woman founds her claim to equal civil and political rights with man. In all sections of our land their voices have been heard by interested and delighted audiences. There are about one hundred and fifty women in the medical profession in the different cities of the State. Mrs. Yeomans, of Clinton, is a successful practitioner. Mrs. King, allopathist, and Mrs. Hortz, homeopathist, are regular graduates in good practice at Des Moines. Dr. Harding, electrician, and Dr. Hilton, allopathist, also graduates, have all the practice they can attend to in Council Bluffs. In 1883, Dr. Jennie McCowen was elected president of the Scott County Medical Society. This was the first time a woman was ever elected to that office in this State, if not in the United States.
It is quite sure that Iowa may justly claim the first woman in the profession of dentistry—Mrs. Lucy B. Hobbs, as early as 1863.[1] At Cresco there is the firm of Dr. L. F. & Mrs. M. E. Abbott, dental surgeons. At Mt. Pleasant, Mrs. M. E. Hildreth is a licensed dentist in successful practice.
Rev. Augusta Chapin was, I think, the first woman to enter the sacred office in this State. Miss Safford, Algona; Mrs. Gillette, Knoxville; Mrs. M. A. Folsom, Marshalltown; Florence E. Kollock, Waverly; Mrs. M. J. Janes, Spencer; Mrs. Hartsough, Ft. Dodge, are regularly ordained preachers of the Universalist and Unitarian faiths. There are several licensed preachers of the M. E. Church, but none have received regular ordination.
Iowa furnished the following women who went to the front as nurses during the war: Mrs. Harlan, wife of Senator Harlan; Mrs. Almira Fales, Mrs. Anne Wittenmeyer, Miss Phebe Allen, Mrs. Jerusha R. Small, Miss Melcena Elliott, Mrs. Arabella Tannehill. These all did good service in hospital and on the field, and some of them laid down their lives as a sacrifice. We copy the following as one of the many facts of the war:
Some years ago Adjutant-General Baker of Des Moines received a letter of inquiry asking about a certain soldier in the Twenty-fourth Iowa infantry. The tone of the letter was so peculiar as to attract considerable attention and create much comment in the office. In reply the general stated that the records of the regiment and the record of the soldier (whom, for the sake of convenience, we will call Smith, although that is far from the real name) were in his office. A few days afterwards a gentleman from Northern Iowa appeared, inquired for General Baker, and was closeted with him long enough to divulge the following singular tale:
When the war broke out Miss Mary Smith, daughter of the general's visitor, was residing in Ohio, working for a farmer. Her father's family had moved to Iowa the fall preceding the attack on Sumter, leaving Mary behind to follow in the spring. Various causes conspired to delay her departure for her Iowa home until autumn, and it was September before she landed at Muscatine, from which place she expected to travel by land to her father's house. She was a large-sized, hearty-looking girl, eighteen years of age. Arriving at Muscatine, some strange freak induced her to assume man's apparel and enlist in the Twenty-fourth infantry, then in rendezvous at that city. She did this without exciting any suspicion, burned all her feminine garments and papers, neglected to inform her friends of her arrival, and became a soldier. Some comment was elicited by her beardless face and girlish appearance, but as
- ↑ See New York chapter, page 401.
