Claiming Medicine as a Profession for Women: The English Woman’s Journal’s Campaign for Female Doctors

Abstract

This chapter highlights a model of active femininity that places young women outside the domestic sphere. Pusapati explores the support extended to the mid-century campaign for women’s entry into medicine in England by the feminist periodical the English Woman’s Journal (1858–64). The journal’s promotion of a ‘specific and highly ambitious model of the college-educated, professional female physician’ functioned to encourage young women to strive for access to higher education as well as entry to the world of medicine (122). As Pusapati demonstrates, the English Woman’s Journal frequently looked to examples from beyond Britain’s borders to buttress this sense of possibility for female readers, not only in terms of professional achievement but also to reassure readers, male and female, that women could practice medicine without flouting ‘women’s culturally sanctioned domestic and social roles’ (123).