The Limits of Reform
Four nurses from the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service (National Library of Medicine)
The turn of the twentieth centry brought with it a rising tide of reform. Movements emerged to combat everything from corrupt politics to urban poverty to corporate malfeasance. Women, many of them college-educated, became leaders of these efforts, often in the traditionally-feminine arenas of health and hygiene.
As large populations migrated to cities seeking industrial work, visiting nurses served the health needs of families in crowded, unsanitary housing without access to medical care. Some of this work was based in settlement houses, where nurses lived in the communities they served. While providing material assistance, such programs also included efforts at "Americanization" for recent immigrants which presumed the superiority of white, middle-class culture.
Though nurses developed public health programs and worked on the front lines providing care, they realized that they could not address the underlying causes of poor health without the right to vote.
Lavinia Dock (Wikimedia Commons)
Sarah Tarleton Colvin graduation portrait, 1892 (Chesney Medical Archives)
Progressive instigators
Lavinia Dock served as assistant superintendent of nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1890-1896. She left a promising career as a nurse educator to work at the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, established by her friend Lillian Wald to serve poor and immigrant communities. There, Dock became active in organized labor and the suffrage movement.
Ellen LaMotte graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and quickly became a leader of Baltimore’s tuberculosis control efforts, working with fellow Hopkins alum Mary E. Lent. Her effectiveness led to her appointment in 1910 as the director of the Baltimore City Health Department’s tuberculosis division. With friends and colleagues, she participated in suffrage actions across the state.
Sarah Tarleton Colvin, also trained at Johns Hopkins, helped establish the Baltimore Visiting Nurses Association in 1895. After seeing countless hospital patients who suffered from preventable diseases, she, like many of her peers, embraced public health nursing.
Postcard, Isobel Pocock (The Suffrage Postcard Project)
Reform as "women's work"
Howard Kelly, famous Johns Hopkins surgeon and outspoken social reformer, declared that “The influence of women in politics, as well as their votes, is greatly needed” because men had failed to uphold “municipal hygiene.”
The notion that women voters, as natural mothers and caregivers, would “clean up” America’s cities was widespread, and suffragists used this gendered imagery to promote their cause.
The settlement house movement, established in the U.S. by Jane Addams, is an example of this ethos. Women also took prominent roles in municipal health departments, often in positions related to maternal and child welfare.
"Getting mixed up in politics"
Nurses had a dual identity as educated, professional reformers and also as care workers. They sought autonomy over their practice, but faced resistance from hospitals and indifference from government. Because of their precarious position, many nurses feared that taking a political stance on suffrage would lead to retribution.
In 1908, the national nurses’ association voted against supporting women’s suffrage, and the Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine tried to dismiss the topic in their editorial pages. However, this led to an outpouring of pro-suffrage agitation in the nursing community.
Nora Holman, class of 1899:
“I ask any woman of our profession who knows of the pitiable combination of sickness and poverty, if she thinks it ‘unwomanly’ to express at the ballot box, a protest against the underlying causes of such distress, the long hours of labor, the unsanitary houses and factories, and the insufficient wage.”
Mary Bartlett Dixon, class of 1903:
“I am told… ‘nurses had affairs enough of their own to attend to without getting mixed up in politics.’ I claim that we were ‘mixed up in politics’ before we were born, and that it is impossible to attend to the smallest part of our own affairs without taking politics into consideration.”
Sarah F. Martin, speech before the Just Government League of Maryland, 1915: