Dr Emily Howard Stowe - First Woman Doctor in Canada:
1831-1903
Dr. Emily Howard Stowe was the first female doctor to practice in
Canada, and an activist for women's rights and suffrage. Emily’s public
struggle to achieve equality for women began in 1852, when she applied for
admission to Victoria College, Cobourg. Refused on the grounds that she was
female, she applied to the Normal School for Upper Canada, which Egerton
Ryerson had recently founded in Toronto. She entered in November 1853 and was
graduated with first-class honors in 1854. Hired as principal of a Brantford
public school, she was the first woman to be a principal of a public school in
Upper Canada. She taught there until her marriage in 1856.
She married John Stowe in 1856. In the next seven years she had 3
children, in the course of which her husband also developed tuberculosis, which
in turn developed his wife's interest in herbal remedies and homeopathic
medicine. Emily Howard Stowe then decided to become a doctor. Since no medical
school in Canada would accept a female even by the 1860s — Emily Stowe
earned her degree in the United States, graduating from the New York Medical
College for Women (a homeopathic medical school) in 1867, and returned to open
a practice in Toronto, Ontario without a license. She saved many children and
women. In 1870, the president of the Toronto School of Medicine granted special
permission to Stowe and fellow student Jenny Kidd Trout to attend classes,
though Stowe does not seem to have taken the exams for her license.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario granted Stowe a
licence to practice medicine on July 16, 1880, based on her past experience,
making Stowe the second female licensed physician in Canada, after Trout. Her
daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, was the first woman to earn a medical degree in
Canada. Emily Stowe was a prominent early suffragist, considered by some to be
the mother of the movement in Canada. In 1877 she founded the Toronto Women's
Literary Guild, a suffragist organization, and campaigned for professional,
educational and occupational opportunities for women. When the Dominion
Women’s Enfranchisement Association was founded in 1889, Emily became its
first president and remained president until her death.
