Louella McCarthy | Filtered Images: Visions of 'Pioneering' Women Doctors in Twentieth-Century Australia | Health and History, 8.2

Filtered Images: Visions of 'Pioneering' Women Doctors in Twentieth-Century Australia

Louella McCarthy

This article focuses on the historical representations of women in medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using the film Charlene Does Med at Uni (1977), made by Australian film maker Margot Oliver, it examines the historiographical traditions that helped inform this film's construction. In doing so, the preoccupations shared by both first- and second-wave feminists in their conceptualisations of 'women's emancipation' are identified. The article argues that by analysing why medicine has been considered an important and persistent component of feminists' political campaigns since the latenineteenth century, we can identify the wider political issues involved. Themes addressed here include women's access to higher education and the professions, and in particular, the continued insistence on women's right to bodily integrity.

Exploring the use of history in film and film's role in our understandings of the past is a vast field. Within the subgenre of the history of medicine, the range of themes is diverse. One result of this work has been to identify the importance of films in constructing or reinforcing ideas about the history of the medical profession, as well as our understanding of medical history more generally. Certainly, the 'miracles of modern medicine' and prominent medical practitioners have held a firm grip on film makers' imaginations for some time. ¹ Equally, the medical profession's interest in film dates back almost to the birth of film itself. The potential clinical applications of film, according to T. Hugh Crawford, were grasped early by nineteenth-century physiologists among others, as was the technological interchangeability of the two domains. Étienne-Jules Marey 'whose "photographic gun" was an immediate technological precursor to the cinema camera,' and of course the Lumière brothers themselves, who 'used their device [the 'cinematographe'] to study human movement.' ² Another application most familiar to modern audiences is in the field of public health, where vast quantities of educational material have been produced on film. The American scholar Martin S. Pernick, for example, unearthed over 1300 films specifically on 'health topics for lay audiences' that were made in the United States between 1897 and 1928: an astonishing output. ³ Scholars working in medical history recognised this trend early on. It was a phenomenon identified and analysed by one of the founders of the scholarly study of the history of medicine, Richard Shryock, just after World War II, as Susan Lederer, another scholar working in the field, recently reminded us. ⁴

Eschewing the sometimes vehement controversies surrounding this medium, often centring on a film's 'historical accuracy,' scholars have preferred instead to undertake innovative readings of the meanings encoded in a film's construction. An excellent example is that provided by Pernick's analysis of an early silent film, The Black Stork (originally made in 1915) and its problematic 'hero,' the real-life surgeon Dr. Haiselden, who performed and publicly championed the role of doctors in killing disabled newborns (and who starred in the film). Moving through the film's layers of meaning, Pernick investigates medical attitudes towards disability, euthanasia, and eugenics. ⁵ The contemporary ramifications of this work for debates surrounding prenatal testing and pre-implantation genetic diagnostics are acute. ⁶ Equally, the work underscores the longevity of the confusion and debate surrounding such concepts as 'quality of life.'

Alongside this conception both of films and film makers as conduits and shapers of 'public opinion,' however, is their role as interpreters of historical events. Several high-profile debates have been sparked by this form of film making, with Oliver Stone representing perhaps the most public claim for the cinematographer's right to 'reinterpret' history. From this perspective film's power as a tool in political debates is widely recognised. This article examines one example of a film with an acute historical sensibility—one which takes as its focus that singular phenomenon, the 'lady doctor' but does so in order to address wider social, political, and historiographical issues.

The film in question is titled Charlene Does Med at Uni. It was written and directed by the Australian woman film maker Margot Oliver in 1977. ⁷ Created as part of a series on health by the Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative, Charlene takes a key feminist concern of unwanted pregnancy as its core theme. The means it uses to address this issue raise a number of interesting issues for historians.

The film's central character, Charlene, is an undergraduate medical student at an Australian university of the 1970s. As the film runs for just over twenty-five minutes, there is no wasted space. The summary provided with the film gives an excellent overview of its intent:

Opening with a brief survey of the history of women in European medicine, the film includes documentary material on the first intake of women medical students at Melbourne University and the fate of the lone woman who first enrolled in medicine at Sydney University late last century. After setting this historical context the film then looks at the experiences of a young woman studying medicine today. Has anything really changed from a century ago? How is the experience of a woman student different from that of her male counterparts? Why does she suffer discouragement and what is the cure? Will she fail and if so, why? ⁸

'Progressive' film makers, and indeed the 'left' more generally, have long been noted for the prominence they accord history. ⁹ For this film maker, with roots in the Sydney Women's Film Group, historical consciousness was a basis for political activism. As Felicity Collins noted: 'ThefirstfilmstocomeoutoftheSydneyThe first films to come out of the Sydney Women's Film Group were part of a feminist movement to politicise personal life and to rediscover the historical causes of women's exclusion from the public sphere.' ¹⁰ Charlene's wider purpose is clear enough. But what were the historical causes of 'women's exclusion' from this particular form of the 'public sphere' as identified by the film maker? And why were these historical issues considered of importance to young women in the 1970s?

