A famous family (though not in Bristol)

THE headline fact of Elizabeth Blackwell’s achievement obscures the way in which most of her siblings went on to prominent roles in American life.

The Blackwells were a remarkable clan; quarrelsome and headstrong, often falling out with one another, but bonded tightly together not just for reasons of blood, but also because of the family’s early financial difficulties when their father died.

Emily Blackwell was the third woman in the US to earn a medical degree, while Sarah Ellen Blackwell was a successful author and artist. Eldest sister Anna was a poet and journalist.

Brothers Samuel Charles and Henry Blackwell both married prominent anti-slavery campaigners – Antoinette Brown and Lucy Stone, respectively.

You can’t help but get the impression that this was a family in which the women were in charge; again, this is partly because of the way the sisters Anna, Marian and Elizabeth supported the family after Samuel’s death, but also because Samuel Blackwell had insisted on something almost unheard-of for the time – that his daughters all got a good education.

Mostly this came from private tutors, and while the girls were young would have marked them out as different to other girls their age. Perhaps this further drove them into one another’s company.

The Blackwells would become members of what might nowadays be called the “liberal elite”.

They were feminists, antislavery campaigners, antivivisectionists, social reformers, public health advocates, and all were committed Christians. Samuel Charles Blackwell married one of the first women to be ordained by a conventional church in the U.S.

America seems to have provided them with more opportunities than Britain might have done.

Women in a large middle-class family which lost its main breadwinner in England might have found work as governesses or school teachers, or hoped for a safe, respectable marriage, but a young nation growing up, even via a murderous Civil War in the 1860s, offered wider opportunities.