elizabeth Blackwell essays

elizabeth Blackwell essays Elizabeth Blackwells Legacy: Advancements in Medicine and Womens Rights Elizabeth Blackwell has contributed greatly to American society by expanding womens rights through her courage and determination to become the first woman doctor in America. In the mid and late 1800s, there werent many choices for women in the professions. Women mostly became housewives or worked in factories, and they only dreamed of becoming doctors, but Elizabeth Blackwell changed it all. Blackwell was accepted to Geneva College in New York because the medical students there had thought her application was a joke from a rival school. However, she soon gained her peers respect by her competence and hard work. After she graduated, she wanted it to make it possible for others to become doctors as she had. As a result, Elizabeth Blackwell used her writings to support her ideas that women are equal if not superior to men, and that they should be allowed to practice medicine. Blackwell used both religious and historical allusions in one of her books, The Laws of Life with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls, to illustrate how women are equal to men. In the Greek Myth, Athena is the goddess of agriculture and wisdom. Blackwell argues: when agriculture and wisdom were of such great importance, why would men name a woman as a symbol of these coveted concepts? Blackwell writes, Her mother was the wisest, her father the most powerful...she was the protectress of sate and of social institutions, and of all that gives t society its highest prosperity...maintained law and justice...she was the protectress of the defences of the state... (Blackwell 10). Men created a woman in the image of all these designations, and they worship her as she is part of a great deity, so then men should treat the women beside them at least as their equals. Elizabeth Blackwell further proves that women are equal to men th...