The first point to observe in Oliver's depiction of the history of women in medicine are the 'key sites' that she chose to represent that history. Drawing on images from the European Middle Ages, the voice-over describes how women are 'the natural healers' with a number of images illustrating the ministering woman. But they were victimised, shunned, and physically abused for their medical practices: the witch craze is unambiguously represented as a retaliation against those women who chose to encroach on the male sphere of medicine. Then, located within the nineteenth century's emergent feminism, the tide turns. Women again return to medicine, demanding admission to medical schools in Britain and America. Finally, the images and narration turn to Australia, to the rejection and exclusion meted out by the universities as women attempted to take their place there as students.

At this point, the film moves to the present to introduce the central character, Charlene. Charlene's story is presented as a pivotal 'moment': she is pregnant—a situation widely recognised as leading to women's withdrawal from education—and uncertain of her future. The actions she takes now, it is implied, will shape the rest of her life. Receiving (and expecting) little help from the academics responsible for her program, she instead seeks advice from a woman doctor. The doctor (a woman doctor with real credentials in this topic) loops us back into history, highlighting for Charlene the historical continuities of her dilemma by describing the difficulties women have experienced over time from the same cause. In the end she counsels abortion.

Charlene then faces a moral quandary, represented by an interesting 'psychedelic' dream sequence articulating the gendered nature of her dilemma. In her dream she is confronted by accusations from male staff that male students don't cause such problems, suggesting that this was one reason why women's acceptance into medicine had been a big mistake. The film concludes ambiguously, at least as far as her decision is concerned. As she and her female friends sit around their living room, drinking and singing folk songs accompanied by a (female) guitarist, they discuss Charlene's chances for success in the exams. The film's credits are accompanied by the radical feminist band, the Stilettos, with lyrics that effectively reinforce the point that Charlene's battles are part of the wider 'women's lib' movement.

There are thus a number of historical themes arranged within the film which have played a significant role in the depiction of women as medical practitioners, and in the interpretations of women's history more generally. We now turn to investigate these issues to see how they helped to inform the structure of Charlene's story, and how they continue to reverberate in our understanding of women's history.

Pioneers and victims: Women in medicine

First, the twin themes of victimisation and pioneering have become synonymous with women's history as medical practitioners. Of particular interest, both to contemporaries of these early women doctors and for later historians, has been their experiences of medical education. A widely accepted depiction was that women were treated unfairly and faced a great deal more pressure than their male counterparts. These pressures included discriminatory admission policies (most commonly through the application of quotas on the number of women students); unfair treatment by staff and male students (most famously the rioting by male students at the University of Edinburgh); and unfair examination marking (being 'ploughed' at finals). One case presented in Charlene is that of Dagmar Berne, Australia's first woman medical undergraduate, who as a product of her 'repeated failures' at Sydney left in 1889 to complete her degree (with no further failures) in Britain.

For the 'first-wave' feminists who had tried to break down institutional barriers to women (in relation to employment, education, the law, and above all the suffrage) in the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth century, medicine was a key platform. Medicine for women was characterised as a way out of the moral dilemma facing all women who became ill: the need to be treated by a man. Thus the tales of the trials and tribulations that women experienced in the pursuit of a medical education were repeated and publicised as part of the campaign for widening women's access to these degrees. The 'truth' or otherwise of these allegations is of less importance for this discussion than the effective role they played in galvanising public opinion in favour of women medical students. In this way, women medical undergraduates became the original 'victims and pioneers' in a historiography which has continued to search for and celebrate women doctors in this way.

Women's entry into medicine in the late nineteenth century

Part of the key to understanding the way that women's experiences of medical education in Australia have been represented is to recognise it as part of a wider, international movement of opening professional opportunities for women. While the United States was among the earliest nations to provide means for women's entry into formal medical programs, the European model of medical education was somewhat closer to that adopted in Australia. And indeed the timing of women's entry was similar. Switzerland admitted women to medical schools in 1864 for example, and France in 1868. ¹¹ Scotland, as Sophia Jex-Blake's colourful autobiography indicated, was dragged into this international movement in 1869 (although the battle at Edinburgh raged until 1894). ¹² In England, the first officially-registered medical woman was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (License of the Society of Apothecaries, London, 1865 and MD, Paris, 1870), who trained 'privately'; along with Jex-Blake, she helped to found the London School of Medicine in 1874, which was recognised for awarding degrees by the University of London in 1900. ¹³ Belfast's Queens College admitted women from 1889, and several German universities followed from 1899. ¹⁴ The fact that Australia was a participant in this international movement of the late nineteenth century—women were first admitted to the medical faculty at the University of Sydney in 1885—had important local consequences, and became incorporated into the ways that its history was constructed.

