permission of women to pursue medicine was not a matter of whether women have unique female qualities of use to the field, but was instead a matter of what is just and equal. [2] In order to justify equal opportunity in the medical field, she championed similarities between genders through biological evidence, thus dismissing the relationship between biological features and societal niche.
Despite the cultivation of change brought by Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi in the late Victorian era, women still faced many obstacles. One common argument was the belief that women would discredit and diminish the professionalism of medical practice because they were “poorly trained” and had “inadequate schooling”. [3] Another claim, made by Dr. E. H. Clarke in 1873, was that it was detrimental for women to pursue extra schooling as it would “[sap] the energy needed for the normal development of the reproductive organs” and the woman could become sterile.[4] Yet another theory was that a woman’s experiences in medicine could strip her of her soft, nurturing characteristics and her instincts as a caretaker and moral compass. Afraid of this occurring, men supported that they were the brutal and uncultivated counterparts who needed women to stay soft and nurturing, in order to soften their edges. The last major, and poor, argument was that men’s own sexual self-control “would be gravely shaken by close contact with women students and physicians.”[5] Men claimed that they could not be focused in the operating or examining rooms, due to uncontrollable sexual urges from the presence of a female. Overall, while women were hailed as morally superior and domestically powerful, they were labeled inferior and weak in the medical profession.
While progress was made, the ideologies of nineteenth-century women doctors still did not drift from mainstream thinking. They accepted that gradual change is all that can be expected of a public influenced by patriarchal standards and worked towards slowly creating a positive image for the female physician. With the exception of Mary Putnam Jacobi, whose ideas were radical at the time, most were accepting of gender stereotypes, only asking for more gender equality in the work place. The popular argument at the time was that women can be competent doctors and still maintain their femininity.[6]
Today, we are finally reaching a point in which more women’s capabilities and smarts are recognized in the professional sphere, as the number of women applying and attending medical are higher than ever before. While gender roles still have not been entirely rethought, we are observing a shift away from the cultural mandate of the housewife, thanks to the various reform movements and the evolution of attitudes in the past two centuries that have secured more freedoms and opportunities for women to become medical professionals. However, while we have come a long way, it is crucial to save a critical lens for the long road ahead of us in the eternal fight for gender equality in medicine.
[1] Morantz-Sanchez, Regina Markell. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 56.
[2] Bittel, Carla. Mary Putnam Jacobi & the Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
[3] Morantz-Sanchez, pp. 70.
[4] Morantz-Sanchez, pp. 54.
[5] More, Ellen S., Elizabeth Fee, and Manon Parry. “New Perspectives on Women Physicians and Medicine in the United States, 1849 to the Present.” In Women Physicians and the Cultures of Medicine, edited by Ellen S. More, Elizabeth Fee, Manon Parry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp. 3.
[6] Morantz-Sanchez, pp. 61.
