The Indomitable Lady Doctors

Meet a dozen fascinating women, pioneers in the medical world, adventurers who went west with the homesteaders, missionaries who went to Tibet, China and India, scholars the academic community had to recognise. The medical establishment in Canada didn't accept these women doctors easily, and their battles for admittance into this profession are revealing. Author Carlotta Hacker presents her biographical profiles in a lively, entertaining style.

Changing Women, Changing History is a bibliographic guide to the scholarship, both English and French, on Canadian's women's history. Organized under broad subject headings, and accompanied by author and subject indices it is accessible and comprehensive.

Female Doctors in Canada is an accessible collection of articles by experienced physicians and researchers exploring how systems, practices, and individuals must change as medicine becomes an increasingly female-dominated profession. As the ratio of practicing physicians shifts from predominately male to predominately female, issues such as work hours, caregiving, and doctor-patient relationships will all be affected. Canada's medical education is based on a system that has always been designed by and for men; this is also true of our healthcare systems, influencing how women practice, what type of medicine they choose to practice, and how they wish to balance their personal lives with their work. With the intent to open a larger conversation, Female Doctors in Canada reconsiders medical education, health systems, and expectations, in light of the changing face of medicine. Highlighting the particular experience of women working in the medical profession, the editors trace the history of female practitioners, while also providing a perspective on the contemporary struggles women face as they navigate a system that was tailored to the male experience, and is yet to be modified.

Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy, whose long life stretched from 1869 to 1967, challenged convention from the time she was a young girl. Her professional life began as one of Oregon's earliest women physicians, and her commitment to public health and medical relief took her into the international arena, where she was chair of the American Women's Hospitals after World War I and the first president of the Medical Women's International Association. Most disease, suffering, and death, she believed, were the result of wars and social and economic inequities, and she was determined to combat those conditions through organized action. Lovejoy's early life and career in the Pacific Northwest gave her key experiences and strategies to use for what she termed "constructive resistance," the ability to take effective action against unjust power. She took a political and pragmatic approach to what she called "woman's big job"-achieving a full female citizenship-and emphasized the importance of votes for women. In this engaging biography, Kimberly Jensen tells the story of this important western woman, exploring her approach to politics, health, and society and her civic, economic, and medical activism. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blyfLWnCTV0

Drawing on historical records of women’s varying experiences as litigants, accused criminals, or witnesses, this book offers critical insight into women’s legal status in nineteenth-century Canada. In an effort to recover the social and political conditions under which women lobbied, rebelled, and in some cases influenced change, Petticoats and Prejudice weaves together forgotten stories of achievement and defeat in the Canadian legal system. Expanding the concept of “heroism” beyond its traditional limitations, this text gives life to some of Canada’s lost heroines. Euphemia Rabbitt, who resisted an attempted rape, and Clara Brett Martin, who valiantly secured entry into the all-male legal profession, were admired by their contemporaries for their successful pursuits of justice. But Ellen Rogers, a prostitute who believed all women should be legally protected against sexual assault, and Nellie Armstrong, a battered wife and mother who sought child custody, were ostracized for their ideas and demands. Well aware of the limitations placed upon women advocating for reform in a patriarchal legal system, Constance Backhouse recreates vivid and textured snapshots of these and other women’s courageous struggles against gender discrimination and oppression. Employing social history to illuminate the reproductive, sexual, racial, and occupational inequalities that continue to shape women’s encounters with the law, Petticoats and Prejudice is an essential entry point into the gendered treatment of feminized bodies in Canadian legal institutions. This book was co-published with The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History.

Focusing both on international comparisons and on the personal histories of many of the pioneers, Bonner shows how European and American women gradually broke through the wall of resistance to women in medicine many choosing initially between inferior women-only institutions at home (e.g. pre-Civil War America, Tsarist Russia, Victorian England) and integrated medical schools in Switzerland and France.

Women in Medical Education combines personal narratives written by sixteen women medical educators who, as clinicians, basic scientists, administrators, and medical humanities faculty, write of their experiences with students, patients, colleagues, and administrators. Their narratives reflect the issues confronting women in the medical academy today, including working in situations where power relations are embedded and enacted daily in the ethos of the institution; where rigid disciplinary boundaries do not include or invite inquiry into gender, race, ethnicity, or class; where integrating one's personal and work life often seems overwhelming. Yet their stories reflect the success and recognition that women in academic medicine have achieved. The book includes essays written by Beth Alexander, Janet Bickel, Dale G. Blackstock, Kate H. Brown, Lucy M. Candib, Pamela Charney, Frances Conley, Leah J. Dickstein, Jacalyn Duffin, Deborah Jones, Perri Klass, Mary Mahowald, Marian Gray Secundy, Marjorie S. Sirridge, Rebekah Wang-Cheng, and the editor.

This comparative study explores the lives of some of the women who first initiated challenges to male exclusivity in the legal professions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their challenges took place at a time of considerable optimism about progressive societal change, including new and expanding opportunities for women, as well as a variety of proposals for reforming law, legal education, and standards of legal professionalism. By situating women's claims for admission to the bar within this reformist context in different jurisdictions, the study examines the intersection of historical ideas about gender and about legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. In exploring these systemic issues, the study also provides detailed examinations of the lives of some of the first women lawyers in six jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, India, and western Europe. In exploring how individual women adopted different legal arguments in litigated cases, or devised particular strategies to overcome barriers to professional work, the study assesses how shifting and contested ideas about gender and about legal professionalism shaped women's opportunities and choices, as well as both support for and opposition to their claims. As a comparative study of the first women lawyers in several different jurisdictions, the book reveals how a number of quite different women engaged with ideas of gender and legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century.