Science Has No Sex

by Arleen Marcia Tuchman

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  questioned women’s ability to run their own homes, their directorship of hospitals should follow naturally.≥∞

  When Zakrzewska turned to the question of female physicians, she continued to tackle assumptions about women’s nature, but she did not waste time pointing out the fallacies of the standard claims about women’s inferior intelligence, delicacy, and physical liabilities. Perhaps she suspected that she was preaching largely to the converted. Whatever her reason, she chose instead to challenge directly men who considered themselves to be liberal in their views of women but who nevertheless prescribed limits for them. Thus, she told a humorous anecdote of a well-known Episcopal minister who could not understand the resistance to female physicians. In fact, he could not imagine anything more natural than for a woman to care for the sick and su√ering. Yet when Zakrzewska suggested that women would also be good priests, he insisted that the ministry was no place for a woman because it demanded ‘‘a masculine power of mind, experience, and power of influence.’’ Zakrzewska then turned to a man of the law, who begged to di√er with the minister, expressing his belief that a woman could minister just as well to the soul as to the body. But when Zakrzewska provoked him by expressing her regret that she had never studied the law, he exclaimed that that would be impossible, because ‘‘ ‘a woman would never be able to handle the strain and discomfort of an advocate’s practice.’ . . . So we see,’’ Zakrzewska drove home to her audience, ‘‘that even those men who consider themselves very liberal in their judgements of women, usually flatter themselves with the belief that at least for their own special subject they can only acknowledge the aptitude of their own sex.’’≥≤

  These criticisms did not prevent Zakrzewska from acknowledging the considerable support she received from male physicians, especially from those ‘‘who have achieved a reputation and standing in their subject.’’ In contrast, those who have stood in greatest opposition tended, in her opinion, ‘‘to have the least understanding, the most deficient education, and the worst practice.’’

  Zakrzewska may well have been thinking of Samuel Gregory as she recited these lines. Indeed, she went on in her talk to lambast the arrangement at the New England Female Medical College, where most of the lectures were given by male professors and those who ran the school had very little understanding of medicine. As she told her audience, her experience there had led her to rethink her position on separate education for women, concluding that a school primarily for women must be directed by women as well, lest the students always be treated as subordinate beings. ‘‘If we are supposed to be capable of prescribing

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  for and helping others,’’ Zakrzewska contended, ‘‘then we are also capable of helping ourselves.’’≥≥

  Zakrzewska said little more in her lecture about the importance of educating female doctors, most likely because her potential donors had made it clear that they preferred to support a hospital for poor women than to contribute funds for clinical training. Still, what is surprising is her absolute silence on the advantages that an all-women’s hospital would o√er patients in providing them with physicians of their own sex. This omission is di≈cult to explain given that the hospital’s bylaws listed as the first of its three aims ‘‘to provide women medical aid of competent physicians of their own sex.’’≥∂ Moreover, as we will discuss in the next chapter, there can be no question that the opportunity for women to be treated by women was one of the hospital’s singular features and much of the reason for its subsequent success. Zakrzewska’s silence is, therefore, all the more puzzling. It is possible, since Der Pionier did not reprint the entire lecture, that the pertinent section was cut out, but that hardly seems likely. More probable is that Zakrzewska felt highly ambivalent about this aspect of her hospital in the early years of its existence.

  We must remember that four years earlier Zakrzewska had published an article on female physicians in which she had insisted that women did not practice medicine any di√erently than men. The medical school she had wanted to open was, moreover, supposed to be coeducational. Even when it came to founding her hospital, she was not initially opposed to having male physicians on the sta√. In fact, a few months after giving her lecture, she hired Dr. Horatio Storer as attending surgeon at the New England. When challenged as to

  ‘‘whether it is not an inconsistency to have a gentleman in attendance, as it has always been stated that the advantage of our Dispensary is that women can be attended by physicians of their own sex,’’ Zakrzewska quipped that it is well known who is in attendance on what days, ‘‘so that patients can have their choice.’’≥∑ A woman’s dignity need not, in other words, be compromised through attendance by a male physician. Zakrzewska may have stood at the head of an all-women’s hospital, but she was ambivalent about its identity as a separatist institution. This would change over the years, but certainly for the first twenty years that she ran the New England, she joined other regular women physicians in voicing her preference for coeducation, viewing her hospital’s status as an all-women’s institution as a temporary arrangement at best.≥∏

  Thus, the vision that Zakrzewska o√ered her audience in January 1863 was of a hospital that resembled a home, where highly qualified female physicians

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  provided medical care in a dignified setting for poor women who had nowhere else to go when they became sick or pregnant. The vision was almost romantic, perhaps even a bit sentimental, an indication that Zakrzewska was not always adverse to employing the rhetoric of female antebellum reformers. At the same time, however, the picture she painted of women was anything but sentimental.

