Miss Matilda Archambeau Van Dorn.
From One Pioneering Blackwell
To The Daughter Of Another
[Blackwell, Alice Stone]. Cummings, Elizabeth. Miss Matilda Archambeau Van Dorn. Illustrated. Boston: D. Lothrop Company, (1892).
8vo.; illustrated frontispiece; other illustrations throughout; pale blue cloth, pictorially stamped in green floral design, additionally stamped in red and gilt; a lightly used copy, covers occasionally scuffed, spine darkened; else nice. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this scarce feminist children’s tale; a rare children’s volume, not in Wright or in OCLC. An interesting association copy, inscribed by Alice Stone Blackwell to her younger cousin: Anna M. Blackwell from Cousin Alice Christmas 1892. Anna Blackwell was the adopted daughter of Alice’s aunt, the medical pioneer Emily Blackwell.
Like her older sister Elizabeth, Emily became a physician specializing in women’s ailments and in treating the impoverished underclass. Emily assisted her sister in establishing the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which provided medical services at affordable rates and gave female patients the opportunity to be examined by physicians of their own sex. In 1860, Emily and her sister established an out-patient clinic at Eighth Street and Second Avenue in New York—it was the earliest instance of medical social service in the U.S., and is now known as the St. Mark’s Clinic.
Emily never married, but constructed for herself an alternative family life. In the early 1880s Emily—a single mother—adopted a daughter, Anna. In 1882 Emily’s colleague Dr. Elizabeth Cushier moved in with them, and the three lived together as a unit until Emily’s death in 1910. That this unusual living arrangement was sanctioned by at least some members of the Blackwell family is established by the existence of this warmly inscribed gift from “Cousin Alice” to Anna.
(#4612)
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