Emily Stowe: Doctor and Suffragist

Emily Stowe was a pioneer in two fields: as a woman doctor, and as a crusader for women's rights. The first Canadian woman to become a medical doctor, she was instrumental in establishing the Ontario Medical College for Women. She steered her own course more in the direction of acquiring political power than towards any contribution to expanding medical knowledge, yet the role of doctor was vital to Emily, and was the cause that launched her into the struggle for women's rights. For Emily Stowe, a Canadian studying in the United States, enfranchisement, female education, and temperance were burning issues. She came to see that the first of these was the key to achieving the other two. Ultimately Emily Stowe the suffragist came to overshadow Emily Stowe the doctor. This biography places Stowe against a backdrop of the major social issues of Victorian Canada, and the conditions of practising medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century.