The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine

In The Doctors Blackwell, Nimura uses the Blackwell sisters’ determined but often fraught journey into medicine as a lens through which to see how gendered expectations, social norms, and institutional obstacles limited women’s access to professional fields in the 19th century. One of the biggest cultural barriers was the rigid expectation of women’s roles in society at the time. They were mostly confined to the domestic sphere and restricted to the roles of caregivers, wives, and mothers. This expectation not only limited the professions women could enter but also shaped societal perceptions of what women could achieve in the first place. Male physicians, educational institutions, and even many women themselves adhered to the belief that the medical field was unsuitable for women. The book depicts the formation of women’s medical colleges as both a solution to and perpetuation of women’s exclusion from mainstream institutions. While they provided women with a path into medicine that they were otherwise denied, it also reinforced the prevailing idea that women needed separate institutions to succeed. Both Elizabeth and Emily thought these colleges were inferior because they provided substandard education compared to men’s colleges. Yet, by the time they founded the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, they recognized the need for these institutions. Most women attempting to enter the medical field did not have the resources and support the Blackwell sisters possessed while trying to fight through the system. At this point, the sisters were the exception, not the norm, and most would not have access to the opportunities they did when they went through their training.

The Blackwells also faced consistent skepticism about their ability to succeed in a profession believed to require masculine traits, including emotional detachment and decisiveness. Women were thought to be too emotional and delicate for the demands of medicine. These attitudes not only shaped the way men perceived women who pursued careers as physicians but also influenced how women viewed themselves. While the women’s suffrage movement was gaining traction around Elizabeth, and she was pushing against the limits of what women were allowed to do, her personal views on her fellow women were still very much rooted in the patriarchal mentality of the period. As she noted, “The problem was not the tyranny of men […] but the disappointing weakness of women. ‘Women are feeble, narrow, frivolous at present, ignorant of their own capacities, and underdeveloped in thought and feeling’” (68). Elizabeth did not view women as inherently equal to men, but rather that they could become equal and that any fault lay with the women themselves rather than the limitations imposed on them by society. For example, she did not believe women were educated enough to vote. This mentality often put her at odds with the other female doctors of the time who supported women’s suffrage. It also shows the complexity of the fight for gender equality due to the difficulty in breaking mentalities created by societal norms. While Elizabeth Blackwell fought to allow women to participate in the medical field, she didn’t believe they inherently deserved it.