Women Doctors

Abstract

The previous chapter on headmistresses showed women engaged in a career which had long been deemed acceptable by the public. Their struggle for this generation of headmistresses had been to gain professional status similar to that of their male counterparts. But a woman whose ambition was to be a doctor faced immense opposition. Teaching was acceptable but doctoring was unfeminine. Until Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman doctor in 1849, women had been excluded from this profession.¹ According to Eric Hobsbawm: ‘The hardest task was undoubtedly that of women who braved the entrenched resistance, institutional and informal, of men in organised professions, in spite of a small but rapidly expanding bridgehead they had established in medicine’.² Hobsbawm recorded that there were around 20 women registered in 1891, 212 by 1901 and 447 by 1911.³ According to Carol Dyhouse, just before the First World War around 1,000 women were on the Medical Register and the 1914–1918 war ‘encouraged many more to qualify and the numbers doubled to 2,100 by 1921’.⁴