Five young women peer from the ragged, yellowed page of a dusty old 1926 yearbook. Some of them don flapper outfits and bobbed haircuts, while others wear more traditional Vermont country garb. It’s odd to see them there: men inhabit almost every other picture. But in the fraternity section of this UVM Ariel, a band of five female students staked a small, resolute claim. The group picture is of Alpha Gamma Sigma, a medical society for women founded in 1924 — the same year the College of Medicine’s first female medical student completed her studies. The time was ripe for such an event: just four years before, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution had given women the vote. The doors to academia had been slowly nudging open for what was then called the “gentler sex.” These women slid through and never looked back.
The earliest female student at UVM first walked across a snowy University Green to class in the spring of 1872. At that time, UVM’s medical faculty vehemently opposed accepting women. In 1891 they had actually refused to sell lecture tickets to one woman. But in 1912 Dean Henry Tinkham, M.D., proposed practical reasons for admitting female students: the school needed tuition dollars and the state desperately needed more rural general practitioners. The idea was still too distasteful to the faculty and administration, however, and a decision on the matter was postponed.
By 1918, though, droves of men had been called to World War I. The shortage of students allowed Tinkham to resurrect the issue yet again, and in 1920 he commissioned a report on female admission to other medical schools all around the country. Pressure from Lieutenant Governor Abram Foote, whose daughter aspired to be a physician, legal advice from fellow board of trustees member Judge Edmund Mower, who shared his opinion that public colleges must accept all qualified citizens, and results showing that a majority of grade “A” medical schools around the country had female students, forced a vote by the medical school faculty. The vote in favor of admitting women came in March of 1920. Miss Estelle Foote of Middlebury, the Lieutenant Governor’s daughter, submitted the first application in May of that year.