Dr. Emily Stowe Doctor and Suffragette
First Canadian Female doctor
Emily Howard Jennings Stowe was a woman of vision long before the term became fashionable. She was born the oldest of six daughters in 1831 on a farm in Norwich Township, in what became Ontario. Her mother, who had been well-educated at an American Quaker seminary, believed in education for all her daughters and felt that the local school was not doing a worth-while job. In response, she removed her children from class and home-schooled them.
Dr. E. Stowe's Early Life
When Emily was fifteen she obtained a teaching position in the town of Summerville. She had a successful teaching career, earning a First Class Teacher’s Certificate and becoming the first woman principal of a public school in Upper Canada, at Brantford. In 1856 Emily married John Stowe and the couple had three children.
Fights for Women's Educational and Political Equality
Emily Stowe was not the stereotypical Victorian housewife, however. Soon after the birth of their third child, John became ill with tuberculosis and was placed in a sanatorium. To pay the bills, Emily returned to teaching but also began to study homeopathic medicine. She quickly developed not only an interest in medicine as a whole, but also a realization that there was a desperate need for woman doctors. In 1865 she applied to the Toronto School of Medicine but was turned down on the grounds she was a woman. “The doors of the University are not open to women and I trust they never will be,” the University’s vice-president told her. (1)
Outraged by this attitude, Emily moved to the U.S. and entered the New York Medical College for Women. In 1867, armed with a medical degree, Stowe returned to Toronto where she set up a homeopathic medical practice. It was not until 1880, after being acquitted of the charge that she had performed an abortion on one of her patients, that she was able to obtain a license to practice. Before 1871 women were not allowed to attend classes and sit the examinations required by the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The struggle to obtain her license to practice helped Emily Stowe to realize that women would not be granted equality with men unless they fought for it. In 1877, she was instrumental in founding the Toronto Women’s Literary Guild, the first Canadian suffragette group fighting for women’s rights and better working conditions. Pressure brought by this organization did result in better educational opportunities for women in Toronto, and in 1883 the group was re-named the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Association.
Dr. Stowe continued to practice, concentrating on women’s and children’s health and giving lectures on the subject. She also kept pressuring the University of Toronto to admit women candidates into its medical program. In 1883 her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen became the first woman doctor to graduate from a Canadian medical school. A public meeting of the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Association in 1883 led to the formation of the Ontario Medical College for Women.
Mock Parliament
Emily Stowe was a beacon for Canadian suffragettes until her death in 1903. In 1888 she attended an international conference held in Washington, D.C. and returned home with new strength and ideas for the fight to win the vote for Canadian women. She became the president of the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association in 1889, and, in 1893, held a “mock parliament,” where the all-female gathering, citing the same arguments that men used against women, refused to give men the vote.
1) Vice-President of the Toronto School of Medicine, 1865
Sources: Canadian Medicine: Doctors & Discoveries A Female Pioneer: Dr. Emily Stowe
Dr. Emily Howard Stowe
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