In my South Dakota Humanities Council presentation, Women Tamed the Frontier, I describe how women were “tradition keepers and tradition breakers.”
Charlotte Ward, from Medicine Creek Claim, certainly belongs in the latter category. Charlotte was always a “healer” – on the family farm, in the Union Army field hospitals, and on the Dakota Frontier. During that time, there were very few licensed women doctors. The story of Dr. Mary Atwater, known as “Dr. Mollie” to her patients, proved insightful. In the biography Pioneer Doctor: The Story of a Woman’s Work, Mary’s granddaughter chronicles her grandmother’s journey to become a respected physician in both Montana and later California.
My research included other stories about women doctors on the frontier. Dr. Flora Stanford was the first female doctor in Deadwood, SD. She and her daughter, Emma, came to the mining town in 1888 in search of “fresh, mountain air” to help treat her daughter’s consumption (tuberculosis).
But Dr. Stanford wasn’t the first woman doctor in Dakota Territory. In 1885, Dr. Emma Bertha Cross became the first licensed physician in Dakota Territory. That was a banner year for female physicians in the Territory. Dr. Cross was one of eight women to be licensed to practice medicine in southern Dakota Territory in 1885.
Some women doctors got their start in the medical field through nursing, such as Dr. Alma Bennett. She served as a nurse in the US Christian Commission during the Civil War. According to South Dakota History, Vol. 45, published by the SD Historical Society, Alma and her husband, also a physician, settled near Elk Point, Dakota Territory, in 1866. Alma received her medical degree in 1881.
But it was still an unconventional career path for women. In 1871, American Medical Association President Alfred Stille stated that women were “morally unfit” to be physicians. Stille said women were “ignorant, inexact, untrustworthy, unbusinesslike, laking in sense and mental perception, and contemptuous of logic.”*
And yet, they persisted.
By 1880, there were 2432 female doctors in America, and by 1900, there were 7387.
* South Dakota State Historical Society, Volume 45, No. 1
* Martha R. Clevenger, “From Lay Practitioner to Doctor of Medicine: Women Physicians in St. Louis, 1860-1920,” Gateway Heritage 8, No. 3 (1987).