At a time when Black women were largely excluded from formal training, Mary Eliza Mahoney set a new standard for who could serve in American hospitals.
Sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, scrubbing floors, emptying bedpans, and eventually assisting nurses and doctors. For 15 years, Mary Eliza Mahoney toiled at Boston’s New England Hospital for Women and Children as a maid, cook, and washerwoman. These were the only jobs open to Black women during an era historians now darkly recall as “the nadir of American race relations.”
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