TAKING TITLE IN THE PROFESSIONS
They are the grimmest outposts of all that mark the winning of the
woman’s cause. But they star the map of Europe to-day—the Women’s War
Hospitals.
Out of the night darkness that envelops a war-ridden land, a bell
sounds a faint alarm. From bed to bed down the white wards there
passes the word in a hoarse whisper: “The convoy, the convoy again.”
Instantly the whole vast house of pain is at taut attention. Boyish
women surgeons, throwing aside the cigarettes with which they have
been relaxing overstrained nerves, hastily don white tunics and take
their place by the operating tables. Women physicians hurry from the
laboratories with the anesthetics that will be needed. Girl orderlies,
lounging at leisure in the corridors, remove their hands from their
pockets to seize the stretchers and rush to their line-up in the
courtyard. The gate keeper turns a heavy iron key. From out the
darkness beyond, the convoy of grey ambulances reaching in a continuous
line from the railway station begins to roll in.
On and on they come in great waves of agony lashed up by the latest
seething storm of horror and destruction out there on the front. In the
dimmed rays of the carefully hooded light at the entrance, the girl
chauffeur in khaki deftly swings into place the great vehicle with her
load of human freight. A nurse in a flowing headdress, ghostly white
against the night, alights from the rear step. The wreckage inside
of what has been four men, now dead, dying or maimed, is passed out.
Groans and sharp cries of pain mingle with the rasping of the motor as
the ambulance rolls on to make way for another.
The last drive in the trenches has been perhaps a particularly terrible
one. All night like this, every night for a week, for two weeks, the
rush for human repairs may go on. Men broken on the gigantic wheel of
fate to which the world is lashed to-day will be brought in like this,
battalion after battalion to be mended by women’s hands. The appalling
distress of a world in agony has requisitioned any hands that know how,
all hands with the skill to bind up a wound.
It is very plain. You cannot stand like this in a woman staffed
hospital in the war zone without catching a vision of the great moving
picture spectacle that here flashes through the smoke of battle. Hush!
From man’s extremity, it is, that the Great Director of all is himself
staging woman’s opportunity.
The heights toward which the woman movement of yesterday struggled in
vain are taken at last. The battle has been won over there in Europe.
Between the forces of the Allies and the Kaiser, it is, that another
fortress of ancient prejudice has fallen to the waiting women’s
legions. It was entirely unexpected, entirely unplanned by any of
the embattled belligerents. Woman had been summoned to industry. The
proclamation that called her went up on the walls of the cities almost
as soon as the call of the men to the colours. There were women porters
at the railway stations of Europe, women running railroads, women
driving motor vans, women unloading ships, women street cleaners, women
navvies, women butchers, women coal heavers, women building aeroplanes,
women doing danger duty in the T. N. T. factories of the arsenals, and
in every land women engaged in those 96 trades and 1701 jobs in which
the British War Office authoritatively announced: “They have shown
themselves capable of successfully replacing the stronger sex.”
Let the lady plough. Teach her to milk. She can have the hired man’s
place on the farm. She can release the ten dollar a week clerk poring
over a ledger. She can make munitions. Her country calls her. But the
female constitution has not been reckoned strong enough to sit on the
judge’s bench. And Christian lands unanimously deem it indelicate for
a woman to talk to God from a pulpit. From the arduous duties of the
professions, the world would to the last professional man protect the
weaker sex.
Then, hark! Hear the Dead March again! As inexorably as in the
workshops and the offices, it began to echo through the seminaries and
the colleges, through the laboratories and the law courts. Listen!
The sound of marching feet. The new woman movement is here too at the
doors. High on the walls of Leipzig and the Sorbonne, of Oxford and
Cambridge and Moscow and Milan, on all of the old world institutions of
learning, the long scrolls of the casualty lists commenced to go up.
Whole cloisters and corridors began to be black with the names of men
“dead on the field of honour.” And civilisation faced the inexorable
sequel. Women at last in the professions now are taking title on equal
terms with men.
The doors of a very old established institution in Fifty-ninth Street,
New York, swung open on a day last autumn. And a line of young women
passed through. They went up the steps to take their place—for the
first time that women had ever been there—in the class rooms of the
College of Physicians and Surgeons. There is perhaps a little awkward
moment of surprise, of curiosity. A professor nods in recognition to
the new comers. The class of 1921 smiles good naturedly. An incident is
closed.
