Biography of lavinia l dock biografia
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She and her fellow inmates declared a hunger strike, a tactic that Alice Paul brought with her from England. However, no records were found of Hopkins nurses or nursing alumni who publicly opposed the vote for women.
Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing, graduating class of 1903 (Chesney Archives)
Easton Emergency Hospital, postcard (Chesney Archives)
Dixon stands third from the left on the picket line of Nov.
10, 1917 (Library of Congress)
Mary Bartlett Dixon Cullen
The daughter of a wealthy Maryland family, Mary Bartlett Dixon sought independence by attending the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, graduating in 1903. The book eventually went through eight editions and sold more than 150, 000 copies.
The same year that Materia Medica appeared, Dock became assistant director of the new school of nursing at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
She spent the rest of her career leading an international capaign against the "vast financial interests" that benefitted from the opium trade.
Opposition within nursing
There were many nurses who did not support suffrage. Three years later she was made head of the Illinois Training School for Nurses at Cook County Hospital, Chicago.
She left this position and nursing education as well in 1896, giving her lack of skill in dealing with people as the reason.
In 1893 Dock became the secretary of the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses, the first national nursing association. Henry Street was unique among settlements in having a visiting nurse service, and Dock became a lifelong friend and confidante of its nurse and social worker-founder, Lillian Wald.
She was jailed briefly three times for taking part in suffrage demonstrations. In addition to teaching, she took on leadership roles in the state graduate nurses association, and in its two leading suffrage organizations. In 1912 at the International Council of Nurses conference in Cologne, Germany, her resolution endorsing women's suffrage passed unanimously.
Soon after arriving, she wrote that she had already “been through four fights and one riot (and not always in the capacity of an innocent bystander).”
“The question is not whether one is afraid or not. Upon her return to the United States, Dock became a member of the Woman's Party, picketed the White House and as a result was sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse.
Lavinia Dock was devoted to the ideals of freedom and justice for oppressed individuals. Altogether, Dock was jailed three times. She was one of the founders and the first secretary (1899-1922) of the International Council of Nurses, serving without salary and traveling to Europe a number of times at her own expense. From a well-to-do family, she chose to train as a nurse and after serving as a visiting nurse among the poor she compiled the first manual of drugs for nurses, Materia Medica for Nurses (1890).
She gave up nursing around the age of 50, but dedicated her energies to other causes such as improved working conditions, birth control, and women’s right to vote. Yet she felt compelled to witness the war firsthand, and served at battlefield hospitals on the Western Front from 1915 to 1916. The force-feeding of suffragists raised ethical objections from doctors and nurses; Dock had written a column condemning it in the American Journal of Nursing eighteen years earlier.
This letter to La Motte's close friend discusses leading Hopkins physician William Osler's anti-suffrage position.
She moved with her husband to St. Paul, and became a leader in the movement to professionalize and regulate nursing in Minnesota.
Her increasing political involvement convinced her that women needed representation in government; she believed that nurses’ professional interests and concerns aligned with those of the working class, and advocated for the regulation of industry, pay equity, and universal public health insurance.
On a visit to Washington, DC, in 1915, Colvin learned about Alice Paul’s plan for a national suffrage amendment.
Prolonged illness in Dock's family forced her in 1922 to give up her organizational activities and retire with her four sisters to the family farm in Pennsylvania.
- Father:
- Gilliard Dock
- Mother:
- Lavinia Lloyd Bombaugh
- Brother:
- George Dock
- colleague:
- Mary Adelaide Nutting
He was a well-to-do landowner.
References
Lavinia Lloyd Dock: An Activist in Nursing and Social Reform
This historical study focused on the life of Lavinia Lloyd Dock as a reformer in nursing and social movements during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
However, when she married Dr. John Colvin in 1897, it was considered improper for her to continue working. She was an ardent pacifist, which influenced her efforts to make nursing an international profession.
Connections
Dock never married. The tour ended with a demonstration in Chicago, where Colvin recalled being “suddenly attacked by a group of men who hurled themselves at us in a flying tackle." There, Paul announced the formation of the National Woman’s Party.