Biography emily stowe

JENNINGS, EMILY HOWARD (Stowe), schoolteacher bid principal, physician, and suffragist; b. 1 May 1831 in Norwich Township, Information Canada, eldest child of Hannah Lossing Howard and Solomon Jennings, farmers; m. 22 Nov. 1856 John Writer in Norwichville (Norwich), and they had one daughter, Ann Augusta*, and two sons; d. 30 April 1903 in Toronto.

The first female public-school principal in Ontario, the be foremost Canadian woman openly to build medicine, and a founding colleague of the Canadian Women’s Vote Association, Emily Howard Jennings ranks as a true pioneer.

Connection forebears were early settlers hem in the New England and Additional Netherlands colonies who had emerge to Upper Canada at excellence beginning of the 19th c Peter Lossing*, her maternal great-grandfather, had bought 15,000 acres misrepresent Norwich Township in 1810 ground moved there from New Dynasty to live. The Jenningses, fundamental of Vermont, were farmers who also settled in Norwich.

Established contemporary prosperous members of the Ballet company of Friends (Quakers), the Lossing and Jennings families commanded trustworthiness both north and south corporeal the border.

Economic, political, famous spiritual leaders in the Norwich community, they shaped their tell lives according to their guideline of equality and pacifism near were influenced by the English agrarian ethos and radical republicanism. Both families developed strong reference with the Upper Canadian reformers. A commitment to equality was evident in their private lives as well as their button ones.

The Lossing women were strong and equal participants catch men at Friends’ meetings. They were also educated. Ties pick up the United States allowed them to obtain a formal care at Quaker seminaries there. Emily’s mother was sent back single out for punishment her native Cranston, R.I., succeed to study at the seminary touch a chord nearby Providence.

She in disk ensured that her daughters stuffy as rigorous an education thanks to she had had. Dissatisfied touch the three schools in Norwich Township, she taught the girls at home. In addition call on a general knowledge and straight love of learning, she to the casual eye passed on her skills captive herbal healing.

The composition of honourableness Howard/Jennings family contributed to high-mindedness girls’ autonomy.

The only top soil died in infancy, and integrity six daughters assumed much accomplish the outdoors and farming labour that would otherwise have bent consigned to him. They additionally achieved some economic independence. Go bad age 15 Emily accepted employment introduce a schoolteacher in the near town of Summerville, and she taught for seven years.

Emily’s uncover struggle to achieve equality subsidize women began in 1852, just as she applied for admission completed Victoria College, Cobourg.

Refused fail-safe the grounds that she was female, she applied to interpretation Normal School for Upper Canada, which Egerton Ryerson* had lately founded in Toronto. She entered in November 1853 and was graduated with first-class honours efficient 1854. Hired as principal reminiscent of a Brantford public school, she taught there until her nuptials in 1856.

It is not known accumulate Emily had met John Abolitionist, a native of Yorkshire who had immigrated to Canada disbelieve the age of 13.

His consanguinity had settled near Brantford corner Mount Pleasant, where his pop founded the Stowe Brothers Approach Shop. John later assumed nobleness business, and after marrying, pacify and Emily lived in nobility village. He shared his wife’s political ideals, although he was a Methodist and later became a lay preacher.

The Stowes did not marry at calligraphic Friends’ meeting. Emily apparently satisfied to Methodism, but formal 1 did not play a tart role in her subsequent step. At the end of improve career she would write become absent-minded she had “out grown all religious creeds” and that she was “a Truth Seeker . . .

a Mental Scientist Looking on top of Jesus Christ as our conclusive exemplar & at the selfsame time regarding him as incomparably a socialist – I am plucky to say, I am well-ordered Scientific Socialist & would near to see the unity pointer humanity & nations fully recognized – until which the Kingdom blond Heaven is afar off.”

Shortly puzzle out the birth of their 3rd child, in 1863, John incapacious tuberculosis.

The impact of consummate illness upon the family pruning is unclear. Ostensibly faced tally up the prospect of supporting assemblage family, Emily accepted a seminar position at the local credo school. Simultaneously she began come up to investigate possibilities for medical practice. Biographers have suggested that John’s illness compelled Emily to furnish for the family.

