CHAPTER 1
One afternoon in 1859, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell returned to visit the first houseshe remembered living in as a child, in the city of Bristol, England. She foundthe house, still standing on Wilson Street, much smaller than she had rememberedit. And as she gazed around the high-ceilinged entryway, she suddenly seemed tosee herself much smaller too, herself as a young child. Above her in the hall—justthere—her own small childish face seemed to be peering wistfully over thebanister, and the memory of a scene from her earliest childhood suddenly rose uparound her.
All the others were downstairs in the dining room, talking and laughing andeating, while Mr. Burnet, a flamboyant Irishman from Cork, hilariously heldforth. Of all the visitors who came to dinner at the Blackwell house—Christianmissionaries like himself, philanthropists, social reformers, travelersfreighted with tales—Mr. Burnet was the most compelling storyteller, the mostuproarious commentator on the world and his own adventures in it. He had theIrish gift of gab. The little girl Elizabeth longed to listen to him, perchedbeside her older sisters at the children's table where they sat on festiveoccasions like this, enchanted witnesses to other people's lives out in thegreat wide world beyond the familiar house and the sugar refinery attached to itthat constituted the universe they knew. But in her exile upstairs, allElizabeth could hear was a distant burst of merriment each time the servantsopened the dining room door to clear away the dishes or to carry in the nextcourse.
She was being punished that evening for some sin, some childish piece ofmisbehavior. Her name had been written carefully into The Black Book carriedeverywhere by her Aunt Bar, who kept track of the children's failings anddetermined the appropriate punishment. She had sentenced Elizabeth to exclusionfrom tonight's party. Upstairs it was lonely—dark and silent except for theoccasional scrabbling of night creatures under the eaves. It hurt to be shutout, it was enraging; and Elizabeth was filled with guilt at having been wickedenough to get her name into The Black Book. It would not happen again, shevowed.
Forty years later, standing in the familiar entryway, Elizabeth could notremember the specific mischief for which she had been blamed, but she wouldalways remember the punishment. Nor would she forget how unquestioningly she hadaccepted it. Aunt Bar was a grown-up; she must be right: "I always accepted,without thought of resistance the decrees of my superiors," Elizabeth wroteyears later. "The fact that those in authority were capable of injustice orstupidity was a perception of later growth."
During that same visit to the house on Wilson Street, as she stood pondering theimage of herself as a tiny child excluded, something truly startling happened.She heard the front door latch lift, clicking in the lock. She turned. Suddenly,there stood Papa Blackwell—who had been dead for many years—smiling directly ather, in the white flannel suit he used to wear during the hottest summer monthswhen he went to work in his sugar house. And then he was gone. He seemed toleave behind the sweet and cloying scent of sugarcane.
Elizabeth Blackwell first arrived in Bristol on February 3, 1821. She was thefourth baby born to Hannah and Samuel Blackwell, and she was so puny that herparents doubted she would live. They had lost a baby son the year before, andnow they watched this new baby daughter's struggle. They feared for her, such atiny helpless thing. She seemed about to die.
But Elizabeth survived. She had been given her life, however tenuously, and shetook hold of it and held on tight.
At the end of many days of watchfulness, when finally they felt sure that shehad really come to stay, Hannah and Samuel called her two older sisters into thebedroom. One at a time, one rung at a time, five-year-old Anna and then three-year-oldMarian clambered up the mahogany ladder at the side of HannahBlackwell's high canopied bed and stared at their new sister. They laughed. Theysaid her name. They welcomed her.
From the very first day, the runt of the litter never grew taller than five footone. As a child, Elizabeth looked much more frail and vulnerable than hersiblings. Her two older sisters, like their dark, high-spirited mother, werecurly-haired brunettes, whereas Elizabeth took after her father, gray-eyed andsomewhat grave, her blond hair straight and pale almost to invisibility. Fromthe very first, "Little Shy," as her father quickly nicknamed her, was Papa'schild. Elizabeth resembled him in more than simply physical ways. From him shetook her stern perfectionism and her straight-faced wit and her obstinacy. Asthe Blackwell family grew and she came to have six younger siblings as well astwo older sisters, Elizabeth proved to be more stubborn than all the rest ofthem put together, making up in sheer tenacity what she lacked in size. From thebeginning, Little Shy sank her teeth so deeply and so doggedly into whatever itwas she wanted that no one could shake her loose.
Her sisters and her brothers knew this about her. If there was something shecouldn't do—a game she did not play as well as her brothers, a book that was toohard for her, a problem in arithmetic she could not solve—she kept on tryingtill she mastered it. The family knew it took her longer to get dressed thaneverybody else because she was so meticulous. And in those days there was somuch for girls to get dressed in: in summertime, flowery frocks with puffsleeves tied with matching ribbons; in wintertime, dark worsted dresses wornbeneath a pelisse; all this over pantalets and petticoats; and, on her feet,corked clogs or noisy wood-soled shoes or, if there was company coming, redslippers with crisscross ribbons.
