Martha May Eliot & Ethel Collins Dunham
Hello and welcome back to Queer STEM History, a podcast where we're exploring the lives of and achievements of queer scientists throughout the ages. I'm one of your hosts, Len, and I use they/ them pronouns. And I'm your other host Lauren, and I use she/her pronouns.
Today you’re in for a treat because we’re going to explore not one queer scientist, but two…. In our historic lesbian power couple spectacular!
That’s right, today we are going to do a deep dive into the lives of Martha May Eliot and Ethel Collins Dunham, who both made a huge impact on the field of medicine and public health, at a time when it was very difficult to have a professional career as a woman. While Eliot and Dunham would both be worthy of an individual podcast, their shared life as a couple for almost 60 years was very closely connected to their careers so a combined retelling is definitely appropriate.
Some highlights of their careers include being among the first women to be professors in medicine at Yale and Harvard, influential positions in government health agencies as well as having a really important role in the formation and early days of international organisations like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. Each was also accorded public honours for leadership in pediatrics, child welfare, and public health, and on most occasions were the first woman to receive that particular honour. In fact, both women received the John Howland Medal, the highest honour given by the American Pediatric Society and hence were the first and second women to receive this award. They are serious couple goals!
But let's go back to how they first met and how their relationship informed their joint careers in public health.
Martha May Elliot and Ethel Collins Dunham met in 1910 at Bryn Mawr College. Martha was originally enrolled at Radcliffe College, but she left in her second year to go to Bryn Mawr to follow a girl she had a romantic friendship with in high school. (OOOH)The romance that took her to Bryn Mawr was shortlived, but she met the 26-year-old freshman Ethel Dunham who also had ambitions to go into medicine. From 1910 to Ethel’s death in 1969 the two women were inseparable. Martha graduated from Bryn Mawr a year earlier than Ethel and waited a year so they could enrol in medical school together.
In 1914, they entered medical school together at Johns Hopkins. Graduating very high in her medical school class, Martha Eliot was guaranteed an internship at Johns Hopkins, but when Ethel's application was rejected. She turned it down writing to her mother “Part of my reason for my lack of enthusiasm was because Ethel didn’t get an appointment. I was frightfully disappointed.” Martha instead took an internship at a hospital in Boston and became the first woman doctor there. But then a wartime shortage in men opened up more places at Johns Hopkins and Ethel was given a residency there. Ethel became the John Hopkins pediatrics department’s first female intern, and the department was certainly not ready for two women. Despite visits, the year's separation was difficult for them. The next year, they again found coordination of opportunities impossible, with Martha going to a pediatrics residency at St Louis Children's Hospital and Dunham to New Haven Hospital.
For the following year, Martha decided to forgo a second year in St Louis to move to Boston, feeling that she could find ways to entice Ethel there. She started a private practice, and lots of male doctors were very frustrated with her because her prices were too low – she already had very strong interest and desire for social medicine. social medicine is the study of understanding how social and economic conditions impact health, disease and the practice of medicine and fostering conditions in which this understanding can lead to a healthier society
In 1919 Martha was invited to be the first resident doctor at Yale. Ethel joined her at Yale as one of the first female instructors at the Yale School of Medicine in 1920. They were finally reunited! The only drawback was that Martha was required to live in the university hospital.” however she managed to take many meals and sleep often in Ethel's apartment.
Martha was very keen to live with Ethel and this greatly influenced the trajectory of her career. She wrote in 1922 ‘whether I shall stay on at hospital is not yet settled I am contemplating taking on some work with rickets which would let me live outside.”
The next year, when they found a house to share, Eliot wrote her mother about what she called “Excitement no. 1” (the little house we were looking at, we will probably move in) and “Excitement no. 2” (funding for her research). In this letter to her mother Eliot “does not hide the fact that although the new house has two bedrooms, she and Ethel sleep in the same room.”
Her research on the prevention of rickets among poor children was revolutionary for its day. American Journal of Public Health in 1971 said “It is difficult to appreciate the courage and imagination required in such studies 50 years ago. There was little tradition for this kind of investigation she had to develop her designs almost from scratch. Her work in social medicine became a model for later researchers. This rickets study was administered by US CHildrens Bureau, and they were so impressed that she was named the Director of the Child Hygiene Division of the Children's bureau in 1924.
However, that same year Ethel became the first female professor at Yale University School of Medicine. In a heterosexual marriage at the time there is no way that both could have continued to follow their careers, but Martha and Ethel continued to power through with working arrangements that seem very modern. Martha arranged to only go to Washington once a month and to work remotely from Yale so she could continue teaching, her rickets study and living with Ethel in their little cottage with a flourishing garden as Martha described it in a letter home to her mum.