While evidence of overt discrimination against the first generation of Australian women medical students is patchy, indicators of difficulties exist. ¹⁷ As the film Charlene reminds us, Australia's first known woman medical student—Dagmar Berne—enrolled there in 1885, only to leave a few years later, her degree incomplete, to finish her studies elsewhere. This departure has been used as key evidence of women's disadvantage in Sydney's medical school by others as well. There is little definitive evidence surviving about this case to be sure, yet its centrality for the 'institutional memory' is a clear indication of its importance in helping to shape the narrative of women's experiences of Australian medical education.

So while the very public animosity exhibited by men in British and American medical schools was not duplicated in Australia, nevertheless Australia's place in the British Empire, and its participation in this wider 'experiment' of training medical women, ensured that the tales of discrimination and pioneering were effectively incorporated within the local narrative as well.

Women, medicine, and the twentieth century

The difficulty for the 'pioneer' thesis, however, is its implication that 'things got better'—that as a consequence of the pioneers' hardships and sacrifices, entry became easier for later women, they passed more exams, and relations improved between female undergraduates and their male teachers and fellow students. From the historical record, and as we find depicted in Charlene, this does not seem to have been universally the case.

First, the historical record is much less ambiguous about the experiences of women students of later generations, particularly those studying in and after World War I, and again during the 1950 and 1960s. In these later periods women, it seems, could face quite hostile learning environments—indicating that the pioneer period did not create a better world for those who followed after all. ¹⁸ Second, one must confront the numbers. From the initial low point of 1882—when women were first admitted to any course at the University of Sydney—the overall proportion of women students in all faculties stood at a mere 2.5%; by the turn of the century, the proportion had risen to almost 14%. By 1930 the percentage of women undergraduates had noticeably increased to 27% (roughly twice the 1900 proportion), although it then dropped back slightly to 26% by 1940. ¹⁹ During the 1960s an extensive expansion in higher education was undertaken in Australia, resulting in a rapid increase in the numbers of students. By 1985, the proportion of women undergraduates across the university had increased to 62%—women had become the majority. ²⁰ While these global figures seem to support the pioneer thesis, they actually disguise the pronounced differences among the faculties, and the changing nature of those differences. In the Faculty of Medicine, for example, women represented 7% of the student body in 1885—their first year of enrolment. On the other hand, just under 5% of the students then enrolled in arts were women. ²¹ This rough equivalence was rapidly lost in succeeding decades. By the turn of the century, women represented almost 28% of the student body in the Faculty of Arts, while those in medicine had risen only marginally to 7.5%. Arts reached parity between women students and men by 1924; and by 1939, women represented over 60% of students enrolled in that faculty. A post-1945 slump affected female enrolments to the extent that women arts undergraduates decreased to 43% in 1950, but then regained their upward trend reaching 52% in 1960 and 62% by 1980. But, up to the time that the film Charlene was made, medicine did not reach parity at any stage, reaching its highest proportion of female students in 1960 with 16.9% of the undergraduate body. It was well after this, in 1985, before women's numbers in medicine started to move closer to parity, with 36% of the student body. ²²

Women were admitted to study medicine in Australia following the University of Sydney's decision in 1885 to admit Dagmar Berne, officially on the same footing as male candidates. Despite this theoretical equality, however, the proportion of women students in medicine makes clear that medicine remained overwhelmingly a man's world. Perhaps it would be accurate to suggest, as Mary Roth Walsh did for women's experiences in the United States, that the University of Sydney's reaction to women in the medical faculty was a policy of risk management rather than outright exclusion. ²³

Charlene's experiences are therefore located in a faculty heavily dominated by male students. In her trials she first turns to her teachers for advice but finds little comfort there from men with little experience of dealing with such 'feminine' issues. Could she have turned to her female teachers? In answering this question, again, the experience at Sydney highlights how masculine the faculty had remained during this period. The first women appointed to staff positions occurred in 1904 with two locally-born Edinburgh graduates, Mary Booth and Katie Hogg, as anatomy demonstrators. After these first two, only one other appointment was made to a woman before the 1920s—to Elsie Dalyell, as a demonstrator in pathology in 1911. The Faculty's teaching staff remained predominantly male during and after World War I, although some gains were made in the number of appointments made to women post-1918—primarily still at the demonstrator level. This employment model paralleled the experience of medical women in British universities where, as Dyhouse pointed out, 'women were clustered in the lower grades of employment' and salary. ²⁴ At Sydney during the 1920s, for instance, Una Fielding, Ellice Hamilton, Lorna Beveridge, Marjorie Little, Suzanne Abramovich, and Fanny Witts all held demonstrator positions in anatomy, physiology and pathology. As an indication of the paucity of academic career paths available to medical women in this period, only one of this group, Una Fielding, was able to make academic teaching a career, and that was in the United Kingdom. ²⁵

The handful of women who were appointed at the lecturer level before World War II tended to be confined to areas which were regarded as quintessentially 'feminine.' Constance D'Arcy, one of the leading surgeons of her day, was appointed lecturer in clinical obstetrics in 1925, and remained in that position until her retirement in 1939. ²⁶ Margaret Harper lectured in the diseases of women during the period 193038, to be replaced by Kathleen Winning in 1939. ²⁷ The only other teaching positions held by women at this time were outside the university, attached to one of the associated teaching hospitals.

