Women in Medicine: The University's Radical Decision

In January of eighteen seventy, the University of Michigan Board of Regents passed a resolution stating that every Michigan resident had the right to the privileges of the university with no exclusion based on sex. One month later, Madelon Stockwell arrived as the first woman enrolled in any department of the university. Ann Arbor had never seen anything like it.

The medical school decision came that same year. In March of eighteen seventy, the regents were asked to allow women to study medicine alongside men. No major research university had done this before. The debate was fierce. Some faculty objected on grounds that have not aged well: they claimed women were constitutionally unsuited for the rigors of medical training, or that mixed lectures on anatomy would be improper. The regents approved coeducation in medicine in July of eighteen seventy, providing additional funds to compensate professors for teaching extra sessions.

That fall, eighteen women enrolled in the medical school. Five of them had trained together in Boston at the New England Hospital for Women and Children and arrived as a cohesive group of friends ready for a fight. Most of their courses were taught separately from men. But they were there, earning real degrees at a serious institution.

In March of eighteen seventy-one, Amanda Sanford became the university's first female medical graduate, completing her degree after just two terms because she arrived with prior credits. She did not wait for the world to catch up. She just finished.

The decision here rippled outward for generations. Other schools watched what Michigan did and calculated whether they could resist. Michigan's willingness to admit women to a major science-based medical program, not a separate school for women but the actual program, changed the argument permanently. It is easy to forget, standing near this medical complex today, that this was once considered a radical experiment whose outcome was genuinely uncertain.