And an epoch is begun. Outside on a high scaffolding there are masons
and carpenters at work. See them up there against a golden Indian
summer sky. They are putting the finishing touches on a new $80,000
building addition. And the ringing of their hammers and chisels,
the scraping of their trowels is but significant of larger building
operations on a stupendous scale not made by human hands.
A LOOK BACKWARD IN MEDICINE
This is the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University,
which after more than a hundred years of history has decided to enlarge
its accommodations and add a paragraph to its catalog announcing the
admission of women. To understand the significance of this departure
from custom and precedent we should recall the ostracism which women
have in the past been obliged to endure in the medical profession.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman of modern times in any land to
achieve a medical education, knocked in vain at the doors of some
twelve medical colleges of these United States before one reluctantly
admitted her. She was graduated in 1849 at the Geneva Medical College
now a part of Syracuse University. The entrance of this first woman
into the medical profession created such a stir that Emily Blackwell
the second woman to become a doctor, following in the footsteps of
her sister, found even more obstacles in her path. The Geneva college
having incurred the displeasure of the entire medical fraternity now
closed its doors and refused to admit another woman. Emily Blackwell
going from city to city was at last successful in an appeal to the
medical college of Cleveland, Ohio, which graduated her in 1852. So
great was the opposition now to women in the profession, that it was
clear that they must create their own opportunities for medical
education. In turn there were founded in 1850 the Philadelphia Medical
College for Women with which the name of Ann Preston is associated as
the first woman dean; in 1853 the New York Infirmary to which in 1865
was added the Woman’s Medical College both institutions founded by
the Drs. Blackwell; in 1863 the New York Medical College and Hospital
for Women. “Females are ambitious to dabble in medicine as in other
matters with a view to reorganising society,” sarcastically commented
the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_. Society as also the medical
profession coldly averted its face from these pioneer women doctors.
“Good” women used to draw aside their skirts when they passed Elizabeth
Blackwell in church. When she started in practice in New York City
she had to buy a house because no respectable residence would rent
her office room. Dr. Anna Manning Comfort had her sign torn down in
New York. Druggists in Philadelphia refused to fill prescriptions for
Dr. Hannah Longshore. Girl medical students were hissed and jeered at
in hospital wards. Men physicians were forbidden by the profession to
lecture in women’s colleges or to consult with women doctors. Not until
1876 did the American Medical Association admit women to membership.
How medical men felt about the innovation, which State after State was
now compelled to accept, was voiced by the _Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal_ of 1879 which said: “We regret to be obliged to announce
that, at a meeting of the councillors held Oct. 1, it was voted to
admit women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.”
Syracuse University, recovering from the censure visited upon it for
receiving Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first of the coeducational
institutions to welcome women on equal terms with men to its medical
college. Other coeducational colleges in the West later began to take
them. In 1894 when Miss Mary Garrett endowed Johns Hopkins University
with half a million dollars on condition that its facilities for the
study of medicine be extended to women equally with men, a new attitude
toward the woman physician began to be manifest. From that time on,
she was going to be able with little opposition to get into the
medical profession. Her difficulty would be to get up. Now no longer
was a woman doctor refused office facilities in the most fashionable
residential quarters in which she could pay the rent. Her problem
however was just that—to pay the rent. A medical diploma doesn’t do it.
And to practise medicine successfully, therapeutically and financially,
without a hospital training and experience is about as easy as to learn
to swim without going near the water. The most desirable opportunities
for this hospital experience were by the tacit gentleman’s agreement in
the profession quite generally closed to women.
Until very recently, internships in general hospitals were assigned
almost exclusively to men. Dr. Emily Dunnung Barringer in 1903 swung
herself aboard the padded seat in the rear of the Gouverneur Hospital
ambulance, the first woman to receive an appointment as ambulance
surgeon in New York City. Twice before in competitive examinations she
had won such a place, but the commissioner of public charities had
declined to appoint her because she was a woman. In 1908 another girl
doctor, Dr. Mary W. Crawford in a surgeon’s blue cap and coat with a
red cross on her sleeve, answered her first emergency call as ambulance
surgeon for Williamsburg Hospital, Brooklyn. It happened this way:
the notification sent by the Williamsburg Hospital to Cornell Medical
College that year by some oversight read that the examination for
internship would be open to “any member of the graduating class.”
