Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [638]
The notion that respectable and educated females might undertake gainful employment ran up against the reality that, as an 1846 article in the feminist Advocate for Moral Reform put it bluntly: “Men have monopolized almost every field of labor. They have taken the learned professions, they have entered every department which commerce opens, and indeed, almost every place where skill and talent is required, they have excluded women.” While the city’s flourishing publishing industry had proved hospitable to women, other suitable professions were growing more restrictive, notably medicine.
Childbirth had long been a jealously guarded female domain. New York midwives had to swear they would not reveal “any matter Appertaining to your Office in the presence of any Man.” Since the development and use of obstetrical forceps, however, male doctors had begun to assist midwives at difficult births and then, slowly, to displace them in the birthing room. To consolidate control over this lucrative practice, they refused to train midwives in the new methods, claiming women were too emotional to make cool judgments in medical emergencies. Midwives dwindled, male obstetricians multiplied.
They did not, however, sweep the field, in part because examinations by male doctors continued to outrage female modesty. Many physicians were forced to communicate with their patients on delicate issues through elderly female intermediaries. In this context, female doctors constituted a serious threat, one reason women were barred from medical college. Those who did receive medical training attended unorthodox institutions, like the New York Hydropathic and Physiological School, which in 1856 graduated thirty males and twenty females. Such women could be dismissed as quacks. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell could not.
Blackwell, an English immigrant, had gotten into an upstate medical school and received the first American M.D. degree ever conferred on a woman. But when she returned to New York City in 1851, physicians prevented her from practicing in city hospitals and dispensaries, and she became the target of hate mail. In 1853 Blackwell opened what would become the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, in a oneroom dispensary on 7th Street near Tompkins Square. She would be assisted by Dr. Marie Zackrzewska, former chief midwife of Prussia’s largest hospital, who had emigrated to New York City convinced that “only in a republic can it be proved that science has no sex.” Poor women flocked from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn to this first medical charity in the United States staffed by female physicians. The New York Infirmary took root, despite vitriolic opposition from the city’s male medicos, though its efforts to add a women’s medical college would be thwarted until 1868. It would be the Women’s Hospital of New York (1855), organized by male physicians to treat female disorders, that would receive significant appropriations of money and land from state and city.
A FAMILY WAGE
Working-class women faced quite a different problem. The same booming economy that was tempting some of the lady class into the workplace was driving poorer women into it willy-nilly.
Many female Irish refugees, large numbers of whom came over on their own, tried to reconstruct familiar domestic arrangements, but a good man, any man, was hard to find. Though Irish females only slightly outnumbered males on the immigrant ships, in New York there were 125 women of marrying age for every hundred men. The demand for Irish brawn was continental in scope, and many males swirled in and out of the city to great construction projects in surrounding states and points west. “The immense majority,” noted a New York Irish paper in 1859, were “as yet but a mere floating population, migrating from place to place, wherever they may find a market for their labor.” Irishwomen, on the other hand, found it relatively easy to get jobs as domestic