The Imagined City: Female Physicians and Their Role in Shaping the Political, Social, and Cultural Spaces of Progressive-Era Denver

At the 1887 meeting of the Colorado Medical Society, a committee formed to discuss the subject of female physicians and their potential recognition within the state-sanctioned association. At the meeting’s banquet dinner, the committee announced its conclusions with the following pronouncement: “All female physicians in Denver, who had been regularly educated in the science of medicine, are hereby invited to attend our meeting and to participate in the proceedings.”[1] Four years later the society admitted its first female physician, Dr. Mary Bates, and by 1902, 106 female physicians had registered their practice within the state. At the height of Colorado’s Progressive Era, not only could female physicians be found in every major hospital, but they also initiated several projects intended to carve out physical spaces within Denver in order to address, treat, and promote awareness of women’s issues.

This paper aims to explore how female physicians took part in shaping the physical, social, political, and cultural spaces of Denver, Colorado, a city whose maturation coincided with the rise of Progressivism and the state’s universal suffrage law. This simultaneity of events provided a unique environment for female physicians to take a lead role in imagining and then enacting Progressive medical policies within the city. Doctors such as Mary Bates and Minnie CT Love helped found many important medical institutions, while also working tirelessly to mold Denver into a modern city of medical treatment. 

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[1] Dr. Minnie CT Love, “History of the Women Practitioners of Colorado,” in Contribution to the Report of the Committee on History of Medicine (Colorado State Medical Society Annual Meeting, June 18-20, 1901), 147.

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