Clemence Sophia Harned Lozier

• Clemence Sophia Lozier
• Born: December 11, 1813
• Died: April 26, 1888

Physician, women’s rights activist, and reformer, was the youngest of thirteen children born to David Harned, a farmer of Huguenot descent, and Hanna (Walker) Harned, of English Quaker descent. She spent her childhood in Plainfield, New Jersey, the place of her birth, where she was raised a Methodist, the religion of her father, and educated at Plainfield Academy. She was orphaned at the age of eleven.

At some time in Clemence Harned’s sixteenth or seventeenth year, she married Abraham Wit-ton Lozier, a carpenter and builder from New York City. The marriage, though a happy one, was plagued with misfortune. The Loziers had several children, though only the youngest, Abraham Witton Jr. lived past infancy. Soon after the marriage, Abraham Lozier became ill. To support the family, Clemence Lozier opened a girls’ school, and for eleven years she taught approximately sixty students a year.

During this time, she began to cultivate what became lifelong interests in medicine and reform. She became active in the New York Female Moral Reform Society. And, inspired by her brother, Dr. William Harned, she read medical books and in her school instructed her pupils in anatomy, physiology, and hygiene—topics then deemed quite unconventional for young women.

Abraham Lozier died in 1837, and in 1844 Clemence Lozier left New York City, settling upstate first in Albany and then in Webster, outside Rochester. At some time after her move to Albany, she married John Baker. This marriage was an unhappy one, and Lozier later sought a divorce—an unconventional act for women of her day; they were divorced on April 27, 1861. In 1849 Lozier (then Clemence Baker) enrolled in the Central Medical College of Rochester, an eclectic institution. She was graduated with highest honors from its successor, the Syracuse Medical College, in 1853.

After graduating, Lozier returned to New York City to practice medicine. She specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, offering women medical care from a physician of their own sex. Patients sought her out. Seeing their lack of information about female health and physiology, Lozier in 1860 began a series of lectures to women in her home, on anatomy, physiology, and hygiene. The vast popularity of her lectures led her to open a medical college for women, and with the help of her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she founded the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women on April 14, 1863. It was the first medical school for women in New York State.

As a homeopathic institution, Lozier’s school deviated from the medical mainstream. It stood in marked contrast to the medically orthodox Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, founded by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell in 1868. Though the two colleges coexisted throughout the remainder of the century, offering women medical alternatives, Blackwell never accepted Lozier’s school as legitimate and saw it as a threat to the future of women in medicine. This antagonistic relationship reflected a major difference that divided nineteenth-century women doctors from one another. Nevertheless, Lozier’s school thrived. She served as dean as well as professor of gynecology and obstetrics for a quarter of a century, and when she died in 1888, the school had graduated more than 200 women physicians. Thirty years later, her college and hospital became part of the New York Medical College of the Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals.

Lozier’s medical activities extended beyond the institution she built. She was reportedly the first woman to present a paper to the New York State Homeopathic Society. She wrote popular health books for women, including Child-birth Made Easy (1870) and Dress (n.d.). She was involved in other reform work for women as well, particularly the woman suffrage movement. She served as president of both the New York City Woman Suffrage Society (1873-86) and the National Woman Suffrage Association (1877-78); she donated money to Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage paper, The Revolution; and she petitioned the New York legislature in 1875 to allow women to vote for presidential electors. Beyond her suffrage work, she was active in the New York women’s club Sorosis and in the National Working Women’s League, and she was president of the Moral Education Society of New York. Lozier’s interests also extended to other areas of reform, with her home a meeting place for opponents of slavery and advocates of sanitary and prison reform.

The last years of her life brought new problems. Lozier went bankrupt in 1871, trying to support her college and hospital after it moved to a more expensive building. She began to suffer from angina pectoris, and her practice slowed down. She died in her home in New York of heart disease at the age of seventy-four and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Her funeral, attended by more than forty women physicians, all graduates of her school, was a testimony to her accomplishments. Her friend Stanton characterized them well at a meeting of the Women’s League in New York City shortly after Lozier’s death: “As a mother, wife, physician, friend, and reformer we cannot too highly exalt her virtues.”

The major source of information on Clemence Lozier’s life is the pamphlet in Memoriam: Mrs. Clemence Sophia Lozier, M.D. (1888). Notable American Women has a thorough biographical sketch. E. P. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (1957), discusses Clemence Lozier particularly in relationship to her school and hospital. See also E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3 (1886); I. H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898); and the Dictionary of American Biography (1933). A record of Lozier’s graduation (as Clemence Baker) from Syracuse Medical College is in the Union Journal of Medicine, April 1853. Obituaries appeared in the New York World April 28, 1888, and the Woman’s Journal, May 5, 1888.