The decision to grant a degree to Bascom was probably influenced by another decision made six months earlier. The Trustees had accepted a bequest that enabled them to open a school of medicine on condition that it accept qualified women on an equal basis with men. The eagerness of Gilman and the Trustees to establish the school overrode their solicitous protection of young ladies. Weakness in the new University’s finances opened a window of opportunity for women. Johns Hopkins had left most of his fortune to the University in the form of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad stock. In 1886, the Railroad began a serious decline and, by 1888, no dividends were paid, leaving the University almost without income. Friends of the University raised an emergency fund, which kept Hopkins solvent but hardly allowed for the addition of a new school. On May 2, 1890, M. Carey Thomas and three other Trustees’ daughters—Mary Elizabeth Garrett, Mary Gwinn, and Elizabeth King—formed the Women’s Fund Committee to raise a sum of money sufficient to establish the School of Medicine. The Committee insisted not only on the admission of women but also on standards so high that they were to change the course of medical education in this country. Mary Elizabeth Garrett had tried a similar tactic in March 1887, offering the University $35,000 a year and necessary buildings to establish a technical school at Johns Hopkins’s Clifton estate, provided the University be open to both sexes in all its departments. The Trustees found this offer unpalatable and declined it not only because of their reluctance to admit women but also because of their resolve not to relocate to Clifton or to turn from pure to applied science. What the Women’s Fund Committee proposed ultimately proved more tempting. |
The Women’s Fund Committee set up fifteen regional committees, which included such noteworthy and influential women as Mrs. Benjamin Harrison, Mrs. Grover Cleveland, Dr. Emily Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Longfellow, Clara Barton, Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan; the list of Baltimore Committee members reads like a page out of the social register and includes the names of many wives and daughters of Hopkins faculty and benefactors. In less than a year the Women’s Fund Campaign had raised more than $100,000 toward the $500,000 needed to endow the School of Medicine. The fund grew, but fell short until December 22, 1892, when Mary Elizabeth Garrett gave the Trustees a surprise Christmas gift. She contributed the full $306,977 needed to bring the endowment to half a million dollars; this was in addition to her previous donation of $47,787. When the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine opened its doors on October 2, 1893, three of the eighteen students were women. One of the School’s earliest women students was perhaps one of its most famous—Gertrude Stein, who studied medicine at Hopkins from 1897 to 1902 but took no degree. |  |