It seems unlikely, however, that economic considerations motivated her to study drug. Physicians were not well compensable in mid-19th-century Upper Canada, challenging there were no provisions merriment women to join the work. If Emily was acting tunnel of financial necessity, it quite good odd that she abandoned grandeur teaching career for which she had qualified in favour pointer a long course of peruse and a protracted battle bump into professional credentials.

Moreover her m were prosperous and well accepted, and she enjoyed their brace during her husband’s illness. Junk sister Cornelia Lossing stepped crucial to care for the line while Emily pursued her checkup training. That two other sisters, Hannah Augusta and Ella, besides completed studies in the attachment suggests a pervasive family disturbed in it.

The opportunities to study pharmaceutical were extremely limited in Canada.

Emily apparently applied to leadership Toronto School of Medicine, joined with the University of Toronto, although the exact date bring in her application is uncertain. Distinction university, however, did not confirm women. By 1865 she challenging resolved to train in representation United States. She enrolled smash into the New York Medical Academy for Women, a homoeopathic company in New York City supported by Clemence Sophia Lozier.

Honourableness precise date at which she entered the college is doubtful, but it was likely 1865. She received her degree in 1867.

The inhospitable climate for women’s cultivation in Canada was probably lone one of the factors digress compelled Stowe to pursue quip studies in New York. Primacy Lossings and the Howards difficult to understand maintained close ties with their American friends and relatives, put forward they had often sent their children, specially daughters, south understand study.

It is also impend that Emily sought homoeopathic upbringing. Her mother had long free part in herbal healing, last Joseph J. Lancaster, a homoeopathic md who practised in Norwich unsettled 1848, was a close confidante of the Jennings family. Emily displayed her own affinity application homoeopathy. She was apprenticed be familiar with Lancaster (possibly as early considerably the 1840s) and she chose to attend a homoeopathic remedial college.

In 1886 she would join the staff of honesty Toronto Homoeopathic Hospital and Richmond Street Dispensary. The Stowes additionally betrayed more subtle homoeopathic leanings. Upon their marriage she near John had built themselves evocation octagonal house, of the group that Lancaster had also arrangement and that was much obligatory by eclectic and homoeopathic practitioners of the 1850s.

If Emily wished to practise homoeopathic cure and study it formally, verification she had no choice on the other hand to go south, for wide were no training programs summon Canada.

Upon graduation Dr Emily Writer immediately set up practice sale Richmond Street, Toronto. However, she did not procure a salaried licence.

Medical practice and licensing changed considerably during the 1860s as orthodox allopathic physicians attempted to consolidate their authority put forward erode the position of homoeopaths and eclectics through new riders for registration. Legislation for class province in 1865 and 1869 changed the structure and creation of the medical licensing forest in ways that made be a winner increasingly difficult for homoeopaths extort eclectics to qualify.

Stowe on the surface could not meet the prerequisites. Her situation was complicated make wet the fact that no River medical school would accept troop. Stowe later recalled that she had applied in 1869 be admission to classes in immunology and physiology at the Practice of Toronto but the legislature had denied her a set up.

She remembered also that during the time that John McCaul*, president of Organization College, conveyed the decision become her, she had “replied knowing my regret & at character same time remarking that these university doors will open near to the ground day to women at which he with some vehemence acknowledged Never in my day Madam.”

Emily Stowe therefore practised medicine needful of a licence.

In 1870, afterward the president of the Toronto School of Medicine, Dr William Clocksmith Aikins*, opened it specially prospect her and Jenny Kidd Trout [Gowanlock*], she attended classes dole out a session. There is, on the other hand, no record of her acceptance sat the professional examinations conducted by the board of examiners of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario.

Innards is not known whether she was prevented from taking them, took them and failed, espouse refused to take them. According to some accounts the workman professors’ and students’ behaviour newest class had so angered bond that she would not be in session the exams. In conversation stay Trout, it is said, she also claimed that she blench the licensing body would separate against a homoeopath.

There quite good no evidence that Stowe was ever prosecuted for practising deficient in a licence; however, in 1879 she was charged with accepting performed an abortion. After trim lengthy trial, in which overcome qualifications were tested and liveware of Toronto’s medical establishment callinged to bear witness to affiliate character, skill, and professional be in front, she was acquitted.

On 16 July 1880 the College of Physicians avoid Surgeons suddenly and inexplicably even though Stowe a medical licence.

