Born: 21 January 1840, United Kingdom
Died: 7 January 1912
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
This biography, written by Jo Spiller, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Sophia Jex-Blake and six other women who became collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven discovered how dangerous the medical establishment felt them to be when they set out in 1869 to pursue the study of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
In Victorian Britain, there were limited opportunities for women seeking employment. Working class women and children did the most dangerous and unpleasant jobs in mines and factories, and earned much less.
Amongst the more affluent in society, the only profession open to women had been that of Governess until Florence Nightingale began transforming nursing into a respectable profession. Attitudes to education were changing in late Victorian Britain which meant that women with skills, ability and character could pursue a nursing career. With women demonstrating they made good nurses, the question of why they wouldn’t equally make good doctors inevitably arose.
Be Midwives, not Doctors – Professor Christieson
The Medical Act of 1858 stipulated that only those with recognised medical degrees from British Universities were eligible to register as doctors. This meant that if women wished to qualify as doctors, institutions previously closed to them would need to be opened up.
In 1869, the University of Edinburgh was the first to open its doors to women when Sophia Jex-Blake successfully petitioned the University for permission to apply.
Despite much support, both active and benign, from members of the Medical Faculty, the wider University and the general public, there was also a great deal of influential opposition to the idea of women as doctors.
Sophia Jex-Blake wrote of one member of the faculty: [he] informed me women ‘didn’t understand their position’, that they did their own work in the world badly, that they had not sufficient strength for medical practice.
Women’s motives in seeking to practise as doctors was also considered suspect and potentially dangerous.
The same member of faculty who had articulated that women didn’t understand their position stated at a meeting of the University council in 1870, that women seeking medical training could be ‘basely inclined’ and unless careful enquiries were made into their character, the institution could be harbouring ‘Magdalenes’.
The debate made the national papers, with most coming out in full support of the women students. The Times not only questioned why the same concerns expressed about women students weren’t equally expressed about male students but also commented:
It is the strongest argument against the admission of young ladies to the Edinburgh medical classes that they would attend the lectures of Professors who are capable of talking in this strain.
Throughout the first year of their Medical degree, the women proved themselves to be both personally and intellectually equal to the demands of the discipline. They conducted themselves diligently and professionally in their day-to-day studies and demonstrated that they could equal and often outperform their male counterparts in open examinations.
In the ‘fair field and no favour’ which Sophia Jex-Blake desired, some of the faculty staff acknowledged the women to be exemplary students. This led to growing tension with the wider student body, in part encouraged by hostile members of faculty, and the women began to be subjected to a mounting campaign of intimidation. They were regularly followed home, and had a series of obscene letters put through their letterboxes. Crowds would gather outside their Edinburgh home to rattle their windows and door and remove their nameplate, they would be pelted with peas and other objects thrown at them as they moved around campus.
The women stopped going out on campus alone and would not leave the house after dark. This hostility reached crisis point at 4pm on 18th November 1870 when the women arrived at Surgeon’s Hall on Nicolson Street, Edinburgh to sit an Anatomy exam. They found their route blocked by a baying mob of over two hundred students and locals hurling mud, rubbish and insults at them.
This was a major turning point in the campaign as many male students were horrified by the way the women were treated that afternoon and began to organise themselves into teams of bodyguards to escort them around campus.
The riot made national headlines and won the women many new supporters. The Committee for Securing a Medical Education to the Women in Edinburgh was set up with over three hundred influential members including Charles Darwin.
The campaign was hard fought throughout the following three years but ended in the courts, with the Lord Ordinary’s verdict that the University had acted ‘illegally’ in matriculating the women in the first place.
… this is not the first time, and I suppose it will not be the last, when grave and wise men will be found defending a dying tyranny. – Professor Masson
Sophia Jex-Blake, herself, did not consider the Edinburgh campaign a failure. “I believe that it was the seed sown in tears in Edinburgh that was reaped in joy elsewhere”.
The women had successfully challenged the widely held assumptions regarding women’s intelligence and had shown that they were more than competent to meet the challenges of the medical profession.
In 1869, they met with an equal, opposite and determined resistance. However, the ‘chariot wheels of progress’ were in motion and the momentum would prove unstoppable.
Dr Sophia Jex-Blake has made the greatest of all contributions to the end attained. – James Stansfeld, 1877
Women would finally, formally and legally be admitted to Universities in 1877. James Stansfeld, MP for Halifax, and one who had been closely associated with the campaign, wrote:
It is one of the lessons of the history of progress that when the time for a reform has come you cannot resist it… [Opponents] are not merely dragged at the chariot wheels of progress – they help to turn them. The strongest force, whichever way it seems to work, does most to aid.
Throughout the world, battles are still being fought to secure the right to free and equal education for women and girls. The ability for women to seek medical care from a woman doctor is not universal, with sometimes unnecessarily catastrophic results.