Her family saw how her perfectionism was turned inward also. It wasn't just theoutside world she wished to conquer, but the world within her. Little Shy wasalways testing herself, trying to strengthen herself, "fighting the devil," asshe called it. In imitation of the saints, she slept on the floor of her room,until her parents made her stop. She fasted during meals. When she had to givethis up because it made her faint at the dinner table, she consented to eat, butturned down all her favorite foods. She hated being sick; it made her feel thather body was in control of her. Once when she was suffering from severe chillsand fever, she refused to go to bed and tried to cure herself by walking themoff (which didn't work). She seemed, even as a very little girl, to beperpetually honing her will. One day when she was only six years old, trailingafter her two older sisters as they discussed what they wanted to be when theygrew up, Elizabeth interjected: "I don't know what I'm going to be, but it willbe something hard."
This purposeful, skinny child set her own uncompromising standards very early,scrambling along on the edge of other people's conversations, just the slightestbit excluded. She was, after all, the youngest of the three oldest Blackwellgirls. She was always grouped with her two older sisters, but she was always, bydefinition, the third wheel—a six year old trying to keep up with a nine yearold and an eleven year old. It meant she must aim higher. It reinforced the factthat she was somehow different, odd girl out—an impression underscored by thefact that the brother who was born right before her died, and the brother whowas born right after her died. In later years, she spoke of her brothers andsisters as having come "all in twos": Anna and Marian, Samuel and Henry, Emilyand Ellen, Howard and George. Elizabeth saw herself as the cheese who stoodalone, bracketed on either side by her dead brothers, separated from the rest ofher family by just that much space, time, and death. A loner.
In fact, her mother gave birth thirteen times; two other children died ininfancy as well. Elizabeth said later that she could scarcely remember a momentduring her childhood when Mama was not either expecting or nursing a baby. Butif this maternal image led to Elizabeth's future reverence for motherhood, asshe said it did, the grown-up to whom she felt closest during all these crowdedyears was Papa. How she loved him. He made her laugh. He expected a great dealof her—as much as she herself did—and he was strict in bringing up his children,as strict as his three unmarried sisters who lived with the family. If he wastough, however, Samuel Blackwell also had a sense of humor, especially whenturning down what he considered to be extravagant requests from his children.These they would submit to him in writing, and he would write back his reply("No!") in the form of a verse.
One day, Elizabeth and her two older sisters had submitted a petition to him,asking that they be allowed to climb out on the roof so that they could seefarther with Anna's new telescope. Her father responded:
Anna, Bessie, and Polly,
Your request is mere folly
The leads are too high
For those who can't fly
If I let you go there,
I suppose your next prayer
Will be for a hop
To the chimney top!
So I charge you three misses,
Not to show your phizes
On parapet wall, or chimney so tall,
But to keep on the earth,
The place of your birth.
"Even so," says Papa. "Amen," says Mama.
"Be it so," says Aunt Bar.
Another time, when a cousin was to stay overnight, the three oldest Blackwellgirls requested that all four of them be allowed to sleep in the enormous bed inthe guest room. This was Papa's answer:
If you four little girls were together to lie,
I fear you'd resemble the pigs in their sty!
Such groaning! Such grunting! Such sprawling about!
I could not allow such confusion and rout!!!!!
So this is my judgment:—'tis wisdom you'll own,
Two beds for four girls are far better than one!
His poetry, his warmth, his humor made Papa seem a "beneficent Providence" toLittle Shy. She thought of him as a kind of god: witty, loving—and superhumanlydemanding. His expectations of his family equaled his expectations of the restof humanity. He dreamed of the possibility of a better world. He believed (aswould his children after him) in the perfectibility of the human race. Whilethis is admirable and inspiring, it is not always easy to live with. Elizabeth'ssister Anna characterized him as "excellent, most generous and affectionate,"but spoke too of his "coldness of manner and austerity of ideas."
Samuel and his wife, Hannah, were strict Methodists. They believed that you wereresponsible, always, for your every action in this world. Each morning Samuelgathered his family and servants together for what Anna called a "horrid"reading of chapters from the Bible, followed by endless prayers, "the infliction[being] made before breakfast." Unlike Anna, Elizabeth enjoyed these dailyprayer sessions, as she enjoyed Sundays, when the whole family attended morningand afternoon services at Bridge Street Chapel and spent the rest of the daylearning hymns and biblical passages. Sometimes she even got to accompany Papa,who was a lay preacher, as he traveled through the countryside, deliveringsermons.
The biggest social event in the Blackwell family calendar was missionary week,mid-May of every year, when everyone went to chapel every day, supplied withvast picnic lunches. They spent long hours listening, fascinated, to the exoticstories brought back to Bristol by returning missionaries.