In the period between World War II and the 1970s, when Charlene was made, the number of women employed as medical academics in Australia had increased, but did not keep pace even with female undergraduate numbers. ²⁸ Overall, in 1975 women represented approximately 32 percent of the undergraduate population but only 16 percent of the full-time teaching staff. ²⁹ Again, it was not until well after the production of this film that women's academic teaching roles in medicine began to reach parity—although it might be pointed out that in Australia women are still 'under-represented' as medical academics. ³⁰ Oliver's decision to have Charlene turn for advice to a woman doctor was therefore a shrewd one. Firstly, doing so underscored the limited access that young female undergraduates had to teachers of their own sex. This limitation was a particular problem in situations where consulting a male authority figure conflicted with social norms about propriety and acceptable female behaviour—and discussions about unwanted pregnancy, it might be argued, transgressed both. But this decision also opens up a second major theme: the role of women doctors in women's health care. It is this role that underpins the wider political issue of control over ones body and women's 'right to choose.'

'Our bodies, ourselves': Who owns a woman's body?

This second 'historical' theme addressed by the film—women's control over their own bodies—is less forthrightly historical in its presentation. It is nonetheless a subject of equal importance in the history of women. As discussed, the entry to medical schools by women was championed by first-wave reformers who saw in this the potential for removing the need to consult a male doctor, especially for 'female complaints' ³¹ But this push was just one part of a wider campaign to wrest control over women's bodies from men, and put it 'back' in the hands of women.

For a recurrent theme in the historiography of women in the western world is the increasing control and censorship exercised by men over information about women's bodies and bodily processes—juxtaposed against images of women's active pursuit of precisely such information. ³² For example, Londa Schiebinger suggested that a reason both the church and the state of earlymodern Europe felt a need to curb the work of midwives was their propensity not simply to treat women, but to share 'secrets' such as contraceptive and abortion information. ³³

For some women graduates, one result of their medical education was a desire to spread their new-found physiological knowledge to a wider audience. And there are numerous examples of women who, having gained a medical education, branched out into public advocacy for women's health. One of the earliest identified in the modern period was Harriett Hunt who trained in medicine in the United States during the 1830s—albeit as an 'irregular.' Dorothy L. Bernstein claimed that Harriett Hunt, 'believed women's ignorance about their bodies and lack of health practices accounted for many of their problems. To remedy this, she organised free lectures in her home on female hygiene and physiology.' ³⁴ Hunt was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1853.

Equally implicated were those women doctors of the laternineteenth century, who in Alison Bashford's phrase, engaged in self-consciously 'promoting and practising a type of "feminine medicine."' ³⁵ In a similar vein, Guenter Risse and John Warner pondered why women might have asserted this gendered approach to medical practice. They suggested that the claims of a 'feminine' medicine, 'emphasizes the important symbolic function of rhetoric.' ³⁶ That many women saw their practice as a gendered one, both in the way they practiced and for whom it was intended, is clear. But, embedded in this notion of a 'feminine medicine' was the concerted effort made by medical women and other nineteenth-century reformers to enable women to understand and therefore control their own bodies.

In assaying the issue of 'health' more generally, the historian Brian Harrison highlighted how women's health issues in particular were accorded prominence by feminists of the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries for two reasons. One involved achieving women's emancipation from the necessity of medical examination by men. The other concerned the common assumption of women's physical 'weakness,' and 'first-wave' feminists' contention that this was linked to an ignorance of the laws of health. Feminists saw the attainment of physical fitness for women as a component of women's 'progress.' ³⁷

Thus the intersections between women's emancipation, medicine, and bodily integrity were well established by the end of the nineteenth century. These themes also continued to reverberate throughout the twentieth century. Women's role in implementing 'public health' measures in the home came increasingly to the fore during this century, alongside an industry in 'home health' guides. Yet it is nevertheless clear that this occurred in unison with the growing 'dominance' of the medical profession, particularly as it impacted upon women. That one of the political demands underpinning 'second-wave' feminism was the attainment of some control over their own bodies and the health care they received, can therefore be seen to be part of a much longer narrative about women and their bodies.

In Australia one result of such demands was the establishment of women's community health centres, providing advisory and treatment services only for women, by women. ³⁸ In the United States equivalent political impulses resulted in Our bodies Ourselves, a work designed to place directly into women's hands the knowledge they needed to make informed health choices. ³⁹ Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the major outcomes of this demand for female bodily integrity was the rise in credibility given to the concept of 'patients' rights,' consequent to the 'rebellion' by women against radical mastectomies, until then the main response to the diagnosis of breast cancer, at least in the United States. ⁴⁰

Overwhelmingly, however, the issue which dominated all others in this period's agitations over women and healthcare, was abortion. And it is this historical development, this theme, which underpins the film Charlene.

