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FeedCeasing to Blush
Chester County’s Ann Preston was not to be deterred from a medical career.
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Bigots are always their own worst enemies. In 1861, they married the cause of slavery—an ancient, constitutionally protected institution—to secession. Dumb.
In the early 1960s, they turned fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators while TV cameras were watching. Dumb.
And, in 1869, they were dumb again. That was the year in which Chester County’s Dr. Ann Preston, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania—the first such institution in the world—led her female students into a lab at Pennsylvania Hospital. The reaction?
“The male medical students shouted insults and threw paper, tinfoil and tobacco quids,” wrote historian Margaret Hope Bacon. “The female medical students remained composed and attended the clinic, but on their way out they were pelted with rocks.”
Even in that misogynistic era, one didn’t publicly insult or throw rocks at women. The incident discredited the most outspoken opponents of woman physicians and helped stiffen the spines of their supporters. And today? Women applicants to U.S. medical schools slightly outnumber men.
For the Woman’s Medical College, “Preston exemplified woman as leader,” wrote Stephen Jay Peitzman, author of A New and Untried Course. “Nothing appeared in the college’s promotional literature more often than images of Preston, into which the viewer imaginatively reads strength and resolve.”
The youngest of nine children born to Quaker farmers Amos and Margaret (Smith) Preston, Ann Preston grew up at Prestonville, a London Grove farm purchased in 1785 by her grandfather. She attended a neighborhood school and, briefly, a boarding school in West Chester. But after her mother sickened, Preston became her nurse and inherited the chores that came with helping raise six older brothers. “Nothing from the first 37 years of Ann Preston’s life suggests that she was interested in medicine, let alone that she would become dean of a medical school,” wrote historian Susan Wells.
Nothing outwardly, that is. Inwardly, Preston couldn’t miss that—besides a chronically ill mother—her family had included three daughters. Both of her sisters died in childhood, though all of her brothers survived. Later, Preston would connect female mortality to sedentary, indoor occupations and restrictive clothing.
Preston’s early letters reveal her interest in literature, current events and politics, fed by the local Farmers’ Library, a lyceum visited by famous speakers and a literary society. “Every American female has and should feel a deep interest in the welfare of her country,” wrote Preston to friend Hannah Darlington in 1835. “If she feels no interest in the perpetuation and perfection of republican freedom, half of the support of our government is lost.”
By modern standards, the Prestons trended left. When an 1827 schism divided area Quakers, the family went with the liberal Hicksites, who emphasized continuing revelation over the Bible. The Prestons were abolitionists, and their daughter came early to that cause. What’s telling is that Preston joined the Clarkson Anti-Slavery Society, a Quaker organization based in Chester and Lancaster counties that accepted men and women on an equal basis. Most anti-slavery organizations accepted only men, requiring women to observe from the sidelines.
The Clarkson group was radical in other ways. In 1840, it vehemently criticized a proposal by the older Chester County Abolitionist Society that every black male pay a head tax to “finance the passage of free Negroes to Liberia.” Hypocrisy, thundered the Clarksonites, whose letters-to-the-editor condemned the “pretended compassion” of those who were “as bad as the slaveholders.”
As Clarkson secretary, Preston was responsible for writing and distributing such statements. She also circulated a petition against capital punishment and agitated on behalf of an anti-tavern bill that, she hoped, would “let the rum sellers feel insecure in their nefarious business.”
In 1838, Preston went to Philadelphia with friends for dedication ceremonies at Pennsylvania Hall, a new anti-slavery meeting place on Sixth Street. Instead, she witnessed the its destruction by a pro-slavery mob. Preston described the event as an “awful and grand spectacle,” but not a discouraging one. “I have heard of some abolitionists whose faith has been shaken by recent events, but I have met with none such,” she wrote to Darlington.
Preston’s poem, “The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall,” was chosen from among several hundred to be published in a book about the event:
“Oh! Slavery’s form that hour was seen / Polluting all our air / Its fearful front and fiendish mien / And twining chains were bare / And well that hall, in freedom’s name / Hath spoken out with words of flame!”
