Restoring the Balance : Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850-1995

by More, Ellen Singer

• ISBN13: 9780674766617
• ISBN10: 067476661X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-02-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

From about 1850, American women physicians won gradual acceptance from male colleagues and the general public, primarily as caregivers to women and children. By 1920, they represented approximately five percent of the profession. But within a decade, their niche in American medicine--women's medical schools and medical societies, dispensaries for women and children, women's hospitals, and settlement house clinics--had declined. The steady increase of women entering medical schools also halted, a trend not reversed until the 1960s. Yet, as women's traditional niche in the profession disappeared, a vanguard of women doctors slowly opened new paths to professional advancement and public health advocacy. Drawing on rich archival sources and her own extensive interviews with women physicians, Ellen More shows how the Victorian ideal of balance influenced the practice of healing for women doctors in America over the past 150 years. She argues that the history of women practitioners throughout the twentieth century fulfills the expectations constructed within the Victorian culture of professionalism. Restoring the Balance demonstrates that women doctors--collectively and individually--sought to balance the distinctive interests and culture of women against the claims of disinterestedness, scientific objectivity, and specialization of modern medical professionalism. That goal, More writes, reaffirmed by each generation, lies at the heart of her central question: what does it mean to be a woman physician?

Author Biography

Ellen S. More is Associate Professor of Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Restoring the Balance?	1	(12)
The Professionalism of Sarah Dolley, M.D.	13	(29)
Gendered Practices: Late Victorian Medicine in the Woman's Sphere	42	(28)
Maternalist Medicine: Women Physicians in the Progressive Era	70	(25)
Redefining the Margins: Women Physicians and Americans Hospitals, 1900-1939	95	(27)
Getting Organized: The Medical Women's National Association and World War I	122	(26)
New Directions: The Eclipse of Maternalist Medicine	148	(34)
Resisting the ``Feminine Mystique,'' 1938-1968	182	(34)
Medicine and the New Women's Movement	216	(32)
Conclusion: Reconciling Equality and Difference	248	(13)
Notes	261	(72)
Index	333