In 1887, the still preteen Johns Hopkins University
and its hospital sibling faced dire prospects.
Due to the collapse of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad stock
dividend, the university had lost nearly 75
percent of its financial holdings overnight. Income from
its B&O Railroad stock, which founder Johns
Hopkins had expected would cover operating costs, had dried
up at a time when the university — opened
in 1876 — was just getting started, and the
13-building Johns Hopkins Hospital was still under
construction.
In this harsh economic climate, plans for a modern
School of Medicine, a vision of the
university's founder that was to be opened simultaneously
with the hospital, had to be put on hold.
Mary Elizabeth Garrett found this unacceptable.
The youngest child and only daughter of B&O Railroad
mogul John Work Garrett — Johns
Hopkins' protege — the 34-year-old Mary shared her
father's commitment to realizing Hopkins' dream
of a medical school. Since social convention prohibited her
from following in her father's footsteps in
business, Garrett dedicated herself to promoting women's
rights, using her status and massive wealth
to help achieve her lofty goals.
The life and times of this pioneering woman are
detailed in the new book Mary Elizabeth
Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age,
published by the Johns
Hopkins University Press
and launched last Wednesday at an event at Evergreen
Museum & Library, a former Garrett family
home.
The book's author, Kathleen Waters Sander, paints a
rich portrait of a shy but determined
woman — and lover of cats — who bucked
convention at every turn and left behind a legacy that
lives on
today.
In May 1890, Garrett and four other women — M.
Carey Thomas, Mary Gwinn, Elizabeth King and
Julia Rogers — organized the Women's Medical School
Fund Committee to raise what would be the
$500,000 needed to open the school. Women in Boston,
Philadelphia, Washington, New York, San
Francisco and other cities eventually joined with the five
Baltimore women, all unmarried, wealthy,
well-educated and devoted to the new feminist movement.
The committee would raise $100,000, and in December
1892 Garrett offered more than
$350,000 of her own funds to complete the endowment. She
made several stipulations to the gift:
that women be admitted on the same terms as men, the school
would be graduate level, and students
would have a background in the sciences and be proficient
in French and German. She also insisted
that a building be erected to memorialize women's national
efforts to elevate medical standards in the
United States.
The Johns Hopkins trustees and President Daniel Coit
Gilman were at first reluctant to accept
the demands but eventually realized that this was an offer
they couldn't afford to refuse.
The money the women raised enabled the School of
Medicine to open and to enroll its first class
in October 1893. The gift also ushered in the modern
standards of American medicine and
philanthropy.
"Her actions had great ripple effects," Sander said.
"First, it gets women in the door of medical
schools on a national level, as other schools soon follow
suit. She also changed medical philanthropy in
general. Other major philanthropists of the day —
John D. Rockefeller Jr., George Eastman and others-
-begin to sit up and take notice of the Johns Hopkins model
of medicine. Up until that point, there had
been little interest in medicine as it was only at the
initial stages of promising great cures."
The book's 360 pages recount Garrett's life and
re-examine the great social and political
movements of the age, through the Civil War to the early
20th century.
Believing that advanced education was the key to
women's betterment, in 1885 Garrett also
helped found and sustain the Bryn Mawr School, the
prestigious girl's preparatory school in Baltimore.
Her philanthropic gifts to Bryn Mawr College at the
turn of the 20th century helped transform
the modest Quaker school into a renowned women's
college.
Garrett, a great supporter of women's suffrage, worked
tirelessly throughout her life to gain
equal rights for women.
Sander, the author of The Business of Charity: The
Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900
(University of Illinois Press, 1998), received her PhD in
American studies from the University of
Maryland. She has spent most of her professional career in
development and in the 1990s was director
of development for the Department of Medicine at Johns
Hopkins.
Sander said that part of the inspiration for the book,
which she began researching in 1998, was
the small Garrett exhibit she passed by during her days on
the East Baltimore campus. The collection
of papers, photos and old bricks was all that remained of
the Women's Fund Memorial Building, the
initial home for the School of Medicine that was torn down
in 1979 to make way for the Preclinical
Teaching Building.
"I had determined back then that I was going to tell
her story," she said. "I was also very
interested in the history of women's philanthropy and kept
coming across her name when I was working
on The Business of Charity. I thought her story was
just compelling and worth telling. I also thought
that through her story I could connect the dots on the
relationships between other philanthropists in
Baltimore at the time."
Robert J. Brugger, history/regional book editor at the
JHU Press, said that Sander's portrait
of this pioneering philanthropist is the first to recognize
Garrett and her contributions to equality in
America.
"So little has been written of her, but she is one of
those late-19th-century figures whose
shadow remains quite recognizable," Brugger said. "This
book was a natural fit for us, as it pulls
together the history of Baltimore, philanthropy and Johns
Hopkins Medicine. It also offers up a
glimpse, by proxy, of Johns Hopkins the man, who we know
very little about due to the fact that he
destroyed nearly all of his personal papers."
Sander said that she has always respected Garrett, but
the book allowed her to grow quite fond
of her subject.
"I see her as a very kind, brilliant person who did
all these great things but wanted everyone
else to take credit," she said. "She never wanted her name
on anything. She wanted things to happen,
but not be in the spotlight. I really admired that trait
about her."
The book, $45, is available at major bookstores and
through the JHU Press Web site,
www.press.jhu.edu.