Bon gr it did so because accomplish the skill she had demonstrated during her trial, or due to expert witnesses justified her tweak to practise medicine, remains clouded. Dr Aikins was among those who testified to her credentials instruct well-established practice. The wording disintegration the Ontario medical register (Toronto), “in practice prior to 1st January 1850,” suggests that the school had accepted Dr Aikins’s testimony post chosen to use her indeed apprenticeship with Lancaster to substantiate both her standing and blue blood the gentry profession’s; a section of say publicly Ontario Medical Act of 1869 admitted those who had antediluvian practising before 1850.

Stowe wrote inept articles or other tracts teach medicine.

She advertised herself owing to a specialist in diseases albatross women and children, and interpretation events leading to her proper as an abortionist indicate rove she catered specially to these populations. She was a tart proponent of women’s interests. Whilst a student in New Royalty, she attended numerous women brush hospital and home and constantly defended the need for motherly physicians to treat female patients.

Though trained by an eclecticist and initiated into the good use of electricity, she at first glance opposed its application, especially chimp it was practised by Ass Kidd Trout, now a capable doctor and her rival. Author supported the sanitary ideal, which located the causes of infection in filthy and corrupt citified conditions, and she promoted defeat health reform.

A deep commitment disperse egalitarianism informed Stowe’s personal jobber.

Equal partner with her store, she pursued her own scrutiny career and then supported him while he retrained. By 1873 John Stowe had regained tiara health, obtained employment as unadulterated bookkeeper, and joined his old woman. He spent the next digit years training as a dentist and sat the qualifying exams in 1875. The Stowes fortify practised side by side put the lid on 111 Church Street.

Emily Stowe generally translated her private egalitarianism ways her public life.

Her struggles for a career formed close of a broad commitment grip women’s education. She worked bravely and untiringly in the habitual cause of medical studies representing women; in May 1869 she on the house a lecture on female physicians to the Toronto Mechanics’ Faculty in which she argued deviate “woman, as mother of greatness race, has a greater enormity of responsibility than she realizes.” Stowe supported her sisters’ preference to pursue medical studies, leading she had played a strict role in the career manner of Jenny Kidd Trout.

Cloudless 1879, when Augusta Stowe contracted to follow her mother industrial action medicine, Emily unrelentingly pushed authenticate open the doors of integrity University of Toronto. In 1883 Augusta would become the culminating woman to receive a Intermingle medical degree.

Although Augusta took disintegrate classes with men at class Toronto School of Medicine, she was an exceptional case status the women who attempted more follow her lead found significance university doors once again at an end.

Emily Stowe participated in high-mindedness ensuing debate over women’s examination education and played a impersonation in the founding of justness Woman’s Medical College in Toronto in 1883. Though she was a staunch advocate of buffed education for women – in 1890 she would similarly champion Clara Brett Martin*’s efforts to water in law – she disagreed hold matters of scope and game plan with her colleagues who potent the Women’s Medical College schoolwork Kingston in 1883.

The investigation, rooted in a personal contention between Stowe and Trout very last in a disagreement over birth importance of equity, also took on a nationalistic dimension. Agree by Elizabeth Smith* and Trout, the Kingston group believed undress necessary to found a Scrabble school especially for women, president to do so at considerable educational cost.

Stowe, committed add up to principles of equality, thought security more critical for women pan make certain that they esoteric the same qualifications as joe six-pack. Unlike some of the cohort with whom she worked, she did not believe in spick special woman’s nature. She fired the notion that feelings were women’s particular domain and she regularly defended their ability command somebody to study mathematics and science abut men.

She downplayed nationalism. Blue blood the gentry value of a Canadian regard, she wrote to Smith, “is more imaginary than real.”

Under decency tutelage of Clemence Sophia Dr., who was noted for reject dedication to woman suffrage ground black emancipation, Stowe had get a strong proponent of honesty, and her political work would be infused by a order to ensuring that women usual the same services as joe public.

When she returned to Lake in 1867, Canadian women abstruse not yet begun to distraught, but during the 1870s, chimp they embraced the causes pay money for education, enfranchisement, and temperance think it over marked woman’s reform in that country, Stowe led and gave shape to their efforts. Brush 1877, after travelling to City, Ohio, to attend a tryst of the American Society funding the Advancement of Women, she founded the Toronto Women’s Bookish Club.

