"Few Things More Womanly Or More Noble": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Advent of the Woman Doctor in America

Abstract

In 1867, a twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Stuart compassionately devoted her first essay to plight of American women burdened with unrewarding domestic labor or leisured idleness. Next to ill-health, she argued in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the principal cause of women's unhappiness--for women are not happy--is want of something to do.... Whether for self-support, or for pure employment's sake, search for work--for successful work, for congenial work--is at bottom of half feminine miseries of world (What Shall They Do? 522). Maintaining that [i]f a girl, for any reason, wants a positive, outside object for her days ... it is her business to find one, and it is business of her friends to help her, proposes a number of occupational suggestions to women: [C]an you teach? Or can't you teach? Can you measure alpaca? trim bonnets? run a machine?... Then can you keep a ledger? write book notices for a busy editor? fill out insurance policies? a city missionary? Read to an old lady? Take care of an invalid? Go into hospitals? (522, 522-23). Her series of alternatives concludes, however, with an option to which would come to attach a singular and surpassing value during first half of her career: Be a doctor? and be sure that you could be few things more womanly or more noble. The pioneers--God bless them for it!--have broken way for you. It is an easier way now than path of idle or ill-paid (523). In most circles in country at this time, as Phelps's first biographer observes, Women doctors were just beginning to be heard of--with shudders (Bennett 25-26). Still, it was not altogether outlandish for to promote medicine as a field for women. In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became first woman to receive a medical diploma, followed by other brave pioneers like Dr. Marie Zakrzewska. During this period, women doctors founded hospitals for women and children in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and schools like Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania gradually prospered. By 1867, when Phelps's piece appeared in Harper's, several hundred women had evidently begun practicing medicine in United States, despite widespread and frequently venomous opposition. came of age when first generation of officially certified women in American medical profession was emerging, and so she was ideally positioned to witness such a development and to grasp its significance for lives and condition of women. As one scholar observes, Phelps wished choices to be available for women and especially supported entry of women into medical careers (Masteller 137). Throughout 1870s, returned to topic in essays, columns, public letters, and short stories--an early advocacy that culminated in her novel Doctor Zay (1882), obviously Phelps's fullest treatment of figure of woman physician. Although Doctor Zay has dominated critical discussion of her interest in women doctors, novel has a long and spacious fore-ground in a wealth of little-known polemical, journalistic, and imaginative writings by Phelps. These writings underscore achievements of already established women doctors, their special role in domain of women's health, imperative of medically educating and training women in face of pernicious resistance, necessity of coeducation in medicine, model of independence and self-sufficiency presented by woman physician, and medical woman's symbolic value as an agent of healing between North and South in post-Civil War America. Between 1867 and 1882, when number of women doctors in United States increased substantially, few writers proved more keenly or vocally responsive than to advent of women in American medicine. An exploration of her largely overlooked early prose demonstrates that played an instrumental role in culturally, socially, and professionally legitimating figure of American medical woman during a crucial fifteen-year period when woman doctor remained perhaps most provocative and controversial new presence on nation's occupational landscape. …