Theirs was a household steeped in religion, and with it, hand-in-hand, went abelief in social reform. The Blackwells wanted to change the world. Papa workedfor more democratic voting laws at a time and in a country where it was not onlywomen but also the majority of men who were not allowed to vote. Only rich andprivileged males had suffrage. He supported educational reform and equal rightsfor women. He preached temperance (total abstinence from drinking), and he wasantislavery, despite the fact that he was a sugar refiner and both his city andhis business were deeply intertwined with the slave trade.
Until 1807, when buying and selling slaves was outlawed in England, Bristol wasa major slave-trading port, and in the ensuing years many of Samuel's colleaguescontinued to smuggle slaves to the colonies. There, they picked the sugarcanethat was shipped to England to be refined into sugar. Samuel wrestledincreasingly with the painful contradiction that he both opposed slavery anddepended on it, a contradiction most clearly expressed by his own children theyear they voluntarily gave up eating sugar (which paid their bills) since it wasa "slave product."
Elizabeth was marked for life by her father's struggle and by her early exposureto evangelical Christianity and the social reform movement. The very sameauthority figure who ruled her childhood like a "beneficent Providence" alsotaught her to question authority, to rebel; and it was from Papa, too, that shelearned the high cost of rebellion.
The Blackwells were not in danger of being jailed or killed for their beliefs,as were their forerunners, the Puritans. But their view of the world—thatslavery was wrong and men and women might live as equals—was definitely aminority view, and especially as religious Dissenters, they were second-classcitizens. In England during the 1820s, Dissenters were not permitted to hold thehighest government offices. They could not work as doctors, lawyers, orprofessors. They were not allowed to study at British universities. They couldnot attend most lower schools. This was part of the reason why Elizabeth and herbrothers and sisters did not go to school with other children, but studiedinstead with each other at home. As it happens, they got a better education thatway, for Papa was particular about the governesses and tutors he employed. Butthe children's education, like their parents' politics and religion, isolatedthem from others.
The Blackwell family formed its own vigorous but nevertheless cut-off community.They remained somewhat apart, always partially turned in upon themselves,existing on the margins, separate.
Elizabeth spent the earliest years of her childhood in the city of Bristol, inthe house on Wilson Street next door to Papa's refinery. Then, when the refinerywas accidentally burned to the ground, as happened often in the sugar business,the family moved to a rambling house on Nelson Street. There, Papa's newrefinery stood just across a walled-in courtyard. Each day, after their lessons,the children would go for at least one long walk. The Blackwells believed thatknowledge of the natural world and vigorous physical exercise (as vigorous asthe constricting clothing of the day would allow) were a crucial part of theirchildren's education, a belief that must have struck their more conventionalneighbors as just another piece of Blackwell craziness, especially in relationto the girls. It was not considered proper—or healthy—for girl children of theirclass to move too much.
Elizabeth dreamily wrote of "the daily walks with our governess into the lovelyenvirons of the then small town. We became familiar with St. Vincent's Rocks andthe Hot Wells, with Clifton Down and Leigh Woods, which were not built on then.The Suspension Bridge across the Avon was a thing of the future.... Inanother direction, Mother Pugsley's field, with its healing spring, leading outof Kingsdown Parade, was a favourite walk—for passing down the fine avenue ofelms we stood at the great iron gates of Sir Richard Vaughan's place, to admirethe peacocks, and then passed up the lane towards Redland, where violets grew onthe grassy banks and natural curiosities could be collected. All theseneighborhoods were delightfully free and open ..."
Freedom and openness—and then the return home to the house next door to afactory, and a pungent factory, at that. The sticky, sickly, cloying smell ofsugarcane floated on the air the Blackwells breathed, making its way past thelilac and white jessamine that Hannah had planted in the courtyard. Some daysthe whole house smelled of cane.
Papa's factory was only one of many to spring up in those years when theindustrial revolution was getting under way, shifting huge numbers of peoplefrom the country to the city. Men and women who might have been skilledcraftspeople or farmers in earlier generations now became unskilled workers inindustries like sugar refining. They crowded into cities to work, or to starve.The middle class—the factory owners—grew by leaps and bounds. So did the poor.
In Bristol in the 1830s, more than six hundred paupers lived in the poorhouse.There, fifty-eight girls shared ten beds, and eighteen beds accommodated seventyboys. The "poor laws" forced thousands of destitute parents to give up theirsmall children, selling them into work-gangs that labored for less than a livingwage or for no wage at all. Children as young as six worked. Women and girlswere used in the coal mines as mules, hooked to coal carts that they dragged onhands and knees through passageways too narrow for anyone else to get through.Workers were at the mercy of their employers, who were supposed to treat themwell—so the theory went—because it was in the employers' own best interest to doso.
