“An Effort for Women to Help Women”: Medical Women and the Founding of the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for Women and Children of San Francisco, California, 1876

• In Event: Engendering Health in the Americas

English Abstract

Women’s collectives during the first women’s rights movement (1848-1920) imagined and incorporated hospital solutions for healthcare crises in their cities. Hospital incorporation defined a new kind of body politic by expanding the corporate franchise to self-identified medical women. The act of incorporation manifested women’s groups as corporate collectives imbued with legitimate existence and rights. As a body politic, hospital women voted on how to direct the flow of hospital funding in support of their missions. As an embodiment of women’s politics, hospital corporations reshaped the local healthcare environment, institutionalizing gendered caregiving aims through their professional mandates.
This paper focuses on the medical women of San Francisco in the Reconstruction Era, and their fight “to provide for women the medical aid of competent female physicians, and to assist in educating women.” In 1876, women physicians in California were discriminated against at the county and state level as licensing societies denied them entry. Undeterred, women physicians and activists incorporated a separatist hospital. They hired an all-woman attending staff to educate medical women while addressing gaps in preexisting women’s medical and surgical services. Through the legitimacy that incorporation gave to their hospital, women physicians were found suitable for state license.
San Franciscan women physicians achieved individual professional emancipation through the corporate franchise. Yet they learned of the brittleness of corporate democracy when a new Board of Managers was elected in response to changes in feminist healthcare politics. Incorporation embodied, and reincorporation voided, the women physician’s hospital mission of professional emancipation.

Author

• Suzanne Winter, University of California, Berkeley