 | Grand Old Lady
Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, Spring 2007
By Sharon Parker
On March 1, 1956, at a site that will soon open as a new housing development, the staff of Ripley Hospital for Women, 300 Queen Avenue North in Minneapolis’s Harrison neighborhood, gathered their half dozen or so patients in the large, sunny, enclosed front porch of their picturesque brick building — white women and black women, most or all of whom were there free of charge — threw a modest party with coffee and cookies, sent them home and locked the doors.
“We had a regular tea party,” recalled one of the patients years later. “Then we all left, that was history, Maternity was history.”
Soon after Ripley Hospital discharged its last patients, wished its employees well, and closed up shop, they also sold their buildings — as well as every bed, chair, dresser, pot, pan, and spoon. Their attorney, Russell Bennett, recalled the sale in a 1999 interview:
“They had to let stuff go. They closed the building, and they had a big sale… I remember going there, they had thousands of kitchen utensils, huge metal spoons, and cooking pots; it seemed like such a shame to break it all up.”
This surprising move came only six months after the board of directors had voted to change the name of the institution from its familiar moniker, Maternity Hospital, to Ripley Hospital for Women, to honor its founder, Martha G. Ripley. The name change was announced with an apparent flourish of optimism: “Our new name will help us, as we move into the future, to remember always that we still carry a torch.” But they were whistling in the dark and they most likely knew it — rising hospital costs combined with a host of other factors doomed the hospital. Facing a diminishing endowment and reduced outside funding, they had no choice but to shut it down.
The site stood empty for several years, then housed a nursing home until 1999, after which it was empty again. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and designated a landmark by the city of Minneapolis in 1986.
Purchase in 2001 by Central Community Housing Trust, the site will soon offer mixed-income housing, both in the form of rental and owner-occupied units, in a model blending historic preservation with ample green space in a development named Ripley Memorial Gardens to honor its predecessor. The CCHT aims for the project to be completed later this year. It’s a fitting renaissance for an institution that was first created to meet the needs of the underserved and which, throughout its history, brought women of many incomes and backgrounds together to experience what was at one time among the highest quality maternity care in the country ( as measured by mortality rates).
It is commonly reported that the hospital’s founder, Martha Ripley, was a pioneer as a female physician in the 1880s. While not wishing to disparage the good doctor’s memory or her many accomplishments, it is time to set the record straight for the sake of the many women who practiced medicine and even founded hospitals during this era: Far from being a lonely pioneer, Dr. Ripley was part of a larger movement of women in medicine, one that was not to be matched until well into the 20th century.
While it’s true that just 6 percent of physicians in the United States in 1900 were women, that number was actually greater that it would be in the coming decades, as the number of female physicians declined over the first half of the 20th Century and was not equaled again until the 1950s— and not significantly exceeded until the 1970s. Ripley practiced medicine at a time that saw more than 7,000 women nationally enter the medical profession in what some historians refer to as the 19th century women’s medical movement.
When Martha Ripley stepped off the train in Minneapolis in the fall of 1883 bearing a medical degree from Boston University Medical School (a homeopathic institution), she was preceded by at least seven women doctors in Minneapolis , an a total of 20 in the state, By the 1890s, there were 68 women doctors registered in Minnesota.
Female Physicians were popular at that time for several reasons: because medicine was seen as an extension woman’s nurturing role, because women were though to be virtuous at a time when corruption and incompetence were common in all professions, and because new immigrants from Europe were more comfortable with female doctors ( nearly 38 percent of the city’s population in 1890 was foreign born). Homeopathy was also widely accepted and even preferred by many at that time.
Women were founding hospitals at an astonishing rate, too. In 1882, doctors Mary G. Hood and Mary T. Whetstone founded the Northwestern Hospital for Women and Children (later Abbott Northwestern and then Abbott). In 1892, Sarah Harrison Knight, an activist in the Methodist Church founded Asbury Hospital. Other hospitals that opened in the 1880s were Minnesota College Hospital, Minneapolis General Hospital, St. Mary’s, and Homeopathic Hospital of Minneapolis.
The prevalence of women physicians and of homeopaths, was such that the founders of Maternity Hospital had no qualms about specifying in their articles of incorporation in 1887 the “The general medical departments of this hospital shall always be under the care and control of homeopathic women physicians who shall be members of the board of directors and this section cannot be amended.” It was amended, however, in 1928, when the articles specified only that “A woman physician appointed by the board of directors shall be in residence at the hospital.”
By the 1950s, only the board of directors had to be comprised of women, so scarce had become female physicians. There had been no more mention of homeopaths after 1928.
The beginning of Maternity Hospital stems from a seemingly chance encounter when the good doctor met three women in need and found a way to help them all. It was in November 1886 that she brought together two young women who were unmarried and pregnant, and an older woman in need of work. She rented small quarters as a shelter, hired two older women to take care of the two young women, and Maternity Hospital was born.
One of the early homes of Maternity Hospital was near Homeopathic Hospital, in the Whittier neighborhood (a site that, as near as I could figure, is now under 35W), where Ripley also practiced. Ripley ran a very successful private medical practice that was one of the largest in the city.
Dr. Ripley’s popularity was probably due in part to her activism. She was elected president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association the same year she arrived in Minneapolis, she advocated for temperance, for adding women to the board of education and matrons to the police force, and for clean water and other public health measures. She joined the efforts to raise the age of consent for girls from 10 to 18, a cause that was also championed by Professor Maria Sanford of the University of Minnesota and Archbishop John Ireland. The legislature raised the age to 14 in 1891 but refused to go any higher. Ripley was so fed up that she personally petitioned the Senate for the right to vote, a gesture that was met with laughter and derision.
Maternity Hospital moved multiple times to increasingly larger quarters until in 1896, the hospital board acquired a large, country-like estate in North Minneapolis, where it had room for several buildings — as well as gardens; a 1926 federal report noted that the hospital had a garden that provided fresh produce to patients, and credited this, in part, for the unusually good health of the patients. It was there, at 300 Queen Avenue North, that the hospital set down roots and continued to provide quality health care to women and infants for 60 years.
 Learn more about Ripley Gardens
Minneapolis Observer Quarterly
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