Ethel and Martha stayed at Yale together until 1935 when Martha became the assistant chief of Children’s Bureau and had to be in Washington fulltime. However, they continued to make their careers run parallel, and that same year Ethel was named the Director of Child Development research in the Children’s Bureau in Washington as well.
They continued to achieve great successes over the rest of their career that we will quickly describe here:
Martha’s research interest was the interrelationship of child health and socioeconomic factors and she spent most of her later career working for better medical services for children of low income families. She was the Chief architect of child health provisions in 1935 social security act which mandated that every state establish child health services. She was invited to lecture at Harvard in the 1930’s, even though she was refused entry to their medical school for being a woman earlier. At that time they still wouldn’t give degrees to women, and it was the protest and pressure Eliot exerted that made it relent and give women degrees in public health.
In 1946 she was vice chair of US delegation to the International Health Conference and on behalf of US signed constitution that established the World Health Organisation - only woman to sign the WHO’s constitution. Martha was also active in formation of UNICEF, in 1947 she travelled with UNICEF to Europe to study how to address medical needs of children in war torn countries. In 1949-1951 she was the assistant director for the WHO in Geneva, played a major role in setting up organization.
Ethel focused on premature babies and newborns, becoming chief of child development at the Children's Bureau in 1935. She established national standards for the hospital care of newborn children, and expanded the scope of health care for young children by monitoring their progress in regular home visits by Children's Bureau staff. The results of her studies shaped health policies and practices around the world. From 1949 to 1951 she studied the problem of premature birth with an international team of experts for the World Health Organization in Geneva – note at the same time that Martha was also working for the World Health Organisation.
Each was awarded public honors for leadership in pediatrics, child welfare, and public health. In 1948, Eliot was the first woman elected president of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and she was the first woman to be honored with the APHA's most prestigious annual award. Both women the highest honor given by the American Pediatric Society (Dunham in 1957 and Eliot in 1967), the first and second women to receive this award. In 1964, the APHA honored Eliot by establishing the Martha May Eliot Award for outstanding service to maternal and child health.
From their reunion at Yale in 1920, Dunham and Eliot lived together for the rest of their lives, except for temporary separations. During those separations they wrote to each other tenderly: “Dearest, it was hard to say goodbye and I shall miss you terribly,” “I miss you my darling.” Their partnership seems to have been generally accepted by their community, as such “Boston marriages”—women’s romantic partnerships—sometimes were at the time.
However they faced some aggressive sexist and homophobic criticism throughout their career. For example, Senator James Reed of Missouri, mocked Dunham and Eliot and other lesbians working at the Children’s Bureau as “female celibates . . . too refined to have a husband,” his speech provoked repeated outbreaks of laughter when he proclaimed that “it seems to be the established doctrine of the bureau that the only people capable of caring for babies and mothers of babies are ladies who have never had babies.” He called for a “committee of mothers to take charge of the old maids and teach them how to acquire a husband and have babies of their own.”
However given that at the time less than 30% of women in medicine were married – there were probably lots of lesbians in the bureau because heterosexual women would usually gave up their careers as expected when they were married or never have study medicine to begin with because it was seen as incompatible with being a wife or mother.
However societal judgements did not stop Matha and Ethel from having a successful and happy life. Martha’s lesbianism was instrumental in helping her realise great passion of her life as a doctor. Her relationship with Ethel made her brilliant career not only possible but necessary.
Their domestic satisfaction crept constantly into Martha's letters back home: "E. keeps me out doors which is great. This P.M. we are going canoeing. Tonight we are having supper here - oyster omelet, a concoction of Ethel's - and apple sauce and toast and nutbread." Their partnership nourished and sustained them through their entire adult lives. In the 1970s, during Martha's travels for WHO, they wrote day after day: "Dearest, it was hard to say goodbye and I shall miss you terribly.. Ever and ever so much love, my darling"; "How I count the time until you do arrive. I miss you my darling".
So many of their achievements helped improve may lives for babies and mothers, so this week's Queer scientist bucket list is to do something that helps change the world for the better.
Martha May Eliot and Ethel Collins Dunham were together an extraordinary couple who worked tirelessly throughout their careers to improve public health care for children through their university research and teaching, advocacy and leadership roles in health agencies. Their obituaries did not mention their almost 60 year relationship, which seems like an error when this partnership intersected with their professional lives in so many ways.
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