  Both her physicians, who were charged to work ‘‘for their own goals and their own satisfaction,’’ and her patients, whom she portrayed as willing to lie about their marital status in order to receive the care they needed, promoted an image of women as capable of taking charge of their lives if given the opportunities.

  And that, of course, was exactly what Zakrzewska wanted her hospital to do. By providing women physicians with a clinical setting where they could perfect their skills, and poor patients a respectable environment where they could recover from their ailments and avoid sinking further into poverty, the New England would level the playing field for all women, whether middle class or poor.

  . . .

  The hospital Zakrzewska created did not reflect her vision alone. It was also shaped by the individuals who gave considerable time and money to ensure its success. The New England Hospital’s first board of directors numbered nineteen and consisted of several of the trustees and most of the Board of Lady Managers of the New England Female Medical College. Frustrated by Samuel Gregory’s stranglehold over the college, they had chosen to leave with Zakrzewska when she handed in her resignation, inspired by her plans to create a hospital by and for women. Many of these individuals came, in Zakrzewska’s words, from the ‘‘liberally inclined part of the community.’’≥π George W. and Louisa C. Bond, Ednah Dow Cheney, Lucy Goddard, Edward E. Hale, Frederick W. G. May, the Honorable Thomas Russell, Caroline M. Severance, Samuel E. Sewall, and John H. Stephenson were only the most prominent.

  Several of the New England’s consulting physicians, most notably Henry Ingersoll Bowditch and Walter Channing, were also part of this community. Other activists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Karl Heinzen, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, Abby May, and William F. Weld, although not o≈cially a≈liated with the hospital, were strong supporters. All these individuals were active in the abolitionist movement and the battle for women’s rights, all of them leading social reformers.≥∫

  Although not as close knit or insular as Boston’s Brahmins, this community of liberal and radical social reformers nevertheless had its own cohesiveness. Several, for example, followed the teachings of the Unitarian minister Theodore

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  Parker or attended James Freeman Clarke’s Church of the Disciples. Of the latter, Zakrzewska once wrote that ‘‘it was among the members of his church that the idea [of the hospital] was materialized, and that funds for the beginning of the experiment were provided.’’≥Ω Both Parker and Clarke were heavily influenced by Emerson’s transcendentalism and engaged in their own reform e√orts within the Unitarian Church. Critical of the formalism of established church doctrine, with its focus on biblical miracles and contemplation of an external god, they preached instead a more personal religion, one that heralded the divine powers within each person and posited the possibility of a direct intuition of God. Zakrzewska, as we have already mentioned, was an avowed atheist by this point in her life and never joined any church. But her ties to these men stemmed from their shared political views. Importantly, both Parker and Clarke paired their religious radicalism with social activism. Indeed, Clarke, founder of a church well known for the power it invested in the laity, believed that the glue that bound his congregants together rested in a ‘‘coincidence of practical purpose’’ rather than a ‘‘coincidence of opinion.’’ This entailed not only the way they worshiped but also their devotion ‘‘to the relief of the poor’’ and ‘‘to doing away with social abuses.’’∂≠

  Deep friendships also bound many of these individuals together. Traveling together, attending the same religious meetings, visiting one another’s homes, and occasionally marrying, they tended not surprisingly to support many of the same political causes as well. The New England Hospital clearly benefited from this. With the exception of a handful of people, the majority who donated funds to the hospital probably did not do so out of any particular commitment to the institution; rather, they must have viewed it as one of many good causes deemed worthy of support, such as women’s rights, abolition, poor relief, and medical reform. They may not have shared exactly the same vision of the New England’s central purpose, but by and large they were convinced that the hospital’s mission dovetailed with their broad e√orts at reform.∂∞

  A closer look at a handful of Zakrzewska’s most prominent supporters demonstrates the variety of interests that led individuals to support the hospital.

  Certainly no person committed as much time and energy as Ednah Dow Cheney, secretary of the New England from 1862 to 1887 and then president from 1887 to 1902. Born in Boston in 1824, she was raised by reform-minded parents and counted herself among the ‘‘band of devoted adherents and friends’’ who went to hear Theodore Parker preach most Sundays. Inspired by Parker and other transcendentalists, Cheney became involved in a variety of reform causes.

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  In 1851, she helped found a school of design, intended to provide women with skills that would help them achieve financial independence. She also became involved in abolitionist work and then, after the war and throughout the 1870s, served as secretary of the teachers’ committee of the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society. In this capacity, she traveled to the South, visiting and evaluating schools and helping to coordinate the hiring of teachers from the North.