'Pioneer' medical women and the 'second wave'

The historical context for Oliver's film was second-wave feminism. This was a movement that represented itself as self-consciously 'history-minded': for many second-wave feminists, the point of history was political. Rescuing 'forgotten women of the past' was seen as more than just legitimate; it was the reason for studying history. Such a project naturally courts the danger of creating a past which legitimates the present (or current demands), and this was one of the earliest criticisms levelled at second-wave feminist historians, not least by themselves. Nevertheless, by adopting this overtly political role for history, feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were able to identify the ways in which previous (male) historians had written gendered male history while proclaiming its universality. Doing so was a necessary first step to 'rediscovering' the many important but 'forgotten' women in our past. What was less frequently articulated however, was the need for an equivalent self-reflexivity as a precursor to any attempt in 'rehabilitating' women into history.

Second-wave feminism was based on a perceived need to overcome oppression, to create equality between men and women. Embedded in this project therefore was the expectation that history's role was to uncover the many ways that women in the past had been unequal, or worse. In healthcare, a germinal work in this early reinterpretation of history was by Ehrenreich and English, who represented the history of medicine not so much as an inevitable rolling out of progress at the hands of beneficent men, but rather as a catalogue of the oppression, marginalisation, and indeed persecution of the 'natural healers'—women. ⁴¹

For many, midwifery was seen as an independent woman-centred and woman-dominated profession. Its comparatively low status in modern society was a product of these historical forces, argued Ehrenreich and English, which usurped women's knowledge and authority, and marginalised them as less skilled. On the other hand, nurses presented a more problematic case for contemporaries of the second wave. It was easy to see nurses as handmaids of authority, capitulators to patriarchy. ⁴² As Beverley Kingston suggested in a foundational work on the history of Australian women:

the low wages, long hours, rigid and rigorous supervision and excessive devotion and dedication to duty offered nothing at all to working-class girls, and only a change of locale to the dutiful daughter who might exchange a tyrannical father for a tyrannical matron and find herself the subject of petty rules, curfews and restrictions similar to those she had suffered at home. ⁴³

Thus, it was important for Oliver's film that Charlene did not 'do' nursing. But was the woman doctor a less ambiguous heroine? Not surprisingly, the answer has to be 'No': women doctors likewise represented a problem for second-wave feminists.

For feminists of the first wave—those late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women who advocated 'Votes for Women' and the expansion of education—the woman doctor question was unambiguously a cause worth fighting for. In their own view, there were innumerable obvious and compelling reasons why women should be admitted to the practice of medicine in order primarily to treat other women. The tying together of women's access to the professions, to higher education and to political emancipation thus made the 'woman doctor question' one of extraordinary significance. Yet the second wave saw this question from a different perspective. In general, as Judith Allen suggested, many second-wave scholars and activists with left-wing credentials regarded the first wave as rather conservative, their attitudes outdated and unhelpful. ⁴⁴ On the specific issue of women doctors, a number of issues and concerns converged to result in a deep ambivalence. Anne Summers, another pioneer in the second-wave revision of Australian history, put this attitudinal difference quite distinctly. The early women doctors may have been 'trailblazers,' she insisted, but 'they were not feminists':

Although they were undoubtedly anxious to see their footsteps followed by other women, they did not perceive their venture as necessarily widening women's sphere in any way. Almost without exception, they reaffirmed that woman's basic calling was to motherhood. ⁴⁵

However, painting a picture that is seemingly even further from an ideal scenario to use as a backdrop for an illustration of feminist pioneering is the exposure of the medical profession as the epitome of antifeminist notions. Peter Dans, among others, has highlighted the ways in which the emergence of a counterculture saw the representations of medicine shift from 'heroic' to dangerous and uncontrolled. For a number of second-wave theorists, and indeed for the wider progressive movements of the 1970s, the medical profession was implicated in the problems of the modern world. Summers was unequivocal in her opinion of the medical profession and its role in the subordination of women:

[T]he vast majority of its members are men who receive considerable personal benefit from the existing sexual division of labour. Both as men and as medical practitioners, most doctors have strict and traditional notions of what is appropriate behaviour for women. ⁴⁶

As we have already seen, this vision and its impact on the history of medicine provided the framework for Ehrenreich and English's condemnation, but other important historical works likewise contributed to growing concerns about the influence of the medical profession on women's lives. Betty Friedan's influential The Feminine Mystique, which condemned psychiatry's construction of women's subjugation, was seen by some second-wave historians as an essential tool for understanding women's historical oppression. ⁴⁷ For Summers, following closely the path laid out by Ehrenreich and English, the history of medicine provided the clearest example of male usurpation of feminine culture and practices; or as she phrased it, 'a clear instance of a female culture being destroyed and an alien, male-derived one imposed in its place.' ⁴⁸ Indeed, it might be true to say that these two works (Friedan's and Summers') formed the heart of Charlene's experiences.