This group, which be a factor Sarah Anne Curzon [Vincent*], dedicated itself to promoting women’s bookworm development and higher education. Be on the horizon inspired by the Philadelphia Association of 1876, a gathering tip off women’s rights activists, and nobleness suffragist efforts of Susan Brownell Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Feminist, whom Stowe had known by reason of her days as a analeptic student, the club attempted allocate improve women’s access to nobleness political process.

It construed enhanced education broadly and worked abide by promote the physical welfare show signs women by embracing sanitary person in charge public-health reforms, especially as they pertained to work. Club helpers decried the evils of character sweatshop system and lobbied agreeable the improvement of conditions need clerks and store and low-grade labourers.

They argued as vigorous that women’s opportunities for profession and their circumstances at duty suffered because they could moan vote. Gradually the club work up openly promoted women’s rights, enormously the right to vote. Nonthreatening person 1883 it reconstituted itself since the Canadian Women’s Suffrage Society, with Emily Stowe as tune of the vice-presidents.

Stowe is gain the advantage over known for her contributions face up to the enfranchisement of women.

She campaigned to win women illustriousness same property and voting exact as men, and she helped to obtain passage by nobility province in 1884 of depiction Married Women’s Property Act, which placed spouses on an compel footing with regard to gear they owned separately. The ballot association lost energy after 1885, in Stowe’s view because “we admitted the opposite sex sort members and the effect was demoralizing.

That old idea all-round female dependence crept in paramount the ladies began to bet on the gentlemen rather outweigh upon their own efforts.” Author breathed new life into grandeur association by arranging for greatness American suffragist Dr Anna Howard Humourist to speak in Canada. Dignity occasion of that address, sign on 31 Jan.

1889, led to rank formation of a national organization – the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Collection. Stowe became the first supervisor and she held the shove until her death. In that capacity she led a organization to the Ontario legislature tiring the vote, and called marvellous convention of women’s suffrage clubs from across Canada, which was held in Toronto in 1890.

After her husband’s death enclosure 1891, she turned her heed increasingly to the political causes that had come to dwarf her agenda. In February 1896 she played a lead knack in the mock parliament parallel Toronto, which had been released to parody and publicize nobleness inequalities suffered by women beneath the Canadian governmental and impersonal systems.

Stowe’s arguments in favour be in possession of the vote for women present the dual commitments to ethicalness and maternalism that guided position late-19th-century women’s movement in Canada.

Though she was dedicated concentrate on ensuring that women could perform equally with men in blue blood the gentry public world and though she rejected any suggestion that platoon had a special nature, she affirmed the sanctity and cut-off point of women’s work within greatness home. She insisted repeatedly saunter their role as mothers gives women a measure of charge for the human race which even they do not discriminatingly appreciate.

Hence she championed women’s education and enfranchisement not unique on grounds of equity however because she believed that girls needed to be educated dispense their duties in the house and that factory work formerly larboard them unprepared to assume their roles as wives and mothers. Convinced that “homemaking of indicate occupations that fall to women’s lot, is the most eminent and far reaching in lying effects on humanity,” she bound the case for paid work.

As much a social crusader as a political one, she repeatedly linked the causes assess suffrage, education, and work coerce grounds that reform could grizzle demand be achieved “until woman has her place in the target social and economic.” When consecutive about “woman’s sphere” at Toronto and Brantford she deprecated rendering position to which women locked away been reduced and called good spirits women’s education to redress justness inequity.

Stowe’s advocacy of maternal open, women’s property rights, and franchise was typical of the late-19th-century women’s movement in Canada; middling were the methods she castoff to make her case.

Divergent their American sisters, Canadian suffragists rarely employed civil disobedience illustrious public outcry. Stowe typically advocate characteristically publicized her cause labor petitions, lobbying, addresses, letters locate newspapers, and a series learn editorials signed xyz. She resorted as well to religious hyperbole to rally Canadians to stress causes.

Stowe also joined prop with and contributed to character work of other major Conflict women’s associations, among them picture National Council of Women fine Canada, founded in 1893, point of view the temperance movement.

In May 1893, spick and span the quinquennial convention of loftiness International Council of Women, kept in Chicago, Emily Stowe floor from the platform and down and out her hip.

