Health on the Homestead: Women Physicians and the Search for Professional Medical Authority in the American West, 1870-1930

• Main Author: Doak, Kate Lynn
• Other Authors: Wise, Michael
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2019
• Subjects: Western; Women Physicians
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1505155/

This project seeks to clarify the historical significance of women in the American West between 1870 and 1930 through the education, careers, and personal lives of western women physicians. The narratives presented in the work provide alternative roles for western women aside from the stereotypical images found in popular culture and history, such as the "Bad Woman," the prostitute, and the obedient homesteading wife. This collective biography additionally demonstrates how women participated in American medical culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emphasizing their agency as historical actors, and countering the common misconception that Victorian women were merely passive subjects of their time and place. The lives of four physicians named Ellis Reynolds Shipp, Mary Babcock Atwater, Mary Bennett Ritter, and Mary Canaga Rowland are available through memoirs, biographies, scholarly articles, newspapers, and other sources that contextualize their careers into the broader context of Western, medical, and nineteenth-century history. Through their personal and professional experiences, a greater story of female autonomy emerges in a period understood to be inherently oppressive to and unnavigable for women.