Battles to secure these rights were also fought here on our doorstep by brave, persistent and dangerous women 150 years ago. They had their integrity and virtue questioned in an era when women’s virtue was valued above all else. They were humiliated, intimidated and faced a barrage of abuse simply due to the fact they stepped into a world that was not yet ready to accept them.
I work on Buccleuch Place, the same street the Edinburgh Seven lived on during their time in Edinburgh. I think often about the fortitude and grit that they showed in enduring all they endured and still excelling in their studies.
I applaud these extraordinary and dangerous women who helped push at this obstinate and intractable door and ultimately made it possible for women in every generation that followed, including myself, to enjoy the privilege of a University education and the opportunity to pursue professional careers of their choice.
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Sophia Jex-Blake, an English physician, born at Brighton. In 1869 she matriculated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and completed her medical education at the University of Bonn, receiving the degree of M.D. in 1877.
In 1886 she opened the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, of which she was dean until her retirement in 1899. She is the author of American Schools and Colleges, Medical Women and Care of Infants.
The following is excerpted from the 1927 supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography, originally published between 1885 and 1900, by Smith, Elder & Co. It was written by Katharine Jex-Blake.
JEX-BLAKE, SOPHIA LOUISA (1840–1912), physician, born at Hastings 21 January 1840, was the youngest daughter of Thomas Jex-Blake, of Bunwell, Norfolk, and Brighton, proctor of Doctors’ Commons, by his wife, Maria Emily, youngest daughter of Thomas Cubitt, J.P., of Honing Hall, Norfolk. She was sister of Thomas William Jex-Blake [q.v.], head master of Rugby and dean of Wells. In 1858 she entered Queen’s College for Women, London, as a student, and became mathematical tutor there (1859–1861). After various educational experiments she went in 1865 to the United States and worked in Boston under Dr. Lucy Sewall, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship and from whom she gained a deep conviction of the ‘incalculable blessings’ conferred on her own sex by a woman physician. In 1868 she began a regular course of medical study in New York under Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell [q.v.]. Recalled to England in 1868 by the death of her father, she began to seek for medical education at home. All avenues to the profession seemed to be closed, both by the Medical Act of 1858, which excluded from the register foreign qualifications, and by the unwillingness of medical authorities at home to teach or to examine women. After being refused by the university of London, she turned to Edinburgh, where, though her first application was refused, a second was successful. Regulations were made for the admission of women and for their instruction ‘for the profession of medicine’ in separate classes.
From this point Sophia Jex-Blake became virtually the leader of the movement to open the medical profession to all, without distinction of sex. Five women matriculated at Edinburgh in 1869 and for three sessions carried on their medical studies, though under increasing difficulties. These difficulties came to a head in 1872, and an appeal to the university court only brought the suggestion that the women students should give up their claim to graduation (the only legal passport to practice), and should receive informal ‘certificates of proficiency’. Finally, the matriculated women students, seven in all, brought an action against the university in the court of Session, claiming that the university was legally bound to enable them to complete their studies. Judgment in their favour was reversed on appeal (1873), chiefly on the ground that in admitting women to matriculation the university had acted ultra vires.
The failure seemed complete, yet it is clear that the struggle had been of great value in forming public opinion. Quite undaunted, Sophia Jex-Blake attacked at their base the twin difficulties of instruction and of legal qualification. Having secured Dr. Arthur Trehern Norton as dean, and a staff of recognized lecturers, she founded the London School of Medicine for Women, which opened in October 1874 on its present site in Hunter Street (formerly Henrietta Street). Clinical work was not secured till 1877, when the London (afterwards the Royal) Free Hospital opened its doors to women students. The legal question was ventilated in parliament from 1873 onwards, Sophia Jex-Blake, as the moving spirit behind the scenes, constantly supplying facts, arguments, and even, at the request of Mr. Cowper-Temple (afterwards Baron Mount-Temple), a draft Bill. Meanwhile her last attempt to qualify under existing conditions, through the licence in midwifery of the College of Surgeons, registrable for general practice, was foiled by the resignation of the examiners en masse (1876). This probably hastened parliamentary action, and in August 1876 the Russell Gurney Enabling Act became law. All medical examining bodies were now empowered to examine women, and through the Irish College of Physicians, the first to use the power, Sophia Jex-Blake, already an M.D. of Berne, at length gained a legal title to practise in Great Britain (1877).
In 1878 Sophia Jex-Blake settled in Edinburgh. There, in addition to private and dispensary practice, she founded a women’s hospital in 1885, and in the next year a school of medicine for women which continued for more than ten years. In 1894, when the university of Edinburgh admitted women to graduation in medicine, the last of the barriers against which she had launched herself in 1869 was down. Able, energetic, determined, a born combatant and leader, she had been an unselfish and generous protagonist in the cause. In 1899 she gave up active work and retired to Rotherfield in Sussex, where she died on 7 January 1912. Her portrait by Samuel Lawrence (1865) hangs in the rooms of the Royal Society of Medicine.