When “M. W. Crawford” who had made application in writing, appeared
with a perfectly good Cornell diploma in her hand, the authorities were
amazed. But they did not turn her away. They undoubtedly thought as
did one of the confident young men applicants who said: “She hasn’t a
chance of passing. Being a girl is a terrible handicap in the medical
profession.” When she had passed however at the head of the list of
thirty-five young men, the trustees endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to
withdraw. When she firmly declined to do so, though they said it
violated all established precedent, they gave her the place. And a new
era in medicine had been inaugurated.
Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to
be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an
embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of them
were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was for the
hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution had
“no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant that all of
the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on this ground that
Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city almshouse in the
country to open to women the competitive examination for internship,
again and again refused the appointment even to a woman who had passed
at the head of the list. It was 1914 before Bellevue in New York City
found a place for the woman intern: five women were admitted among the
eighty-three men of the staff.
This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the indication
of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in consequences.
Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there is a glass bottle
containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the annals of the
medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been another kidney
just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for a layman
to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it happens that a
young woman physician discovered the patient with that kidney and
diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that kidney and removed it
successfully. Then a man physician came along and borrowed it and read
a paper on it at a medical convention. He is now chronicled throughout
the medical fraternity with the entire credit for the kidney.
“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with
flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little
older, my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the
professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.
It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were
making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the
top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous surgeon
in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P. Culbertson are leading
members of the medical profession in Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar
was in 1917 appointed visiting surgeon on the staff of the Women’s
Hospital in New York, the first woman in New York City to receive such
an appointment. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, who established in New York the
first bureau of child hygiene in the world, is probably more written
of than is any man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has
under her direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure
annually of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate
of Dr. Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first
began to be taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as
well as a curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few
years later incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor
of Public Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented
“public health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and
original doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at
Harvard the opportunity to take their course leading to such a title.
The university did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of
Bellevue Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking
about for the greatest living authority to take this university
chair, came hat in hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution
does not admit women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered,
“I’ll accept the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may
take my own course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public
Health elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman
who has practically established the modern science of public health,
in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and
discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever encounter.
The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is the
same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner of
England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally unfit
for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership
the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged
themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession
and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission
of women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical
fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge.
A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION
But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced the
admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by chance
now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the United
States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions. They are
doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the University of
Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the front is shaking
all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if shattered by a
bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of trustees in all
countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new woman movement.
All over the world to-day the hammers and chisels are ringing in
reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun that is being made for
woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale and Columbia are creaking
on their ancient hinges because the gates of the future are swinging
wide. It is not a thin line that is passing through. The cohorts of
the woman’s cause are sweeping on to occupy the field for which their
predecessors so desperately pioneered.
Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back from
the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures that lead
the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-day marches the
soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian women doctors there
is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first medical woman of that
land, who in 1865 was denied her professional appellation and limited
to the title “scientific midwife.” With the 1100 British women there
keeps step the spirit of Sophia Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a
degree at Edinburgh University, who in 1874 founded the London School
of Medicine for Women.
And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she led
for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely
as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional
woman’s cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag
over Endell Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a
new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on
the vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of
her youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all
of their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war
hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home in
Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active hands
that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in her lap.
[1] Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England,
Dec. 17, 1917.
Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of modern times, the first
in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London to be a doctor
in 1860, there was no University in her land that would admit her.
Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of them scornful
and some of them rude, and some were simply amazed. “Why not become a
nurse?” one more tolerant than the rest suggested. The girl shook her
head: “Because I mean to make an income of a thousand pounds a year
instead of forty.” The kindly old doctor who finally yielded to her
importunities and admitted her to his office, also let her in to the
lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with the specific arrangement that
she should “dress like a nurse” and promise earnestly “not to look
intelligent.” Her degree she had to go to Paris for. Like that she
got into the medical profession in 1871 a year before her marriage to
the director of the Orient steamship line. Dean of the London School
of Medicine for Women and founder of the New Hospital for Women, she
came through the difficult days when it was only in “zenana” practice
in India that English women doctors had a free field. Russia too
dedicated her pioneer medical women to the heathen, modestly designing
them for the Mussulman population and at length permitting them the
designation “physician to women and children.” That idea lingered long
with civilisation. As late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in
a public address allowed that there was this province for the woman
physician, the treatment of women and children. But any medical woman
“who professed to treat all comers,” her he held to be an “abomination.”
Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth
Anderson’s eyes looked on the glory of Endell Street. Do you happen
to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved upward toward
the top in any of the professions so laboriously and so heavily
handicapped? Then for you also, Endell Street is the shining citadel
that to-day marks the final capitulation of the medical profession to
the woman’s cause, as surely as the New York Infirmary in Livingston
Place still stands as the early outpost established by the brave
pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller who may search out the
unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles in High Holborn, I
suppose may miss some of this spiritual significance to which a woman
thrills. The buildings which have been converted from an ancient
almshouse to the uses of a hospital are as dismal and as dingy as any
can be in London. They are surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall
covered with war placards, a red one “Air Raid Warning,” a blue one
“Join the Royal Marines,” and a black one “Why More Men are Needed.
This is going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the
sword until—” and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the
winter wind.
In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter
opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the ambulances
come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors’ day. It is a
grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green privet. On the
benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers, armless soldiers,
some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent parade in blue cotton
uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every man of them at two
o’clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting—for his woman.
Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls with flowers, the
women with babies in their arms. And each grabs his own to his hungry
heart. You go by the terrible pain and the terrible joy of it all that
grips you so at the throat. Inside where each woman just sits by the
bedside to hold her man’s hand, it is more numb and more still. A girl
orderly in khaki takes you through. Her blue shoulder straps are brass
lettered “W. H. C.,” “Women’s Hospital Corps.” The only man about the
place who is not a patient is the porter at the gate. The women in
khaki with the epaulets in red, also brass lettered “W. H. C.,” are the
physicians and surgeons.
There is one of these you should not miss. You will know her by her
mascot, the little fluffy white dog “Baby” that follows close at her
heels. Her figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below the
medium height. Her short swinging skirt reveals trim brown clad ankles
and low brown shoes. She has abundant red brown hair that is plainly
parted and rolled away on either side from a low smooth brow to fasten
in a heavy knot at the back of her head. I set down all of these
details as being of some interest concerning a woman you surely will
want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer in charge
of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter of Dr.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs. Millicent
Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies. And she is to-day one of England’s greatest surgeons, Dr.
Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of major in the English army.
Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant because
of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the militancy
in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training in that
other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her transfer to
her present place of government service has come about in a way that
makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits. “You have silenced
all your critics” the War Office told her when they bestowed on her the
honour of her present official rank as she and her Woman’s Hospital
Corps “took” Endell Street.
It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first
onslaught of the women’s forces. There was, at least, as you might say,
a preliminary skirmish. The Woman’s Hospital Corps raised and financed
by British medical women was at the beginning of the war offered to the
British Government. But in the public eye these were only “physicians
to women and children.” Kitchener swore a great oath and said he’d have
none of them for his soldiers. Practically the War Office told them to
“run along.” Well, they did. They went over the Channel. “They are
going now to advance the woman’s cause by a hundred years. O, if only
I were ten years younger,” sighed Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as she
waved them farewell at Southampton on the morning of Sept. 15, 1914.
France was in worse plight than England. Under the Femmes de France of
the Croix Rouge, the Government there permitted the Women’s Hospital
Corps to establish themselves in what had been Claridge’s Hotel in the
Champs Elysées. In the course of time rumours reached the British War
office of this soldiers’ hospital in Paris run by English women. Oh,
well, of course, women surgeons might do for French _poilus_. At length
it was learned however that even the British Tommies were falling into
their hands. And Sir Alfred Keogh, director of the General Medical
Council, was hurried across to see about it.
“Miss Anderson,” he addressed the surgeon in charge, “I should like to
look over the institution.”
“Certainly,” she acquiesced. “But it’s Dr. Anderson, if you please.”
Three times as they went through the wards, he repeated his mistake.
And three times she suggested gravely, “Dr. Anderson, if you please.”
[Illustration:
DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON
The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
of America the next woman of modern times to practise medicine.
]
They had finished the rounds. “This,” he said, “is remarkable, ’er
quite remarkable, don’t you know. But may I talk with some of your
patients privately?”
Then the soldiers themselves, British soldiers, assured him of their
complete satisfaction with the surgical treatment they had received.
Indeed the word, they said, was out in all the trenches that the
Women’s Hospital was the place to get to when a man was wounded. Women
surgeons took more pains, they were less hasty about cutting off arms
and legs, you see. Oh, the Women’s Hospital was all right.
“Extraordinary, most extraordinary,” murmured Sir Alfred Keogh. And
this report he carried back to the General Medical Council. “Incredible
as it may seem, gentlemen,” he announced gravely, “it seems to be so.”
