Eliza Maria Mosher: Pioneering Woman Physician and Advocate for Physical Education

Abstract

Through her work as a prison physician, prison superintendent, college physician, college professor and university dean, Eliza Mosher touched in a substantive manner nearly every health-related career that women entered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mosher's benchmark work in the profession of physical education was of particular importance at a time when the field was just emerging. In a profession that accepted women on nearly equal terms with men from the outset, it was of importance that women of substantial academic and professional merit participated in the formative years of the field's chief professional body, the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education. Mosher was such a woman.