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Introduction
On October 1st, 1877, Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson gave the Inaugural Address at the London School of Medicine for Women, which she had helped to establish three years earlier. Only the previous year, the UK Medical Act had allowed the country’s medical authorities to license women as doctors for the first time, and it is difficult to think of better advice to anyone hoping to bring about important social change.
IN conclusion I would beg you to remember two points.* The first is that without indulging in any high flown estimates of our own importance, it is impossible to deny that the future success of our cause depends very much upon the judgment and moderation, as well as upon the zeal of its earliest advocates.* In England, where the conservative instinct is so strong and so general,* it is of paramount importance, if we would carry the community with us, not to put ourselves needlessly in opposition to this instinct by any want of good taste or even by want of deference to the taste of the community. “All things are lawful, but all things are not expedient”* and it is not for us who are in charge of this question to endanger it by tilting against everything else capable of being improved. Let us reserve ourselves for our own work and peg away manfully at that, trying in all legitimate ways to carry opinion with us.
* Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was born Elizabeth Garrett on June 9th, 1836, and married James George Skelton Anderson in 1871. The couple had three children, Louisa (1873–1943), Margaret (1874–1875) and Alan (1877–1952). Louisa went on to be Chief Surgeon of the Women’s Hospital Corps and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine; Alan followed his father into the shipping business, and became a Conservative MP for the City of London and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Elizabeth’s sister Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) was a vigorous campaigner for women’s suffrage.
* The principle that judgment and moderation must guide any serious reformer remained with Anderson throughout her life. A pioneer in the campaign for Women’s Suffrage, she joined Emily Davies and John Stuart Mill in preparing a petition for Parliament in 1866, which sadly was unsuccessful: see Imagine. Unlike her sister Millicent, however, and her daughter Louisa, Anderson regretted the movement’s increasingly antagonistic approach of later years and withdrew from active involvement in 1911. See posts tagged Women’s Suffrage Movement (4).
* Here, Anderson uses the word ‘conservative’ to mean ‘resistant to change’. In that sense, all the major parties were disappointingly conservative when it came to broadening the roles of women in society. At the time, Elizabeth, Louisa and Millicent identified as Liberals and Unionists: they disapproved strongly of nannying regulation, and believed in free markets, family life, individual liberty tempered by social responsibility, and the sovereign integrity of the United Kingdom. Today, such views would see them labelled Thatcherite Conservatives.
* See 1 Corinthians 6:12, 1 Corinthians 10:23. That is to say, thanks to the removal of various legal restrictions on women in medicine, women now had an opportunity to change many things, but not everything necessarily needed changing.
Précis
In 1877, the country’s first qualified woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, spoke to the new intake of students at the medical school she had founded three years earlier. She warned them that being pioneers required not only enthusiasm but restraint, and that their task was not wholesale revolution, but to win public support for women doctors by their example. (59 / 60 words)
In 1877, the country’s first qualified woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, spoke to the new intake of students at the medical school she had founded three years earlier. She warned them that being pioneers required not only enthusiasm but restraint, and that their task was not wholesale revolution, but to win public support for women doctors by their example.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, besides, despite, or, ought, since, whereas, who.
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