“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women
surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their
country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s
crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked under
the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no longer in
doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps held the fort
for the professional woman’s cause in England.
WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT
Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist, meanwhile
was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her government.
France, it was true, had seen that British women could be military
doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh, every one was
sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the home. And if ever
there was a woman whom God made just to be “protected,” you’d say
positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin.
She stood before me as she came from her operating room, curling
tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s white cap
set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied closely
back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line. She is
soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small shapely hands, as
exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I looked at her hands
in the most amazement, the hands that have had men’s lives in their
keeping, little hands that by the sure swift skill of them have brought
thousands of men back from death’s door. You’d easily think of her as
belonging in a pink satin boudoir or leading a cotillion with a King
of France. And she’s been at the war front instead. “Madame la petite
Major” she is lovingly known to the soldiers of France. She too has
that rank. You will notice on one of the sleeves of her uniform the
gold stripe that denotes a wound and on her right pink cheek you will
see the scar of it. On her other coat sleeve are the gold bars for
three years of military service.
This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-Mangin was in
charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital Beaugou, in Paris. When
the call came for volunteers for army doctors, she signed and sent in
an application, carefully omitting however to write her first name.
The War Office, hurrying down the lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin
as any other man. One night at twelve o’clock her _concierge_ stood
before her door with a government command ordering the doctor to
report at once at the Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case
in one hand and a surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The
astonished military _medecin-en-chef_, before whom she arrived, threw
up his hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.”
She held out her government order: “_N’est ce pas?_” He examined it
more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.”
“_En ce moment_,” as they say in France, a thousand wounded soldiers
were practically laid at the commander’s feet—and he had only five
doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy of a woman
before him. After all there was an alertness, an independent defiance
of her femininity that straightened at attention to duty now every
curving line of the little figure. His glance swept the wounded men:
“Take off your hat and stay a while,” he said in desperation. “But,” he
added, “I shall have to report this to the War Office. There must be an
investigation.”
Three months later when the Inspector General of the French army
arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had performed six
hundred operations without losing a single patient. “You’ll do even
though you are not a man,” he hazarded.
A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily
improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors and
no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the beds. As fast
as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There were no utensils
of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up outside where they had
been cast away by the commissary department when emptied of meat. There
was no heat. There was no water in which to bathe her patients except
that which she melted from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she
worked without once having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and
she had to limp about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and
she had a staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were
eight hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell
fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred and
twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next the
little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only
time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the
American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines. They
delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four days, whom
she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior hospitals. Later
when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back from the army infected
with tuberculosis, the Government required its greatest expert for the
diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-Mangin in the fall of 1916
was recalled from the front to be made _medecin-en-chef_ of the new
Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue Desnouettes, Paris. It is a
group of low white buildings with red roofs. The white walls inside are
ornamented above the patients’ beds with garlands of red and blue and
yellow flowers. And the commanding officer’s own gay little office has
curtains of pink flowered calico. Grey haired French scientists in the
laboratories here are taking their orders from Madame la petite Major.
Soldiers in the corridors are giving her the military salute. One day
there came a celebrated French general: “When I heard about you at
Verdun,” he said, “I could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a
surgeon. She is only a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to
Paris,” he smiled in candour, “to find out if you are real.”
The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin did
her two years’ service at the front without a day off for illness and
never so much as an hour’s absence from her post of duty. She is the
only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her right
to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to equal,
let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be assured beyond
question. Let us write high on the waving banners carried by the
cohorts of the woman’s cause the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was
not a simple or an easy thing that she has done. You would know if you
heard her voice tremulous yet with the agony on which she has looked.
“I shall nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!” she told me brokenly,
in the gay little pink calico office. And the beautiful brown eyes
of the little French major, successful army surgeon, were suddenly
suffused with woman’s tears.
WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID
Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the
great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which
she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women’s Hospitals have appeared
on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation of the
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and supported by the
entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of London,
they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the forces of the
woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled into formation for
the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. Dr. Elsie Inglis[2]
the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, like a general
disposing her troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally
followed the armies of Europe, placing her now indispensable auxiliary
aid where the world’s distress at the moment seems greatest. There
have been at one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals in
simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are forced to pick up their
entire equipment and retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of
the Hun hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by the enemy, only
eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to
conquer.
[2] Died 1917.
These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of
the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed
the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to
the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian
prisoners brought into the Scottish Women’s Hospital operating at
Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors’ faces
in amazement to inquire: “Who are you? We thought we had done for
you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you
double?” Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they
were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in
admiration: “It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They
refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies.”
At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first
record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue
Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage
of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital
at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an
official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly
attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances
on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The
Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established in the deserted
old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the show hospitals of
France. When the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey
they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bottles, no water but
that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and they themselves slept
on the floor. But eventually they had transformed the great vaulted
religious corridors into the comfortable wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie
301. They might, the French Government had said, have the “_petite
blessé_.” They would be entrusted with operations on fingers and toes!
And every week or so, some French general ran down from Paris to see
if they were doing these right. But within two months the War Office
itself had asked to have the capacity of the hospital increased from
100 to 400 beds. And the medical department of the army had been
notified to send to Royaumont only the “_grande blessés_.” At the end
of the first week’s drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were
objecting that they could receive no more patients: their overworked
staffs could not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in
the crowded wards. “But,” said the French Government, “see the Dames du
Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and report to us
for more.”
[Illustration:
MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD
Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in
England.
]
It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian
armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful campaign in
spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most
primitive conditions of existence, every service from bookkeeping to
bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water was done by women’s
hands. It was not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. They
came into Serbia through fields of white poppies and fields of equally
thick white crosses over fresh graves. They faced a country that was
overcome with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged through the
hospitals where patients lay three in a bed, and under the beds and
in the corridors and on the steps and on the grass outside. After
months of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally abated, the
enemy again overran Serbia and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily
evacuating, retreated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors
were taken prisoners and obliged to spend months with the German and
Austrian armies before their release. Others joined in the desperate
undertaking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian
nation fleeing over the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But
the Scottish women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr.
Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards
powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As
regards morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the
capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater
than anything we ever knew before about women.”
Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where
are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the
practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English
medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident
physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was
a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly
tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors
practically to forget it. And he had to.
Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday,
it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her
place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London
hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their
staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are
entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission
is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of
pathology. When one of those Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to
Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at
Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities
there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that
the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the
woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War
Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military
hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were
being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School
of Medicine for Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the
demand!
Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s place
in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before
the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board
of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried
for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her
women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr.
Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military
hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau,
Paris. In Lyons the _medecin-en-chef_ of the military hospital is Dr.
Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military
responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War
Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country’s most valuable
assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not
be permitted to leave for any other. “Over there” the governments of
Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors.
You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations
will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England
until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical
and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day
will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded
out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, the horror and
the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful
world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent
10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000.
Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women’s
battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for
you. The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be
outdone by any institution now bidding for women’s favour, has rushed
up an “emergency” plant, a new $200,000 building. The London School of
Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addition and the public
appeal for the funds was signed by Premier Asquith himself. The nations
to-day are waiting for the women who shall come out from the colleges
equipped for medical service.
A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION
And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the others? If
a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before she can be a
doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a Sunday in March,
1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an aged clergyman up the
pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she stood
silhouetted against the black hanging at the back of the pulpit, her
face shining, illumined. By the time that the white surpliced choir had
ceased chanting “We have done those things that we ought not to have
done,” the ushers were hanging in the entrance corridor the great red
lettered signs “Full.”
The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss
Maude Royden, one of England’s leading suffragists, “preach.” This
church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth
of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman ever
spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden has now
been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first woman
in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the pastor, in
announcing the innovation, declared: “We want the woman point of view,
the woman insight and the woman counsel.” The City Temple is not an
Episcopalian Church. But even the established church has recently heard
an archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that “we may invite
our church women to a much larger share in the Christian service than
has been usual.” You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled
as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last year permitted to make
public addresses in the National Mission of Repentance. They thus
ascended the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and
one woman—has now been appointed to see how much farther women may be
permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller
churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the
arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all
lands are still “protected.” High established places are of course the
last to yield. Theology continues to be the most closed profession.
But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the highest
ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world has yet
attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench.
In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily
falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the most
conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of England, has
added a clause to its charter permitting women to become fellows. The
Royal Institute of British Architects has also decided to accept women
as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association for the first time
opened its doors to women students. Germany even has several women
architects employed in military service, among them Princess Victoria
of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted women to architecture and
engineering.
Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield
University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in
the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to
replace young men who have been “combed out” of Sheffield’s large
industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling
similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University
had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study
chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the chemical
department and the college received applications from the industrial
world for no less than 100 women chemists. So insistent was the demand
that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without
waiting for her to get her degree. Women are wanted too in physics
and bacteriology. A London University woman has been appointed to a
position at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and there
were last year, at this one university, offers of twenty positions for
women physicists that could not be filled. All over the world now,
in trade journals are beginning to appear advertisements for women
chemists and physicists.
Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground won.
Women have of course been longest admitted to this the poorest paid
profession, and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid
places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of all the masters
in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the army and with the
consent of the Department of Education women are for the first time
being appointed to these places, in some instances even at the same
salaries as were received by the men whom they replace. Russia had in
the first year of the war opened the highest teaching positions in
that country to women, by a special act of the Duma providing that
“their salaries shall equal those of men in the same position.” Russia
also in 1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia,
occupying the chair of Russian history at the University of Petrograd.
In 1916 Mlle. Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had
been invited to lecture at the College de France in Paris. In 1917
Germany had its first woman professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender,
at the Royal High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same
year England had appointed its first woman to an open university chair,
when Dr. Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at
Bedford College.
[Illustration:
_Albert Wyndham, Paris_
MME. SUZANNE GRINBERG
Celebrated woman lawyer of Paris who pleads cases before the _Conseil
de la Guerre_. The privilege thus accorded the French women lawyers
marks an epoch in history. It is the first time in the world that
women have conducted cases before a military tribunal.
]
In each country like this, where the opposing professional lines
begin to show a weakened resistance, surely, sometimes silently,
but irresistibly and inevitably, the new woman movement is taking
possession. Next to medicine the legal profession, one may say, is at
present the scene of active operations. The woman movement in law, as
in medicine, began for all the world in the United States. It was in
1872 that one Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago knocked at the tight shut
doors of the legal profession in the State of Illinois. Of course her
request was refused. Public opinion blushed that a woman should be
guilty of such effrontery, and the learned judges of the court rebuked
the ambitious lady with their finding that: “The natural and proper
timidity which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the
occupations of civil life. And the harmony of interests which belong
to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting
a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.” Syracuse
University, which gave to the world the first woman physician, also
graduated Belva A. Lockwood, who in 1879 was the first woman to be
permitted to practise law before the Supreme Court of the United
States. Every State but Virginia has now admitted women to the practice
of law. There are something over 1000 women lawyers in the United
States. Their way in and their way up has been attended with the same
difficulties that women encountered just about a generation ahead of
them in the medical profession. The University of Michigan was one of
the first institutions to admit women to its law school on the same
terms as men. The Women’s Law class at New York University was started
in the nineties. Many law colleges, as Boston, Buffalo and Cornell,
have since opened their doors. It was in 1915 that Harvard University
announced the Cambridge Law School, the first graduate law school in
America exclusively for women, and the only graduate law school open to
them in the East.
But opportunities for professional advancement for women in law have
been exceedingly limited. It is on the judge’s bench, in every land,
that their masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused to move
up and make room. So it is noteworthy that Georgiana P. Bullock was
in 1916 made a Judge of the Woman’s Court in Los Angeles, the first
tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women have been allowed a
place as judges in the children’s courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch
of Chicago, who some years ago as justice of the peace was the first
woman anywhere in the world to have arrived at any judicial office,
scored another victory in December, 1917, when she was made a master in
chancery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle
Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette
Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco
in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments.
Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York,
is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public
prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really
be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she
was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman
movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that
handicap of civic inferiority is being removed.
Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the
rear guard of the women’s lines in the legal profession are moving. At
the front “over there,” every country reports distinct progress. Even
a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state
to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a
petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian
Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central
Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law
clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first
reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women
lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms
with the men of the profession. The Italian Parliament in 1917 passed
a bill granting to women in that country the right to practise law.
Specially significant is the legal situation in England, the land
where Chrystabel Pankhurst, denied the opportunity to practise law,
became instead a smashing suffragette. Now, see the vacant places in
the London law courts where day by day women clerks are appearing with
all of the duties, though not yet the recognition, as solicitors.
And the English Parliament at last is considering a bill which shall
permit women to be admitted to this branch of the legal profession in
England. This bill really should be known as Nancy Nettlefold’s bill.
