Women -- Employment -- United States; Women -- Social and moral questions
In Boston the “admission” of women was debated in three directions: to
the Harvard Medical School, to the Massachusetts State Medical Society,
and to the Boston City Hospital. The application of Miss Hunt to the
Harvard Medical School in 1847 and 1850 have already been described.
After the final discomfiture of this first applicant, no other attempt
to open the college doors was made until 1879,[115] when a Boston lady,
Miss Marian Hovey, offered to give $10,000 toward the new building the
college was about to erect on condition that it should receive women
among its students. A committee was appointed from among the overseers
of the university to consider the proposition;[116] and after a year’s
consideration reported, with one dissenting voice, in favor of accepting
the conditions. The committee outlined a plan for medical co-education,
substantially like that already adopted at the Michigan University,
where certain parts of the instruction should be given to both sexes in
common; for others, where embarrassment might occur, the instructions
should be duplicated. The one dissenting voice, that of Le Baron
Russell, disapproved of co-education in any shape, but urged that
Harvard University should charge itself with providing a suitable
independent school for women.
The majority report expressly advised against the establishment of a
separate school for women because “A considerable number of the most
highly cultivated women physicians of the country state that the same
intellectual standard cannot be maintained in a school devoted to women
alone, and that the intellectual stimulus obtained by female students
from their association with men is an all-important element of
success.”[117]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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