Dr. Madge Baker Gaskin: The Making of a Woman Physician in the 1920s

During the 1920s, women who aspired to be doctors often found the South unwelcoming. Women interested in the medical profession, encountered multiple roadblocks when they applied to medical school programs because of sexist stereotypes and cultural expectations. These categorizations relegated women to home concerns and this subservient status conflicted with the common perceptions of male professionalism in the medical field. Nevertheless, in 1926 Madge Baker Gaskin overcame gender discrimination and challenged accepted social norms to graduate from the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston. By discussing Baker’s exceptional experiences as a medical student, resident, and practicing physician in the 1930s, this biography contributes to the historical scholarship of Southern women medical students and physicians during the first decades of the twentieth century.