By Elliott Nace | Staff Writer
Four panelists discussed the mistreatment of Black women in the Antebellum South and the relationship between women’s health and religious institutions at a roundtable event hosted by the history department.
The event, hosted Wednesday evening, sought to celebrate Women’s History Month and add academic context to a variety of key events in the history of women’s rights.
Dr. Andrea Turpin, associate professor and graduate program director of history, said the format of the roundtable fit well with this year’s Women’s History Month.
“The theme of Women’s History Month this year is actually education — women having access to and making a difference in education — so some things in history do get better,” Turpin said.
Dr. Steven Jug, lecturer in history and modern languages and cultures, focused his lecture on the advancement of women as practitioners of medicine during the Crimean War in the 19th century. He noted that women’s presence as medics began to change their roles within fields formerly dominated by men.
“There’s the element of novelty, the extent to which this is not simply women working with ideas of feminine essence that’s compatible with being nurturing, with being motherly and providing care, but of course, [also] in an unambiguously military context,” Jug said.
According to Turpin, whose lecture analyzed historical examples of the gradual advancement of women’s education, the work of early advocates for female education such as Catharine Beecher necessarily worked off the challenging landscape of 19th-century academia.
“[Beecher] tried to make space for women teachers to have a career that sort of matched men’s careers, but that meant that she was paying them more, so not as many women could afford to go get higher education at those schools,” she said.
Jug explained that institutional adversity, when brought to bear during extraordinary circumstances, helped reveal the equal value brought by women to the workforce.
“That element, I think, is more illuminating … what’s available to [women], what a combination of women’s agency, women’s activism and then crisis makes possible,” he said.
Although the advancement of female roles took time in a variety of fields, Turpin said that each step still carried great importance. She mentioned Mary Lyon, who founded what is now known as Mount Holyoke College, and how her forward trajectory toward equality still warrants merit in spite of her indifference to abolitionism.
“It was the best that anyone had ever offered women at that time,” Turpin said. “The reason Mary Lyon founded this was because she was a Christian who wanted women to have a work in spreading the Christian message as well as men … She wanted to make that opportunity available to as many women as possible, including poor women.”
Jug said that the Crimean War ultimately redefined what it meant for a woman to be a medic.
“It’s not about a sort of palliative care, simply dealing with people’s pain and comforting them as they probably die, right?” Jug said. “So the element here is, there’s a little bit of that with the nurturing, but with the actual medical training you can kind of fast forward a bit.”
Jug then commented on the result of including women in the field of medicine, and that countries grew to allow women to be medics following the demands of wartime.
“Crises can be both in the sense of a war, of an invasion or simply that of something disruptive,” he said. “All these sorts of things that are part of the process along the way [indicate] that nursing is a big part of a sort of relative success or by survival rates going up, essentially. And the one country that doesn’t do that has by far the worst outcomes.”
According to Turpin, the inclusion of women into academic fields, whether incentivized through crisis or due to an ever-growing need for college-educated individuals, reflects well upon the direction taken by universities of the modern day.
“I think one of the strengths of the United States today is that there are a variety of different types of institutions for higher education that are accessible to people who can make the most of their gifts and give back to the world with them,” Turpin said.
