Emily Stowe

Emily Stowe applied to study medicine at the University of Toronto in the 1860s and was refused admission specifically because she was a woman, a rejection that pushed her to study instead at the New York Medical College for Women, where she earned her medical degree in 1867. She returned to Toronto and began practicing medicine immediately, treating patients for over a decade before Ontario's medical licensing body would formally grant her a license to practice in 1880, making her the first woman to practice medicine in Canada, albeit initially without official sanction to do so.

Beyond medicine

Stowe used her prominence to push for broader change, co-founding the Toronto Women's Literary Club in 1876, an organization that functioned as an early vehicle for suffrage activism under a deliberately unthreatening name, and later helping found the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. Her daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to earn a medical degree entirely within Canada, continuing her mother's work in both medicine and the women's suffrage movement that eventually secured Canadian women the federal vote.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Emily Stowe
• Wikipedia — Emily Stowe

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