Imperial Careering: India and the Women's Medical Movement, 1896-1920.

Abstract

India figured prominently in the women's medical movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was both a cause-bringing medical aid to Indian women-and a career-offering employment opportunities to qualified British women doctors. Where most studies have focussed on the early years of the movement in India and the creation of the Dufferin Fund in 1885, this article explores the careers, attitudes and experiences of a second generation of white women doctors, from the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1896 to the end of the First World War. As an exercise in imperial careering, it charts the parallels and connections between women doctors in India and Britain but also assesses the obstacles to the pursuit of medical careers in India and the factors, personal, political and professional, that by 1920 were driving women's medicine in metropole and empire further apart.