Women in the Medical Profession: Why were there so Few?

Abstract

Until now, scholars lacked an analytical, book-length study of women in the American medical profession. Mary Roth Walsh has filled this gap. Historians of women as well as social historians of medicine will be grateful for this overdue beginning to the study of an important topic. Medicine attracted more women than any other profession in nineteenthcentury America except teaching. Indeed, Walsh characterizes the late nineteenth century as the golden age of women physicians, when women made up 10 percent or more of the enrollment in eighteen regular medical schools. By 1900 their proportion in the profession rose to 18 percent in selected cities such as Boston. Walsh correctly views women's progress in medicine as part of the nineteenth-century struggle for female self-determination. She argues, though she does not explore the thesis thoroughly enough, that feminism was a crucial variable in facilitating women's entrance into medicine. She defines feminism in the broadest terms-as an effort to expand opportunities for women. This approach enables her to avoid the pitfalls of equating the entrance of women into the profession with organized women's rights. She also understands that although large numbers of women doctors remained personally aloof from the campaign, the women's movement provided a context for their efforts to gain medical training. The author finds that despite nineteenth-century hostility to women doctors, physicians did not succeed in significantly barring women from medicine until the twentieth century. She attributes the drop in the number of female physicians to a male backlash and attempts to demonstrate that a male-dominated medical establishment, appalled at the high percentage of female physicians in 1900, systematically limited women's