Over the next decade, Mahoney gradually built a strong professional reputation as a charming, discreet, even-tempered and highly competent private nurse, enabling her to raise her rates in 1892 to $2.50 per day or $15 per week. That’s the equivalent of around $40 today, a very modest amount for what could easily be 24-hour-a-day duty. Mahoney would spend much of her nursing career as a private-duty nurse, initially charging the princely sum of $1.50 per day. If local hospitals were reluctant to hire nurses of color, there were plenty of affluent white families willing to do so. However, the Massachusetts Medical Library maintained a Nurses’ Directory, which served as a sort of bulletin board for nurses to offer their services to private parties. Nursing for $1.50/DayĪlthough Mahoney was now among the best-trained, most qualified professional nurses in the nation, hospitals willing to hire Black nurses - whatever their qualifications - remained few and far between. Only five more Black nurses would graduate before the turn of the century. Of the 42 students in her cohort, only three others graduated. She graduated in August 1879, the first Black woman in the U.S. In 1878, at the age of 33, Mahoney became the program’s first Black nursing student. However, the school’s charter permitted only one Black student and one Jewish student per cohort. The new nursing school was nominally open to Black and Jewish applicants, which many early nursing programs were not. It was an intensive 16-month program involving both classroom study and practical experience, probably inspired at least in part by the rigorous midwife training Zakrzewska had completed in Berlin before becoming a physician. In 1872, Zakrzewska decided the New England Hospital for Women and Children should establish a formal nurse training school, the first of its kind in the U.S. She was not a nurse or even a nurse’s aide, although after she had worked in the hospital for some years and developed working relationships with the doctors, she sometimes assisted the nurses with their work, and they came to trust her judgment. Not long after the hospital opened, Mahoney joined its support staff, working as a custodian, janitor and cook. It was also operated and staffed entirely by women, providing sorely needed training and clinical practice opportunities for female physicians and surgeons. July 1862, Marie Zakrzewska, M.D., a German-Polish immigrant who had been a midwife in Berlin before earning her medical degree, established a new hospital in Boston: the New England Hospital for Women and Children.Īs its name implied, the hospital cared exclusively for female and pediatric patients. Lay nursing paid poorly there were as yet no formal training schools for nurses and few institutions would hire people of color for any but the most menial work. Mahoney took an interest in nursing as a teenager, but opportunities were scarce. It wasn’t until she was 10 years old that a new state law permitted Black children to attend school alongside their white peers. Mahoney and her younger siblings were born in Massachusetts, which had been a free state since the 1780s, but even there, widespread discrimination and segregation, official or otherwise, remained the norm. In states like North Carolina, where both of her parents had been enslaved, it was a serious crime to teach slaves to read and write, on the grounds that it had “a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to produce insurrection and rebellion.” When Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in 1845, slavery was still legally practiced in half the U.S. ever to earn a professional nursing degree. This Boston-born nurse was a true pioneer: The first Black woman in the U.S.
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