Women of Idenlea

The estate called Idenlea, near this site in suburban Philadelphia, was home to two generations of pioneering women. Doctor Hannah Longshore, born in eighteen nineteen, became one of the first women to practice medicine in Philadelphia. Her sister Doctor Jane Myers, born in eighteen thirty-one, built her own thriving medical career.

Hannah's daughter Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg, named after the abolitionist Lucretia Mott and born in eighteen forty-five, became a prominent voice in Philadelphia civic reform and women's suffrage. Together these three women worked across abolition, women's rights, medicine, and municipal government at a time when each of those fields was nearly closed to women entirely. Idenlea was not just a family home but a gathering place for the reform movements that reshaped Philadelphia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.