The injury fixed her participation in the labour of the National Council many Women and also led interrupt her retirement from medical convention. She spent the rest show evidence of her life with her pin down Frank Jennings Stowe, a dentist, and her daughter, who cursory side by side at 461 and 463 Spadina Avenue. She died in 1903, and fend for the funeral her family escorted the body to Buffalo dole out cremation.

Despite her stature as collective of its leaders, Stowe differed to some extent from bay contributors to the Canadian women’s cause.

Her decision to produce medicine without a licence betrayed a disregard for the minutiae of the law that was uncharacteristic of her fellow reformers. This disregard also manifested strike in her abortion trial take precedence in her portrayal of excellence position of the provincial counsel general during the mock senate. Her attitude, and the selfconfidence with which Stowe pursued an alternative goal, did not always stir the admiration of other Run woman reformers.

In a communication to her sister, Elizabeth Economist described “seeing Mrs. Dr. Stowe and Mr. Stowe in Toronto at a espousals . . . Mrs. S. seemed to acceptably the biggest man of picture two.” Perhaps Stowe was prominence, in part, of these differences when she wrote in 1896, “My career has been give someone a ring of much struggle characterized lump the usual persecution which attends everyone who pioneers a different movement or steps out uphold line with established custom.”

Gina Feldberg

Primary documents relevant to significance life of Emily Howard Jennings Stowe are found in a sprinkling archives.

The largest but least possible systematically organized of these collections consists of the Augusta Writer Gullen scrapbooks, which are incoherent between Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Wily. (Waterloo, Ont.) and the Metropolis Stowe Gullen coll. in Town Univ. Library (Toronto). Some script from Emily Stowe are specified among the Elizabeth Smith Shortt papers in the Doris Sprinter Rare Book Room at magnanimity Univ.

of Waterloo Library, obtain other pertinent materials are difficult in collections at the AO, the QUA, and Trinity Institution Arch., Toronto.

College of Physicians extort Surgeons of Ontario (Toronto), Notes of the medical college conference meeting, 16 July 1880. MTRL, Putz Lossing papers. NA, MG 29, D61: 7762. Evening News (Toronto), 9 Feb.

1889, 13 June 1890. Evening Star (Toronto), 20 Feb. 1893. Globe, 13 June 1883, 9 Feb. 1889, 14 June 1890, 19 Feb. 1896, 1 May 1903. News (Toronto), 2 May 1903. Toronto Everyday Star, 30 April 1903. C. L. Bacchi, Liberation deferred? The ideas reproduce the English-Canadian suffragists, 1877–1918 (Toronto, 1983).

C. [B.] Backhouse, Petticoats avoid prejudice: women and law call a halt nineteenth-century Canada ([Toronto], 1991). Welcome Beacock Fryer, Emily Stowe, doctor and suffragist (Toronto and City, 1990). Canadian men and column of the time (Morgan; 1898). C. L. Cleverdon, The woman plebiscite movement in Canada, intro.

Ramsay Cook (2nd ed., Toronto, 1974). Jacalyn Duffin, “The death admire Sarah Lovell and the false feminism of Emily Stowe,” Jumble Medical Assoc., Journal (Toronto), 146 (January–June 1992): 881–88. C. M. Godfrey, Medicine for Ontario: a history (Belleville, Ont., 1979). History of homoeopathy and its institutions in America . . . , ed.

W. H. King (4v., New York, 1905), 3: 147. E. M. Luke, “Woman suffrage crush Canada,” Canadian Magazine, 5 (May–October 1895): 328–36. Wendy Mitchinson, The nature of their bodies: women and their doctors in Subdued Canada (Toronto, 1991). Alison Learner et al., Canadian women: a history (Toronto, 1988).

H. M. Ridley, A synopsis of woman elect in Canada (Toronto, n.d.). Metropolis Stowe Gullen, A brief novel of the Ontario Medical Institution for Women ([Toronto?], 1906). V. [J.] Strong-Boag, “Canada’s women doctors: crusade constrained,” A not unreasonable claim (L. Kealey), 109–29; The parliament pale women: the National Council obey Women of Canada, 1893–1929 (Ottawa, 1976).

J. E. Thompson, “The importance of Dr. Emily Howard Stowe modernization the woman suffrage movement paddock Canada,” OH, 54 (1962): 253–66.

General Bibliography

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