  Later in the century, she returned to her focus on women’s issues. She was a founding member of the New England Women’s Club; she, along with Abby W.

  May, founded the Massachusetts School Su√rage Association; and she was an active member of the New England Woman Su√rage Association, the Association for the Advancement of Women, and the Massachusetts Women’s Su√rage Association.∂≤

  The New England Hospital’s appeal to women’s rights advocates has been well documented by other scholars. It was, to use Estelle Freedman’s phrase, an example of the ‘‘female institution building’’ that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Freedman argues that most progress in women’s rights in the nineteenth century occurred not through women’s entry into the male-dominated spheres of politics and the professions but rather through the creation of all-female institutions, such as colleges, reform societies, and clubs. These female networks provided the social, emotional, financial, and institutional support that helped women in their e√orts to challenge traditional gender roles. In addition to the publicity the New England received in the pages of the Woman’s Journal, a journal founded by Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe as the spokespiece of the American Woman Su√rage Association, it was also actively supported by the New England Women’s Club, which was formed in 1868 to further women’s place and power in society. In fact, many of the club’s founding members joined Cheney in taking a seat on the hospital’s board of directors over the years. ∂≥

  Cheney’s attraction to the New England Hospital must also have been because of its position on race. Although Zakrzewska made no mention of it in her 1863 lecture, the hospital was on record as providing medical assistance to

  ‘‘colored’’ patients. In the 1866 annual report, for example, Cheney emphasized that a ‘‘noble woman, of the race to whom we owe so much, came in for a surgical operation. No sign of prejudice here. All met on the common ground of humanity.’’ And in her memoir of Susan Dimock, who served as resident physician from 1872 until her untimely death in 1875, Cheney highlighted the fact that Dimock’s first maternity patient at the hospital was ‘‘colored’’ and that

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  Dimock was named godmother of the newborn girl. In addition, William F.

  Weld, a Boston shipbuilder and regular contributor to the New England, gave five thousand dollars in the late 1860s for mothers-to-be ‘‘without regard to color or nationality.’’ Not surprisingly, as we will see in the next chapter, this never translated into anything more than the occasional woman of color receiving care, but it is significant that it mattered rhetorically to Cheney and others to promote the hospital as a color-blind institution.∂∂

  Cheney first met Zakrzewska in 1856, when Zakrzewska was in Boston soliciting funds for the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Their mutual friend Harriot K. Hunt had arranged this meeting, suspecting that the two women would take to each other immediately. She had guessed correctly. Cheney, a recent widow and mother of a one-year-old girl, later credited Zakrzewska with helping her to get out of her own misery and to think again about ‘‘the claims of duty outside of my own home.’’∂∑ Cheney ended up joining the board of lady managers at the New England Female Medical College; in 1862, she left with Zakrzewska to found the New England Hospital, where she remained for forty years.

  Cheney was not alone among the longtime o≈cers of the New England Hospital who bridged the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. Samuel E. Sewall did as well. Father of Zakrzewska’s close friend and pupil Lucy Sewall and originally a trustee at the New England Female Medical College, he left with Zakrzewska in 1862 and went on to serve at the New England Hospital as a member of the board of directors, a vice president, and one of the hospital’s two legal counselors until his death in 1888. A well-known abolitionist and Garrisonian, he provided legal counsel in countless slave cases. By 1851 he had earned enough of a reputation to win election to the Massachusetts Senate as a Free-Soil candidate, where he continued to fight for the passage of antislavery laws, particularly one to render unenforceable the Fugitive Slave Act, which he considered to be ‘‘as void in law as it is in the forum of conscience.’’ Later in the decade, Sewall also became involved in John Brown’s case, first preparing legal arguments in Brown’s defense and then, when the conviction stood, turning his attention to the raising of funds for Brown’s family.∂∏

  As a senator, Sewall showed himself to be a champion of other radical causes as well, petitioning the legislature to grant ‘‘aliens’’ greater rights, to accept legal testimony from witnesses regardless of their religious views, and to abolish capital punishment. But after abolition, no theme drew his attention more than the legal rights of women. As both a senator and a citizen, Sewall fought for

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  women’s su√rage, for women’s right to hold o≈ce, to be justices of the peace, to sit on juries, to retain their right to property after marriage, and to be able to end marriages more expeditiously.∂π He had, it should be recalled, loaned Zakrzewska the money she had needed to purchase her home, thus translating into practice his belief that women should be encouraged to own property. Committed to removing any and all obstacles that prevented women’s entry into the public sphere, he demonstrated a particular interest in women’s medical education that predated his involvement with the New England Female Medical College. Zakrzewska recalled how ‘‘profoundly interested in the subject and kindly disposed’’ he had been toward her when she had come to Boston in 1856.