My project is called Women in Medicine and the Suffrage Movement. I want to create an interactive website that tells the story of early women doctors and how their work connected to the fight for women’s rights. The website will include images, documents, videos, and a timeline to help visitors explore their stories. I hope to show how women’s achievements in medicine helped them make a difference in society and politics. I plan to use WordPress to build the site, with TimelineJS for the interactive timeline and galleries for images and videos.

This project focuses on the challenges women faced in becoming doctors in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many were denied access to medical schools and professional training, but they created their own institutions like the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and the New England Female Medical College. These women not only became doctors but also worked to improve society and fight for voting rights. This topic is important because it shows how professional success and political activism were connected. I want to explore questions like: How did women in medicine support the suffrage movement? What obstacles did they face? How did female medical colleges help them succeed? And how did their medical work influence social change?

I am using both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources include the Bulletin of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which shows the college’s efforts to support women doctors in 1920, and Elizabeth Blackwell’s book The Laws of Life, which encouraged women to learn about their health and take part in society. The Declaration of Sentiments by Elizabeth Cady Stanton also highlights the struggle for women’s political rights. Secondary sources include articles and research guides about women physicians and the suffrage movement, which explain how these women combined their careers and activism to create lasting change.

The website will have sections about the early barriers women faced, their professional achievements, their role in the suffrage movement, and their long-term impact. I plan to include images of medical schools, photographs of women doctors, historical documents, and video clips. Interactive elements will include a clickable timeline and annotated primary sources so visitors can explore important events and quotes. Short videos about figures like Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi will bring their stories to life.

My audience will be students, educators, historians, and the general public. I want the site to be engaging and easy to navigate. Accessibility is important, so all images will have alt text, videos will have captions or transcripts, and the design will be simple with clear fonts and colors. My next steps are to collect images and sources, create the timeline, and add descriptions for the artifacts. Challenges might include getting permission for some media, making the website run smoothly with all the multimedia, and managing my time to finish before the deadline. Overall, this project will highlight the important contributions of women doctors and show how their work helped advance women’s rights.