In the spring of 1888, a photographer captured an extraordinary moment in Washington, D.C.
Thirty women stood, sat, and posed for the camera in their floor-length dresses and high, ruffled collars, hair pinned up in buns and braids.
The inaugural meeting of the International Council of Women had drawn luminaries from around the country and the world. At one end of the room sat Clara Barton, founder and president of the American Red Cross. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the grande dames of equal rights for women, centered the front row. Activists from Ireland, Canada, India, Norway, and France—pushing for everything from voting rights to prison reform and prohibition—dotted the group.
In the center of the gathering, casting a profile by looking over her left shoulder, stood 37-year-old scientist Louisa Reed Stowell (B.S. 1876, M.S. 1877). If she had extended her arms, Stowell’s hands would rest on the shoulders of Anthony and Stanton. “She is known in two continents as a specialist in microscopy,” reported Demorest’s Monthly Magazine, “and is the first woman educated in America to be elected as a member of the Royal Microscopical Society of London.”
Stowell was also the lone female instructor at the University of Michigan and in her 11th year of teaching microscopy and histology to botany, pharmacy, and medical students.
The microscope was growing in importance as a research tool—in chemistry, zoology, dentistry, botany, medicine, pharmacy, paleontology, and more—and Stowell was a recognized expert in its uses. She managed the campus microscopical laboratory and taught several courses a semester. With her husband, Dr. Charles Stowell, a professor of physiology and histology and U-M Medical School graduate, she founded and edited a medical journal called The Microscope and wrote a textbook on using the microscope for medical research.
Still, Louisa Stowell was never given the status of professor, despite requests from some members of the Board of Regents. Motions were sent to regental committees, where they died. Her title, for 12 years, was “assistant.”
Stowell was at the 1888 Washington meeting representing the Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae, a predecessor of today’s American Association of University Women. “If I were to state, in a word, the duty of our time,” she told the meeting, “I should declare it to be an unending effort to prove the beneficial effects of the higher training of women on our social and national life.”
Stowell’s students loved her. In 1880, during her third year of teaching, the editors of the student newspaper The University called for more women faculty. They noted that Stowell was “so efficient in her position as a teacher that the powers in charge should have no hesitation in placing women in other responsible positions in various departments.”
When students gathered for commencement in 1884, women in the class made the unheard-of request for Stowell to sit on the stage alongside faculty and administrators. According to the Ann Arbor Courier, “Mrs. Stowell felt that she must politely decline the invitation.”
The Stowells resigned from U-M in 1889. Seven years later, Eliza Mosher, professor of hygiene, became U-M’s first woman professor.
Photo illustration by Carly Parker
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