Founding mothers of social justice: The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, 1877-1892

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Harth, Erica

Clisby brought much of her own unusual background to her shaping of the Union's early character. At the aee of seven. she had left London for the Australian bush, where she very early learned the lesson of selfreliance. Ten years later, she was baptized together with other members of her family in the Swedenborgian New Church in Adelaide. Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondences that link the human with the natural and the divine in a cosmic unity, a doctrine which appealed to many of the Transcendentalists Clisby would later meet in Boston, stamped her adult life and work. Swedenborgianism attracted nonconformists, radicals and independent thinkers as well as people interested in mesmerism and spiritualism. Its medical counterpart was homeopathy, which emphasized natural and spiritual healing based on the curative principle of administering like to like, or substances that would produce the symptoms of the disease.

Clisby discovered medicine in a visionary burst not unlike that which inspired her to form the Union. From Adelaide she had gone to Melbourne around 1856, where she met Caroline Harper Dexter, an unconventional woman who had founded an Institute of Hygiene. Among other innovations, the Institute promoted dress reform, a movement guaranteed to appeal to the young Clisby, who on her move to Adelaide from the bush gave in only reluctantly to her mother's demand that she exchange her short country dress for long skirts. She and Dexter collaborated on the first Australian magazine published by women, the Interpreter, which included a page of medical information and advice. After the publication of two issues it folded, and Clisby went to work as the editor of a shorthand magazine under the direction of Isaac Pitman (whose wife would later be listed as a member of Clisby's Union). When Pitman sent over from London an article by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell on "The Laws of Life, with special reference to the physical education of girls," Clisby's somewhat unfocused occupational adventures came to an abrupt close. From then on she single-mindedly pursued the goal of training as a physician.

It took tenacity for a woman to earn a medical degree in the 1860s. The world's first medical school for women, the New England Female Medical College, had been founded by Samuel Gregory only in 1848, and the vast majority of medical schools internationally did not admit women. Clisby managed to apprentice herself to a kindly male physician in Adelaide. Two years later, she traveled to England, where Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, one of the pioneer women physicians, advised her that she would have a better chance of getting her degree in the United States. In the meantime, Clisby earned her keep as a nurse in London's Guy's Hospital.

Once she got to New York, she found Elizabeth Blackwell, who had been an inspiration to Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson), as discouraging as Dr. Anderson had been. Blackwell, it is true, had had to overcome many obstacles in order to earn her degree from Geneva College (in western New York state) in 1849. But by the time that Clisby met her she had won a large measure of respect. Like Clisby's, her family had emigrated from England, in her case to the United States, and she had been influenced by Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist ideas.'3 Surprisingly, then, Blackwell told her, in effect, to return to England. Instead, Clisby enrolled in the first graduating class of Dr. Clemence Lozier's Medical College and Hospital for Women. Although most of the institutions that admitted women were homeopathic, it is likely that, given her Swedenborgian conversion, Clisby would in any event have preferred homeopathy. But "regulars" were the majority and had more standing than the homeopaths, so Lozier secured permission for her students to attend lectures at Bellevue.'4 There the women faced such hostility from male professors and students that they carried switches to ward off their persecutors. At the age of ninety, when Clisby had won fame as the world's oldest woman physician (to be topped by her own death at one hundred and one), she recalled that one of the lecturers at Bellevue was so eager to drive the women away that he invited a "colored patient named Jim, a big, strapping fellow," to class and asked him to undress. As the patient slowly proceeded, one of the women made a move to leave. Clisby stood firm, prompting the other women to follow her example. The case reached the press, with Henry Ward Beecher championing the women students' cause.'5 (One wonders about the relation of race and gender implied in this anecdote. Among Clisby's close associates were such renowned feminists and abolitionists as Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison and Julia Ward Howe.) Later the women went to class escorted by a military guard.