Yet Oliver's film focused on women doctors as forgotten heroines. How can we reconcile these points of view? Of course, the film's main character, Charlene, is pregnant. Virtually all feminists of the era recognised that the limited options for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy was a major impediment to women's social and economic advancement. The agitation for abortion rights and 'freedom to choose' were thus key platforms in their political agenda. In the film, this problem is shown as having a major impact on a young woman's ability to undertake higher education.

Which leads us to the emblematic function of Charlene's medical education. Several factors about this form of higher education are relevant. First, as a device to enable discussion about access to abortion and its medical implications, the choice of medical education as a setting for the film was logical. However, there is a problem posed by this choice as well, related to medicine's association with wealth and privilege. Medicine has long been perceived to be an expensive degree to undertake, and, with its extra years of study, extends the nonwage earning period of its students. (Indeed, this was another mark in its disfavour for progressive political movements of the 1970s.) Nevertheless, the film's date of creation leads us to the explanation for finding our politically progressive message seemingly immersed in the world of the social elite. In 1977 'free' tertiary education had been available in Australia for almost three years; its introduction in January 1974 (by a Labor government with some shared positions with the second wave) was based on the belief that one outcome would be an expansion of higher education opportunities to under-represented economic and social groups—for women, the working class, Aborigines, and ethnic minorities. ⁴⁹ It is possible then that the choice of the name 'Charlene' (a form of name popular for girl's in non-elite circles of the period) was meant to suggest our heroine had origins with 'the people.'

An equally important reason for choosing medicine was the commonly-held expectation that, since medical degrees entail intense periods of study and training, pregnancy would be an extra burden. Yet this additional burden, as the film pointed out, affects only women students. It is therefore a form of gender discrimination. And it is at this point of Charlene's story that the history of medical women becomes important. By linking Charlene's dilemma to a longer history of discrimination against women in medical education, the film maker was able to highlight the continuity of longstanding practices. It was not something specific to one woman or peculiar to the age, but a historical wrong against all women.

Conclusion

In drawing upon a historiographical tradition that emphasised the victimisation and exclusion endured by medical women, Charlene highlights a number of the preoccupations shared by both the first- and second-wave feminists. Women's exclusion from the 'public' sphere was something both groups believed inhibited women's general progress in society, and so women's access to professional power was a necessity for both. Feminists of both periods also believed that it was through educational opportunities that such access was to be achieved. Therefore, identifying the means by which women were denied these opportunities was important in order for those barriers to be broken down. The historical continuities between the 'pioneer' women medical students, and those of the latertwentieth century thus suffuses this film.

An equally long tradition represented by the film Charlene is women's quest for control over their bodies. Women assuming (or reentering) the practice of medicine was couched in the nineteenth century as the means by which women could be 'freed' from the prying hands and eyes of men. Women doctors' subsequent articulation of a role in 'educating' their fellow women in physiological issues, is equally well documented. The 1970s Second Wave also embraced this ambition of enabling women to assume control of their bodies. Publishing projects, such as that which produced Our Bodies Ourselves, ⁵⁰ were matched by patient rights movements such as that which condemned radical mastectomy, a movement taking rhetoric from and helping to reinforce the place of 'informed consent' in medical decision making. ⁵¹ The flashpoint of these activities though, and the one which remains in the forefront of discussions around women and health was abortion.

Charlene thus personifies these many threads in the history of women and medicine, as victim and as pioneer, as combatant in the control of her body and as the recipient of and participant in a 'women's culture' that sees the issue of women and health of fundamental importance in the quest for women's equality.

University of Sydney

Image 1: Women graduates from the medical program in 1898: Julia Carlile-Thomas (back 2nd left) Harriett Biffin (back 2nd right), Alice Newton (front left) and Ada Affleck (front right). Only two women had graduated before them: Grace Robinson and Iza Coghlan, both in 1893. (Courtesy University of Sydney Archives.)

Image 2: The resonant story of Dagmar Berne's pioneering-victim role in the history of women doctors in Australia, of her leaving the University of Sydney after 'repeated failures' to complete her medical degree overseas, is reiterated in the film Charlene. ⁵² (Courtesy of University of Sydney Archives)

Notes

^1. The twentieth century produced a significant number of 'doctor' films; and even those without a particular focus on medicine and doctors often had one in a supporting role. In the category of beneficent doctors, Flores estimated that of the 121 films he analysed, 56 percent could be described as being in this category. Interestingly, of the 44 percent of whom he classified as 'bad,' around half were 'insane,' suggesting that an explanation was required for evil doctors. Representations of doctors did tend to become more negative as the century progressed however. See, Glen Flores, "Mad Scientists, Compassionate Healers, and Greedy Egotists: The Portrayal of Physicians in the Movies," Journal of the National Medical Association 94, no 7 (2002): 6401; see also G. Flores, "Doctors in the Movies," Arch. Dis. Child. 89 (2004): 10848. My thanks to John Leggott for this citation.

