How did Achsa Bean prove himself?
She hid in British bunkers and subway tunnels from Nazi air raids and helped dig casualties out of the rubble. She worked tirelessly in a rural field hospital during heavy fighting, overseeing the care of an entire ward full of wounded soldiers and civilian women and children. and recruited a fellow woman to join her in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
In the fall of 1942 she returned to Poughkeepsie and took a leave of absence to teach at Vassar College. People kept asking her if she thought women could succeed alongside men as commissioned doctors in the U.S. Army.
It’s a silly question.
“I’m certainly not a feminist,” she said. “But it seems to me that the great demand for doctors should be met by the most competent, male or female.”
Bean, who graduated from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1936, was one of the first when Congress finally agreed to the appointment of female doctors in 1943. She was the obvious choice. Her brave volunteer work in England was an embarrassment to American medical personnel who opposed gender equality in her enlistment.
Bean died in 1975 in his native state of Maine, accompanied by his lifelong partner and fellow physician Barbara Stimson.
Nearly 50 years later, Bean, a rare early medical graduate and faculty member in Rochester, spent most of her career in Poughkeepsie.
Bean, one of UR Medical College’s earliest female graduates
The name Achsa is a biblical name. In the Book of Joshua, a woman named Axar married as a reward for a military victory.
After marriage, her new home is very dry, so she requested and received land with a freshwater source from her father. Achsah is thus an example of a woman showing agency and acquiring possessions even in a highly patriarchal society.
Achsa Mabel Bean was born in 1900 in central Maine. Her father was a traveling salesman with chronic ill health. Bean has worked as a high school teacher, Camp She has worked as a counselor and librarian, and she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in zoology from her Orono campus at the University of Maine.
She spent six years as female dean at the Orono campus and briefly studied at Radcliffe College, then the women’s division of Harvard University, before moving to Rochester in 1933 and enrolling in the University of Rochester Medical School.
She received her medical degree in 1936 (one of three women in a class of 40) and spent the next two years as an obstetrician and gynecologist.
By 1938, Bean’s father had died, and Bean became the primary support for her mother and grandmother.
It was while at Vassar that she met Barbara Stimson, a doctor at Columbia University.
Stimson was a Vassar graduate and a noted specialist in orthopedic surgery.she was also her first cousin Henry StimsonUS Secretary of State.
When World War II began, both women felt compelled to comply. They traveled to England and joined the British medical service as private doctors. They were guests at the home of Waldorf Astor and Nancy Astor. Britain’s first female MPwhen Pearl Harbor was bombed.
At the time, the United States did not appoint female doctors. Female doctors would squeak in conflict zones, and men would not take orders from female doctors. Instead, Stimson and Bean joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, Stimson became a major and Bean became a captain.
Bean told journalists in September 1942, “It seemed impossible for anyone to avoid war. The sooner something was done, the happier I would be.”
“Equal position and respect”
Both women served prominently in war hospitals. They were accustomed to being called “sir” — a bit of military protocol that proved inevitable — and worked side by side with their male colleagues under intense pressure.
Their first tests were soon made when their transatlantic ship was attacked by a submarine. Bean used to tell the story of when he was about to take a long-awaited bath in his London apartment, only for the building to be hit by a bomb while he was filling the tub.
Despite her gender, Bean appeared to be part of a wartime officer.
“She was massively built and had a voice to match,” they wrote. must have looked like a dreadnought.”
In a letter to her mother in February 1942, Bean describes her and Stimson’s shock when technically her superior, Stimson, received a formal salute from a male soldier for the first time.
“We met a wisely saluted private, and Barbara recovered from her surprise quickly enough to admit it, but was rather disoriented,” she wrote. When I turned to see, I could see a bright scarlet rapidly rising from the collar line, and I had a good laugh about it afterwards.”
