A book I should have read in the Women’s History class that was never offered at UAF, or at least not while I was there.
In 1890 Dr. Mary [Mollie] Babcock Moore decides that she’d rather work for herself than for her husband. She had good cause.
…it wasn’t long after she started working with Frank and his friend that the trouble began…With her degree and her state license, she had expected to become an equal partner with the two doctors…But regardless of the services she provided, at Frank’s insistence, the patient always paid him…twice now, Mollie had been concerned that Frank might be mistaken in his diagnosis of one of her patients. When she questioned him, he became angry and defensive, pointing out that he had been in this business a lot longer than she.
The AMA refused to admit women and the icing on the cake was a world class bitch of a mother-in-law. She realizes the only place she has a chance of starting her own practice is in the West, where doctors are thin on the ground, and so she ups stakes from Oklahoma to a remote mining town in Montana named Bannock, population 200. It is not a soft landing.
Clearly she was going to have to defend her status as a single woman and a doctor here. The coldness in Mrs. Meade’s greeting rankled her. And Billy’s commenting that she was the only single woman in town with the exception of the soon-to-be-wed schoolteacher, a few teenagers, and the soiled doves over the Bank Exchange Saloon meant that she would be viewed as an oddity, perhaps even as prey.
Well, Mollie has been viewed as an oddity before, and armed with a buggy whip she sallies forth to deliver babies and set broken bones and sew up stabbings in saloons. She has been hired to look after the miners but she soon discovers that the miners’ wives need her more.
“…it’s the women who need help. Some of them seem to get pregnant every year. They’re exhausted. Two women died last year in childbirth, leaving a whole batch of children. I think they just wore out. Some of them came here years ago as mail-order brides, and their fate was to become baby-making machines.”
She responds to a woman who is ill from swallowing half a bottle of Clark’s Pills, one of the many patent nostrums marketed to women with coded phrases like “menses regulators” or “menses stimulators.” Mollie knows
…there was enough ergot and savin in a bottle of Clark’s pills to abort a horse
but the woman, Therese Braunfels is unconscious and Mollie has no way of knowing how many pills she took or when. She manages to save Therese’s life, illegally procures contraceptives from the pharmacy in the next town over, and uses Therese to tell the other miners’ wives to ask Dr. Mollie how to use them.
When the Bannock mine shuts down she moves to a mining town of 1,500 people, five mines, and sixty saloons. But first she has to go home and get divorced, not an easy thing for herself, her husband, or her family.
Divorce on the frontier was almost a commonplace. Mollie had read that one in five Montana marriages ended in divorce, largely because a husband would abandon his family when his dreams of gold collapses. He would be off to a new dig, to a new hope—maybe to a new wife. But there in [Oklahoma], divorce was viewed as a disgrace.
Back in Marysville, she is busy with her practice and with falling in love with the man who will become her second husband, until the Panic of 1893 slows everything down. Mollie moves to Helena with her second husband, Ben Atwater, in hopes of better prospects. Only to be confounded by an unexpected pregnancy at the age of 41, when she determines to close her practice to raise her daughter. She turns what attention she can spare to inveigling the Montana legislature into funding a sanatorium for tuberculosis victims and educating both the legislature and the public on how to prevent scarlet fever and diphtheria, as well as fighting for women’s suffrage. That last only takes twenty years and the inside look at all the ways the anti-suffrage crowd tried to cheat the women out of the vote is as enlightening as it is enraging.
And then there is her return to arms with the appearance of the Spanish flu in 1918, with scenes that read right out of Covid, only we were lucky we had disposable masks.
You must wear a mask, and be careful not to touch it. Change the mask every two hours. The masks must be boiled for a half hour after washing…The masks were needed in a constant supply; each nurse would use at least six or seven a day.
The flu in America begins in Army camps and the government puts the camps under quarantine and cancels the draft.
The flu added another dimension to the agony of the war for Americans. This was a war that had already astounded the world with forms of violence and weaponry hot seen before: the German submarine; the glass ball shrapnel; the artillery barrages; the cruelty of mustard gas; the carnage in the trenches at the Somme and Verdun. And now this strange and seemingly incurable disease that was killing Americans by the thousands, both at home and abroad.
Mollie volunteers to go to Whitefish where she sets up a hospital in the Masonic Temple and trains five schoolteachers and a railroad brakeman to be nurses, because all the nurses are off at war. All of her patients recover, a triumph tempered by the knowledge that half of those Montanans who caught the flu went unreported.
Ben dies in 1931 and Mollie moves to San Francisco to live with her daughter, where she dies ten years later.
This biography, written by her granddaughter in the style of creative nonfiction, is a vivid resurrection of an extraordinary life, from the doctor to the pioneer to the suffragist to a leader in the cause of public health, not to mention wife and mother. As in all good biographies, it is a portrait of the times as much as it is the hero. The epilogue, where Graña explains how and why she came to write this biography, is the perfect coda, with a last line that will make you laugh out loud. Very much worth reading.
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