^2. T. Hugh Crawford, "Visual Knowledge in Medicine and Popular Film," Literature and Medicine 17, no. 1 (1998): 2444, 24.

^3. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of 'Defective' Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), viii.

^4. Susan Lederer, "Repellent Subjects: Hollywood Censorship and Surgical Images in the 1930s," Literature and Medicine 17, no. 1 (1998): 91113, 91, citing Richard Shryock, American Medical Research Past and Present (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1947), 243.

^5. Pernick, The Black Stork.

^6. See for example, Jackie Leach Scully, "Drawing a Line: Situating Moral Boundaries in Genetic Medicine," Bioethics, no. 3 (2001)" 189204.

^7. Charlene Does Med at Uni, documentary short film, directed by Margot Oliver, (Sydney: supported by the Australian Experimental Film & Television Fund, 1977). Oliver a few years later was co-producer of the award-winning history of women and work in Australia, For Love or Money: Women and Work in Australia, produced by Margot Nash, Megan McMurchy, Margot Oliver, and Jeni Thornley (Sydney: Sydney Film Makers Cooperative and Flashback Films, 1983).

^8. The Sydney Film makers Co-operatives Independent Film and Video Reference Book 1983, National Film and Sound Archive, http://www.nfsa.gov.au (accessed November 2006).

^9. Lisa Milner, "Fighting Through Their Filmwork: The Waterside Workers' Federation Film Unit," The Hummer 4, no. 2 (2004), http://asslh.org.au/sydney/hummer/vol4no2/milner.htm (accessed November 2006).

^10. Felicity Collins, "TheExperimentalPracticeofHistoryintheFilmworkofJeni Experimental Practice of HistoryintheFilmworkofJeniHistory in the FilmworkofJeniFilmwork of Jeni Thornley," Screening the Past, Issue 3, 1998, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/FCfr3a2.htm.

^11. Marjorie Hutton Neve, This Mad Folly! The History of Australia's Pioneer Women Doctors (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1980); T.N. Bonner, "Medical Women Abroad: A New Dimension of Women's Push for Opportunity in Medicine 18501914"," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 62, no. 1 (1988): 5873, 60, 62.

^12. Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical Women. A Thesis and a History (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1886; facs. reprint New York: Source Books, 1970); Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols. Women's Entry to the Medical Profession (London: Women's Press, 1990), 91155.

^13. Jex-Blake, 93, 168, 196. There were still legislative barriers to women's medical practice, however, a British Act of Parliament in 1876 'empowered examining bodies to allow women to qualify' (Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. A Medical History of Humanity From Antiquity to the Present (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 35658. This can be compared with women's experiences in London: See Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 18701939 (London: UCL Press, 1995), 13; Carol Dyhouse, "Women Students and the London Medical Schools, 19141939: The Anatomy of a Masculine Culture," Gender and History 10, no. 1 (1998): 11032.

^14. Mary T.S. Logan, "The Centenary of the Admission of Women Students to the Belfast Medical School," Ulster Medical Journal, , no. 2 (1992): 20003; James C. Albisetti, "The Fight For Female Physicians in Imperial Germany," Central European History, 15, no. 2 (1982): 99123, 100.

^15. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 148; Dyhouse, "Women Students and the London Medical Schools."

^16. Jex-Blake, Medical Women.

^17. Helen Jones, Nothing Seemed Impossible: Women's Education and Social Change in South Australia 18751915 (St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1985).

^18. Louella McCarthy, "Uncommon Practices: Uncommon Practices. Medical Women in NSW, 18851939," (PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 2001), chapter 3; Carol Dyhouse also investigated the growing animosity women faced during the interwar period in Britain: See Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 204.; Dyhouse, "Women Students and the London Medical Schools," 11032. Also see Conchy T. Bretos, Women in the Medical Profession (Kensington, NSW: Centre for Medical Education Research and Development, University of New South Wales, 1980). Sydney Women's Health Students Group, [editorial responsibility: Kate Moore], Sensible Women: Not All Doctors Want to be Men: Australian Women in Medicine (Sydney: Sydney Women's Health Students Group, 1978). Rosemary Pringle has also charted the difficulties faced by medical women in this later period: See Rosemary Pringle, Sex and Medicine. Gender, Power and Authority in the Medical Profession (Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

^19. C. Turney, U. Bygott, and P. Chippendale, Australia's First: A History of the University of Sydney 18501939 (Sydney: University of Sydney/Hale & Iremonger, 1991), appendix 4, 643.

