Club Seventeen Regina

After years of poverty and the demands of child-rearing (at one time the household included eight children, five of them Florence's cousins), Eleanor Miller removed her sixteen-year-old daughter from school and kept her at home to dust, sew, cook, and attend the occasional tea party or dance for diversion. The strong-minded Florence had other ideas, and in 1871, at the age of seventeen, she persuaded her parents to allow her to join Sophia Jex-Blake's campaign to open Britain's medical schools to women and to seek matriculation at the University of Edinburgh.

club seventeen regina

Fenwick Miller moved to Edinburgh to prepare for her entrance exams, a number of which she passed "with distinction." But Edinburgh's powerful professors refused to allow women into their classes, blocking Jex-Blake's progress and sending Fenwick Miller back to London. There, undaunted, Fenwick Miller studied medicine at the Ladies' Medical College, completed a clinical practice in midwifery, and, at the age of twenty, set herself up in private practice, going out to visit patients from a bedroom in her mother's home. Two years later, at the age of twenty-two, a radical men's working club invited Fenwick Miller to stand for election to the London School Board--a body responsible for the education of nearly half a million children. Fenwick Miller agreed and was elected to that post, which she held for nine years. 041b061a72