Sylvia Marks qualified as a doctor in 1910, which makes her a) a bit of a prodigy because I messed up my timeline and b) someone who really knew what she wanted and went for it against all sorts of prejudice.
I’ve put a shed-load of wiki links in this, because a blog post is stonkingly inadequate to cover it all; this is a very brief summary of the actions of a load of very able, determined and amazing people. For actual proper references see at the bottom of the wiki pages, they’re pretty well annotated.
Sylvia Marks’ character was originally based on stories my grandmother used to tell about a local doctor-friend of her mother’s, who’d come and visit and sit on the kitchen table with her skirts hitched up and smoke whilst they chatted. However, once I decided she needed her own book, I needed more than just that to base her on–so I went reading.
The first woman doctor in England was Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, who along with Sophia Jex-Blake, the first women doctor in Scotland, fought long and hard for the privilege. Garrett-Anderson exploited loopholes in the articles of the Society of Apothecaries and the British Medical Association that were immediately sewn up for a couple of decades once she’d passed through and were therefore closed to Jex-Blake.
Initially getting the education was difficult and the women paid for private tuition and had to wheedle their way into practical and observation sessions with various levels of success. There was a lot of resistance–all the usual stupid stuff about women’s poor little brains overheating with facts, being sensitive creatures who should be protected from icky medical nastiness and the like. As time went on, however, the tide gradually began to turn.
Across the UK there was a growing pressure for women to be able to formally access university education. Jex-Blake eventually became one of the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to ever be admitted to university courses in the United Kingdom in 1869. However, although the Edinburgh Seven joined the university as undergraduates they were not allowed to qualify as doctors. They scattered across Europe and most qualified in either Paris and Berne to get their M. Ds..
Finally, in 1876 new legislation meant that examining bodies were able (but not forced) to consider women medical candidates and eventually, in 1877, legislation was finally passed to enable women across the UK to be awarded degrees.
After qualifying through her loop-hole, Garrett-Anderson founded The London School of Medicine for Women (1874), along with Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the USA to qualify as a doctor. Jex-Blake also set up The Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women (1886). It sounds as if she wasn’t a people-person–she fell out with some of her students and one of them, Elsie Inglis, left her school and founded the Edinburgh College of Medicine for Women (1889).
These handful of women who pushed and pushed through the patriarchal mid-nineteenth century education structures forced a path for other women to follow. They were proactive in lifting up their peers and those that came behind them. However, despite all this, women doctors were pretty much confined to treating women and children and not accepted in general hospital practice. Many of them were active women’s suffragists and when war broke out in Europe in 1914 they saw it as an opportunity to show that women could serve and be useful alongside men.
Inglis, who sounds like a truly amazing person, founded the Scottish Womens Hospitals for Foreign Service in 1914, where I made Sylvia do her war-work. Louisa Garrett-Anderson initially went to Europe to set up a hospital in Paris, which impressed the military authorities so much she was invited to come back to London and set up the Endell Street Military Hospital along with her partner Flora Murray. Sylvia is a sort of composite of these amazing people–not forgetting Dr Frances Ivens, who commanded the hospital at Royaumont.
The tenacity, the dedication to both professional and personal development and the willingness to engage in public life to lift other women up is very evident when you read about all these people. It must have been a truly exhausting struggle for them. I am really pleased to be able to bring them to people’s notice again a century and more later, even in a terribly fictionalised way.