^20. Ursula Bygott and Ken Cable, Pioneer Women Graduates of the University of Sydney, 18811921, Sydney University Monograph Series, no.1 (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1985), 25; University of Sydney, Calendar, 18951940 (can be found in the University of Sydney archives, or the Mitchell library).

^21. University of Sydney, Calendar, 1885, 1895, 1900.

^22. McCarthy, "Uncommon Practices", chapterss 23; Turney, Bygott, and Chippendale, appendix 4, 643.

^23. Mary Roth Walsh, 'Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply': Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 18587, 199200.

^24. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, 149.

^25. A.A. Abbie, "Una Lucy Fielding"," Medical Journal of Australia (13 December 1969): 12278.

^26. She was a member of the University Senate from 1919 to 1949. University of Sydney, Calendar, 19191940. "Constance D'Arcy"," in 200 Australian Women: A Redress Anthology, edited by H. Radi, (Sydney, NSW: Women's Redress Press, 1991), 121.

^27. University of Sydney, Calendar, 19191940; "ObituaryUna Lucy Fielding"," The Lancet (30 August 1969): 499.

^28. James E. Everett, "Sex, Rank and Qualifications at Australian Universities"," Australian Journal of Management 19, no. 2 (1994): 15976, 1634, 1701.

^29. Frances Lovejoy and Jennifer Jones, "Discrimination against Women Academics in Australian Universities"," Signs 5, no. 3 (1980): 51826, 523.

^30. Sharon Bell and Ronda Bentley, "WomenInResearchDiscussionPaper","prepared"Women In Research Discussion Paper","prepared"," prepared for the AVCC National Colloquium of Senior Women Executives, November 2005, 6.

^31. I have addressed this topic in more detail elsewhere: see, Louella McCarthy, "All This Fuss About a Trivial Incident? Women, Hospitals and Medical Work in New South Wales, 19001920"," Women's History Review, 14, no. 2 (2005): 26785.

^32. Perhaps the most common examples of women's pursuit of physiological information focus on the sharing of information over contraception and abortion remedies. See for example Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia (Melbourne, VIC: Nelson, 1977), 9; Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Melbourne, VIC: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2531, 227; Stefania Siedlecky and Diana Wyndham, Populate and Perish: Australia's Fight for Birth Control (Syndey, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1990), 1819, 27.

^33. L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11112, 118.

^34. D.L. Bernstein, "Women in Medicine: The Tortuous Path to Professionalism," Minnesota Medicine 75 (September 1992): 1623, 18.

^35. Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (London: MacMillan, 1998), 10305. Morantz-Sanchez also made a valuable study of how these ideas of difference have influenced medical politics as well as clinical practice: Regina Morantz-Sanchez, "Making it in a Man's World: The Late-Nineteenth Century Surgical Career of Mary Amanda Dixon Jones," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 69, no. 4 (1995): 54268.

^36. Guenter B. Risse and John Harley Warner, "Reconstructing Clinical Activities: Patient Records in Medical History," Journal of the Social History of Medicine 5, no. 2 (1992): 20102.

^37. Brian Harrison, "Women's Health and the Women's Movement in Britain, 18401940," inBiology, Medicine and Society, 18401940, edited by C. Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5051. Harrison suggested that 'women were far keener to become doctors than to enter any other profession.' Their success, moreover, made them 'one of the British feminists' proudest and earliest achievements.' (pp.3941). See also discussion of nineteenth-century feminist characterisations of 'medical science as rape' in Bashford, 1212.

^38. Joyce Stevens, Healing Women: A History of Leichhardt Women's Community Health Centre (Sydney, NSW: First Ten Years History Project, 1995).

^39. Boston Women's Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

^40. Barron Lerner, The Breast Cancer Wars: Fear, Hope, and the Pursuit of a Cure in 20th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp 1517.

^41. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1972).

^42. Ibid.

^43. Beverly Kingston, 75.

^44. Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1214. See also, Katie Spearritt, "New Dawns: First-Wave Feminism, 18801914," in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, edited by Kay Saunders & Raymond Evans (Sydney, NSW: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 32549, 329.

^45. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police. The Colonization of Women in Australia (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1975), 328.

^46. Ibid., 107, 10811.

^47. See for example, Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (London: Penguin, 1974), 511. Compare this with Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Penguin, 1968); Charlotte Mackenzie, "Women and Psychiatric Professionalisation, 17801914"," in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's Power, Women's Resistance, edited by the London Feminist History Group (London: Pluto Press, 1983), 105119.

^48. Ibid., 244.

^49. Alan Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales (Kensington, NSW: NSW University Press, 1988), 27576.

^50. Boston Women's Health Collective (see note 39).

^51. Lerner, 1517

^52. Berne's early death from TB, probably contracted during this time in Britain, contributed to the sense of mistreatment which surrounds her name, and underpinned the decision to inaugurate a memorial prize in her name at the University of Sydney for students of the MD degree.

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