Medical Women's International Association—Professional Association and Network for Jewish Refugees

In my presentation I will delineate how the Medical Women’s International Association (MWIA) provided a network to help German and Austrian Jewish medical women to build a new life in exile.

Originally, in 1919, the MWIA was founded as an apolitical professional association that had as its goal the gathering of international knowledge on women’s health and the empowerment of women in their medical career. After the National Socialists denied Jewish women the possibility to work in their home countries, the MWIA was confronted with an unforeseen task: Jewish women from Germany, Austria and later also from other European countries, asked the MWIA for political interference and individual support.

I will examine how the MWIA negotiated the possibility to interfere and to support their medical colleagues in need. I will show how the MWIA could draw on their existing personal and international networks and I will look at the interplay with other existing, international women’s organizations, such as the International Federation of University Women. To demonstrate this, I will trace the way into exile of some members and will follow their correspondence and travel from Berlin and Vienna to London and New York. In particular I will follow the head of the German branch, Elizabeth Hoffa.

My presentation draws on archive material of the MWIA that is located in the Archives and Special Collections for Women in Medicine, Drexel University, College of Medicine. In particular, I will make use of correspondence between individual physicians and the president and honorary secretary of the MWIA.