building was completed and furnished in a style of elegance far beyond what was appropriated to that purpose. On April 2, with a great flourish, the immense building was thrown open for public inspection. A large number of women applied at once for admission, but encountered a set of rules that drove most of them away. This gave Judge Hilton an excuse for violating his obligation to carry out the plan of his dead benefactor, and in a few weeks he closed the house to working women and opened it as the Park Hotel, for which it was so admirably furnished and fitted that it was the general opinion that it was intended for this from the beginning. Great indignation was felt in the community, the women calling a meeting to express their dissapointment and dissatisfaction. This was held in Cooper Institute, under the auspices of the Woman Suffrage Association.[1] Had Mr. Stewart provided a permanent home for working women it would have been but a meager return for the underpaid toil of the thousands who had labored for half a century to build up his princely fortune. But even the idea of such an act of justice died with him.
In 1879 that eminent philanthropist Dr. Hervey Backus Wilbur, superintendent of the State Idiot Asylum at Syracuse, urged the passage of a law requiring the employment of competent women as physicians in the female wards of the State insane asylums. Petitions prepared by him were circulated by the officers of the Women's Medical College, of the New York Infirmary, by Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell of the State Board of Charities, and by Drs. Willard Parker, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and other eminent physicians of New York. The bill prepared by Dr. Wilbur was introduced in the Assembly by Hon. Erastus Brooks, and required the trustees of each of the four State asylums for the insane, "to employ one or more competent, well-educated female physicians to have the charge of the female patients of said asylum, under the direction of the medical superintendents of the several asylums, as in the case of the other or male assistant physicians, and to take the place of such male assistant physician or physicians in the wards of the female patients." Although Dr. Wilbur stood at the head of his profession, his authority upon everything connected with the feeble-minded being not only recognized in this country but in Europe also as absolute, yet this bill, which
- ↑ Mrs. Lozier presided. Addresses were made by Matilda Fletcher of Iowa, Mrs. Helen Slocum and Mrs. Devereux Blake.
