Women’s right to choose

Elizabeth Garret Anderson

On the Euston Road is a red brick building with striking scooped walls was founded by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. 

Originally the New Hospital for Women it was the first staffed by women and for women. Later women fought against its closure. 

Unable to enrol at Medical School, Elizabeth persisted, undertaking private tuition while working as a surgery nurse and found a way to gain accreditation.

She went on to notch up firsts – she was the first dean of a British medical school, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, the first female mayor and magistrate in Britain. 

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was a suffragist. Her memoir, written by her daughter Louisa, a suffragette, sets Wollstonecraft as a key influence, citing the lines from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

 ‘But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace; surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools, and chronicle small beer! No. Women might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses.’

Many years later, in the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital – its name since the founder’s death in 1917 – was threatened with closure. A militant campaign of occupations and publicity designed to save the hospital was undertaken. Action constituted the first hospital ‘ work-in’., with a 24 hour picket, maintaining services for three years under extraordinary conditions it won and the hospital remained open and providing medical care to women  until 2001, when it moved to a wing of the rebuilt UCH on Euston Road. One of the campaigners recently reminisced:

‘There was a lot going on. It was a funny period really. We were all sixty-eighteen. That is not to be forgotten. We all thought we could change the world. We were quite convinced. Actually, I’m still convinced – but it seems to be taking rather longer than we thought at the time.’ 

Professor Linda Clarke