The year that Nancy Nettlefold arrived at her twenty-first birthday
and was presented at court, Cambridge University announced in June,
1912, that she had taken the law tripos, her place being between the
first and second man in the first class honours list. And she at
the time determined to make the winning of the legal profession her
contribution to the woman’s cause. With four other English women,
who have also passed brilliant law examinations, she has financed
and worked indefatigably in the campaign to that end. To-day they
have that conservative organ of public opinion, the London _Times_,
urging in favour of their case: “Many prejudices against women have
been shattered in this war. And there is no stronger theoretical case
against the woman lawyer as such than against the woman doctor.”
The bill permitting women to enter the Law Society has passed a
second reading in the House of Lords, Lord Buckmaster, its sponsor,
declaring: “The true sphere of a woman’s work ought to be measured by
the world’s need for her services and by her capacity to perform that
work.”
And the world’s need presses steadily, inexorably day by day. France
had called 1500 men lawyers to the colours when the War Office sent
a brief notice to the bar association of Paris: “On account of the
absence of so many men at the front,” read the summons, “women lawyers
are wanted in the Ministry of War.” Women have been in the legal
profession in France since 1900. There are 52 women lawyers in Paris.
But their practice has been limited largely to women clients. Madame
Miropolsky has made a reputation as a divorce lawyer. Madame Maria
Verone is the prominent barrister of the Children’s Court. A year ago I
heard Avocat Suzanne Grinberg plead a case before a tribunal which up
to 1914 had never listened to a woman’s voice.
[Illustration:
DR. ROSALIE SLAUGHTER MORTON OF NEW YORK
Who is organizing the American women physicians for war service.
]
As she stood there in the ancient Palais de Justice of Paris, her
small, well formed head wound round with its black braid, her red lips
framing with easy facility the learned legal phrases, her expressive
hands accentuating her points with eager gesture, her woman’s figure
in the flowing legal robe of black serge with the white muslin cravat,
was outlined against a thousand years of history. Eight soldiers
with bayonets stood on guard at the rear of the room. The court whom
she addressed was seven judges of military rank in splendid military
uniform. And her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la
Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from Suzanne Grinberg’s
left shoulder. It is edged with ermine, the sign that she is entitled
to plead before the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the
history of the world, here in France, that women lawyers have been
empowered to appear in military cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they
call the great central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note that
these new women lawyers who wear the ermine walk in the Hall of Lost
Footsteps! On the walls of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg
pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of France, “_Avocats à
la Cour d’Appel de Paris Morts pour la Patrie_,” and there follow 127
names.
Only the day before yesterday woman’s capacity for the higher education
to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once
stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women
were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there.
Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the
critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science
and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that
Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college
women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the
high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know!
Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary
reported to that distinguished body that in the elections of the past
three years, women have captured in Phi Beta Kappa an aggregate of 1979
places to 2202 for men. What shall the oldest college fraternity do
in the face of this feminine invasion? A letter on my desk says that
the committee on fraternity policy has been commissioned to take under
advisement this grave situation and report to the council meeting of
1919! So the present Phi Beta Kappa record seems to dispose forever of
the old tradition of the mental inferiority of the always challenged
sex.
Ladies, right this way for titles, please, one profession after another
takes up the call to-day. New York University at its opening last fall
registered 110 women in its law school, the largest number ever entered
there. Already the American medical women are called and coming.
New York City has recently appointed women doctors for nearly every
municipal institution. The first mobile hospital unit of American women
physicians with a hospital of 100 beds, to be known as the Women’s
Oversea Hospital Unit, is now in France. It is backed financially
by the National Women’s Suffrage Association. And it goes from that
first original outpost of the professional woman’s cause, Elizabeth
Blackwell’s New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Meanwhile the
entire Medical Women’s National Association is being organised for war
service under the direction of Dr. Rosalie S. Morton, who has been made
a member of the General Medical Board of the United States Government
at Washington. The American Women’s Hospitals are being formed for
civilian relief at home and for service with Pershing’s army. From the
Surgeon General’s headquarters in Washington the announcement is made:
“There will be need for the war service of every woman physician in the
United States.”
And through the vast Salle de Pas-Perdus of the world, the professional
women are passing. The Lost Footsteps! O, the Lost Footsteps! Forward
the advancing columns. Hush, there are ways that are not our ways! On
with the new woman movement, but with banners furled before the woe of
a world! For all the pæans of our victory are drowned in the dirge of
our grief.