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

In New York and in Boston, to which she moved sometime around 1871, Clisby surrounded herself with women physicians. In New York, Dr. Lozier had taken her in for a time; in Boston in the 1870s, we find her at two different Winter Street addresses, at each of which several other female physicians were also residing.'6 At least one of these physicians, a Dr. L.W. Tuck, was on the Union's Hygiene Committee. Among the founding members of the Union were several graduates of the New England Female Medical College. Dr. Mercy B. Jackson was on the Union's first Board of Directors (she died shortly thereafter); Dr. Arvilla B. Haynes was its first vice president. In 1880, both Clisby and Haynes were residing at 773 Tremont Street. Haynes and another early member, Dr. Caroline E. Hastings, were notable figures on the lecture circuit, and Haynes in particular was in much demand.'7

By 1880, the year of the Union's incorporation, Haynes, who had served as chair of the Union's Committee on Moral and Spiritual Development, was lecturing on the "Anatomy and Physiology of Circulation," "Nutrition," and "Assimilation" for the WEIU's newlyorganized Committee on Hygiene and Physical Culture. In January of that year, the Union had decided to offer a free course of public lectures on Tuesday evenings by a full roster of female physicians. Among them was another member of the Committee on Moral and Spiritual Development, Dr. Mary Safford, a professor of Gynecology at Boston University's homeopathic medical school, which had absorbed the Female Medical College after Gregory's refusal to give women a real managerial role and solid professional training had forced the closing of the women's college. Safford, a proponent of dress reform, also served on the staff of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital and carried on a private practice. At the Union, she lectured on the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the eye, and also gave a "talk upon Constipation, its causes, and how to avoid it." Among the other topics of that season were diet, dress, ventilation, and sanitary measures to prevent disease.18

The Hygiene Committee to all appearances did not stray far from women's traditional benevolence. For all the male opposition to their professional training, women, as physicians, could still be seen as playing their assigned role of nurturer and care giver. The initiative that the committee took in 1880, when it opened a Hygiene Room, for example, is consistent with this role. At the Hygiene Room, women physicians held regular hours of consultation every day "for the benefit of young girls and others connected with stores and manufactories, who need advice in hygiene and also medical treatment, but whose means will not admit of paying regular fees at the offices of physicians....We hope to benefit a class, a majority of whom are in need of just such care."19

In this type of work, however, the Union was breaking new ground. The Hygiene Committee is an instance of how the WEIU began to move away from the charity visitor's campaign for the moral uplift of the poor and closer to the spirit of the settlement house movement that sprang up in the United States in the late 1880s and 1890s. In the Hygiene Committee, as in the settlement houses, the ideal was one of mutual benefit to helper and beneficiary. Female physicians did not have many professional opportunities, although as alternatives to male gynecologists they served an important moral function in preserving the modesty of their middleclass patients. In the Hygiene Committee, physicians could benefit from the professional experience and personal gratification they gained there as much as poor patients could benefit from their low-cost care.