This article is part Overlooked. It’s a collection of obituaries about extraordinary people who died, starting in 1851.
Around 40 people applied for the New England Hospital for Women and Children’s Boston nursing program in 1878. Only nine people were admitted and only three graduated after 16 months of hard work. Mary Eliza Mahoney who was widely regarded to be the first Black nurse in America, did earn a diploma.
Domestic service was the only job available to Black women at the time. In fact, Mahoney was initially employed as a maid by the hospital. She persevered, spending 16 hour a day ironing, scrubbing, and cleaning before she was able to get into the nursing program.
“She cooked, washed and scrubbed and — she got in,” a family friend, identified only as Miss Hawley, was quoted as saying in The American Journal of Nursing in 1954. “A woman doctor wanted her there, and that was the only influence she had.”
Mahoney, who was only five feet tall and 90 lbs, was a modest but hardworking student. The program’s standards were high, and few succeeded; of the 40 or so applicants in 1878, nine withdrew, 13 were considered unsuitable and nine of 18 who had been accepted for trial failed to be admitted. Mahoney’s sister, Ellen, attempted to complete the program as well but failed the final exam.
Mahoney’s guiding motto was, “Work more and better the coming year than the previous year.”
After her graduation, she became an independent nurse, caring mainly for wealthy white patients who she considered to be her family. Many people requested her assistance. “I owe my life to that dear soul,” one patient was quoted as saying in the 1954 journal article.
Her success opened doors to future generations of Black nurses. She would dedicate the rest of her career making the profession more accessible through her role as the first Black member of the Nurses Associated Alumnae in the United States and Canada, now known as the American Nurses Association. (A survey published in The Journal of Nursing Regulation showed that only 6.7 percent of all nurses in the United States were Black in 2020.
Mary Ella Chayer, a former professor of nursing at the Teachers College at Columbia University, wrote of Mahoney in 1954: “This nurse was an outstanding student of her time, an expert and tender practitioner, an exemplary citizen, and an untiring worker in both local and national organizations. She was a sound builder for the future, a builder of foundations on which others to follow may safely depend.”
Mary Eliza Mahoney was a Massachusetts native, born in 1845 in Dorchester. Boston annexed the area in 1846. She was the oldest child of Charles and May Jane (Stewart), Mahoney’s three children. They were believed to have been enslaved by North Carolina before being freed.
Mahoney, at the age of 10, entered the first grade at Phillips School. This was after it had become one of the first desegregated public schools to be opened in Boston.
Mahoney was 17 years old when Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (German-born) founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. This was in an effort to give women the opportunities and skills they needed to enter the medical profession, which was at that time reserved for men. It was the second hospital in America to be run by women — its entire staff was composed of women — and the first to formally train nurses in medical, obstetric, surgical and pediatric services.
Mahoney was the first Black person to register with the Massachusetts Medical Library’s Nurses Directory. She said that she chose to work independently and not in public nursing because of the discrimination she faced.
In response to the exclusions of Black nurses from other national organizations, she founded the National Association for Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908. She gave the welcoming address at the group’s first national convention in Boston in 1909. Two years later, Mahoney was granted a lifetime membership by the association and she was named its national chaplain.
Between 1911-1912, Mahoney was the director of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum Brooklyn.
A longtime advocate for women’s suffrage, she contributed to another history-making event when women won the right to vote in 1920; at 76, she was one of the first women to register.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1923. She died on January 4, 1926 at the New England Hospital. She was 80.
Mahoney has received numerous awards over the nearly 100 years that have passed since her death. In 1936, the Colored Graduate Nurses organization created the Mary Mahoney award, which is given to a group of nurses or nurses who promote integration in their profession. Although the association closed in 1958, the American Nurses Association still presents this award.
In 1973, one of the recipients, Helen Sullivan Miller, led a campaign to have a memorial erected at Mahoney’s grave site in Everett, Mass., with backing from the A.N.A. Chi Eta Phi is a national sorority that supports professional and student nurses. Another award winner was Mabel Staupers who designed the stone.
Mahoney was inducted into the A.N.A.’s Hall of Fame in 1976 and into the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1993.
Source: NY Times