Bean returned to the United States in September 1942 to help care for his mother. By then, it had become painful for the United States to allow its own female citizens to serve in foreign armed forces, and Stimson approached her cousin, the Secretary of State, directly on the matter.
As Bean put it, “[The female military doctors]don’t faint and they don’t behave badly. They’re seasoned doctors and they know their job.”
In April 1943, Congress passed the Sparkman-Johnson Act, allowing women to receive temporary military service. Bean became a lieutenant in the Naval Medical Corps, becoming the first female lieutenant. She served at Naval Medical Facilities in Maryland, New York City, and Pearl Harbor, and by the end of the war she was promoted to lieutenant colonel.
She returned to Vassar after the war and remained there until 1963, where she was a professor of hygiene and frequently lectured on health care and public service.
“She was a fearless woman and was not afraid to face anything,” recalls Vasser’s colleague. “She inherited her loyalty and her ideals of service and dedicated her life to furthering them.”
“Crop Cream”
After retiring, Bean moved to Owls Head, Maine and designed his own seaside home. Stimson had become more than a professional acquaintance since we first met in 1938.
Stimson followed Bean to Vassar shortly after the war ended. They worked and lived together for nearly 40 years.Though they didn’t say it publicly, those who knew them said it was a romantic relationship, not just a friendship as newspapers of the time reported. I have confirmed that
“That was the consensus,” said Rodney Weeks, whose grandmother was close friends with Bean and Stimson, who retired in Maine.
That makes another hidden fact all the more surprising: Bean, who spent her adult life in a committed same-sex relationship, had a son. Born in August 1929 while studying at She gave him up for adoption by her close family and kept the relationship strictly confidential for the rest of his life.
“You can imagine how confused I was too,” said Deirdre Hendrie. She is the widow of Bean’s son, Gordon Hendry, who died eight years ago.
Gordon Hendry didn’t know his mother until he was 16, but after that he developed a fairly close relationship.
The Hendries family spent most of their lives in British Columbia, Canada, where Deirdre Hendry still resides. Bean and Stimson maintained a relationship with them and Bean’s three grandchildren, visiting each other regularly in Maine and Canada.
Bean’s obituary contained no mention of a son or grandson. In their will, she and Stimson left the Owl Head estate to Gordon Hendry.
“She was a very nice woman, but that was in her own words,” Deirdre Hendrie said. “Of course, she was independent for a long time.” She recalled that Bean and Stimson had a checkup on her to make sure she was in good health before they got married.
Weeks, now secretary of the Mussel Ridge Historical Society in Owls Head, Maine, recalled Bean’s deep, harsh voice — she was a talented singer before smoking cigarettes ruined her vocal cords — But I also remembered how she and Stimson (two highly educated doctors) did it. She lived in a big city and stood out in rural Maine.
“At the time, the area was a little backward, people were using outhouses and things like that,” Weeks said. “So when educated people came along, it was a big deal. They were really good.. And to a 10-year-old boy, she was just a sweetheart.”
Carolyn Philbrook, vice president of the Historical Society, would sometimes go with her grandmother to clean the woman’s house or see the dogs, a pair of Norwegian Elkhounds named Gunda and Jarda. . Bean sometimes put her in a bright blue Mercedes.
“She was very kind, very down-to-earth. Just helping,” Philbrook said. “If I was sick, my mother would take me to see if Dr. Bean could tell me what was wrong….they fit in really well with the community.” increase.”
Achsa Bean died in March 1975 and was buried in Maine. Stimson said she lived until 1986.
After World War II, Bean frequently lectured on public health and military experience. She never forgot to mention some of her own core principles: the virtue of service to her own community and country and the importance of equal opportunity.
In a speech after returning home, Bean said, “In British hospitals filled only with soldiers, female doctors worked alongside the men and had the same status and respect as the male contingent.” They stand up in times of crisis, just as they show courage in .It’s the personal qualities that count.”
Contact Staff Writer Justin Murphy [email protected].
