In honour of International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate one of the most inspirational women of the nineteenth century – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel in 1836, one of 11 children. A life of poverty did not last long, though. Her father became a successful businessman, clawed his way up through society’s ranks, and by the 1840s the family were living in a mansion in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
Garrett gained the patchy education typical of a middle-class girl and seemed destined for a life of domesticity until, at the age of 18, she encountered feminism. She befriended suffragette Emily Davies (of flinging herself under a horse fame) as well as America’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. Garrett decided to forge a medical career. The first battle she won was to persuade her father support her ambitions – she could do nothing without his financial and practical support. Though at first he found the idea ‘disgusting’ and her mother had hysterics over the ‘disgrace’ to the family, her persistence won them over in the end.
Garrett then fought for her education. None of the medical schools would admit her, so for six months she trained training as a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, while simultaneously having private lessons in Latin, Greek, materia medica, anatomy and physiology. Eventually she was allowed to attend lectures and dissections, but the other (male) students petitioned against her and forced her out. She continued with her private education, which made the British Medical Journal trumpet “The female doctor question has received a blow instead of a lift. . . . It is indeed high time that this preposterous attempt on the part of one or two highly strong-minded women to establish a race of feminine doctors should be exploded.”
In 1865, she finally took an exam at the Society of Apothecaries and obtained a licence to practise medicine, making her the first female doctor in Britain. Hooray! The Society promptly banned any other women from taking their exam in future. Boo! After she joined the British Medical Association, they too made sure no other women could follow in her footsteps. Double boo!
Women were banned from taking up hospital medical posts, so Garrett opened a private practice in London, as well as St Mary’s Dispensary for Women and Children, to help the poor obtain medical treatment. The dispensary received 9,300 visits in its first year.
Garrett then learnt that the Sorbonne University in Paris did not deny access to women, so she learnt French and gained her coveted medical degree in 1870. Let’s pause here to consider this – she ran a private clinic, a dispensary to aid the poor, learnt French and took a medical degree AT THE SAME TIME.
Of course, Garrett faced not only official opposition, but also complaints, disapproval and bad press. Psychiatrist Henry Maudsley claimed that too much education caused mental illness and reduced fertility in women. Garrett responded that boredom was a far bigger problem for middle-class women. In fact, she said, happiness for women “is not known where the days drag along, filled with make-believe occupations and dreary, sham amusements.”
A year later, at the age of 35, Garrett married businessman James Anderson. She and her husband lived happily together and had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Meanwhile, Garrett’s dispensary expanded and became the New Hospital for Women and Children, staffed almost entirely by women. Garrett was also elected to the London School Board and became the first women to be appointed to a medical post – as visiting physician of the East London Hospital for Children. However, like many women today, she found juggling work family life exhausting, and soon gave up her two official positions.
Because the medical establishment had pulled up its drawbridges against women, Garrett decided that sisters would have to do it for themselves. In 1874 she co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women and became Professor of gynaecology ther. After the progressive University College London opened its doors to women, Garrett’s pupils were able to get medical degrees.
By the 1900s Garrett had retired from medical life, and moved back to Aldeburgh, where she was elected as Britain’s first female mayor in 1908. She used this platform to campaign for female suffrage. Garrett died in 1917 at the age of 81.
Like most nineteenth century and contemporary feminists, Garrett could be accused of being middle class and selfish. Why concentrate on opening the professions to wealthy women, when all around poverty, brutality and inequality were killing women in their droves? But Garrett had a strong sense of civic duty. Her medical worked helped thousands of poor women and children, and her campaigning on behalf of women’s education, rights and careers, helped to change perceptions of women’s abilities. And this is why I think Garrett is so inspirational. She didn’t just ‘lean in’ for her own advancement. She worked tirelessly to liberate future generations of women. That’s something many of us could learn from today.