Women doctors? Gasp!

Many people might not realize this, but Johns Hopkins Medical School admitted women from its opening in 1893, due to a smart Baltimore philanthropist who insisted both men and women be allowed in on equal footing.

This and other pieces of the history of women doctors played a role in my novel Cora’s Secret Engagement.

The inspiration for this book, though, came from a wonderful work of nonfiction by Wendy Moore entitled No Man’s Land, which tells the true story of physicians Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson, and the military hospital they set up in London during World War I. Staffed entirely by women, it attracted help from around the world, including from the United States.

I began to wonder, as I read that engrossing story, what the experience of working in that hospital might have been like for young women from the US and how they would fit back into society after their duties were no longer required.

Thus, Cora Finch Montague, my heroine, was born in my imagination. As I researched this novel, I encountered the equally phenomenal story of Baltimore philanthropist Mary Elizabeth Garrett who, with several other women, helped provide crucial funding for the founding of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She gave the money, however, with one caveat: the school must admit women equal to men.

It took many years, of course, for true equality to take hold, but my heroine, Cora, though fictional, has struggles that mirror those of many women in the medical field at the time.

Even as late as the 1930s, in fact, women were discouraged from going into nursing because it would expose them to the male anatomy and was deemed an unseemly profession. Nonetheless, they persisted. Another source of information on women in medicine (nursing, in this case) is the book If I Perish about nurses in World War II.

My thanks to Andrew Harrison, an archivist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, for sending me the actual catalog and admission requirements for the medical school in 1919 and for pointing me to an online biography of Mary Elizabeth Garrett.

A more comprehensive look at her life can be found in Kathleen Waters Sander’s book: Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age.

A wonderful read about the medical school at Johns Hopkins and ten individuals—several of them women—who helped shape it into a world-class facility of education and healing is A Scientific Revolution by Ralph H. Hruban and Will Linder. It’s an engrossing and accessible read filled with inspiring and some heartbreaking stories.

As of this writing, men still outnumber women as physicians—64 to 35 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And women doctors only outnumber men in the same specialties they were forced to work in back in my fictional character’s time—pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology. But things are changing. According to statistics from the Association of American Medical Colleges, in 2019 women outnumbered men for the first time in medical school enrollment.

Pioneers like the two women doctors at the Endell Street Hospital helped break that ground, and I hope my fictional story of an aspiring female medical student inspires as well as entertains.

Rejected By the Best Series

The life of an author is filled with rejection. Back in the day, when agents and editors used the postal service to correspond, I had two files’ worth of rejection letters. Many were for books that went on to be published by traditional houses, a few for books I self-published after I threw in the towel on the submission process.

Every author has a rejections file of some sort, now probably an email one. And like me, those authors probably go on to do something with some of those manuscripts–from small press to hybrid to self-publishing–only reserving the ol’ “book funeral” for ones they’re not sure are worth the effort.

I have a few manuscripts–maybe three–that don’t fit into that book funeral category. Yes, they’re genre fiction, but their stories call to me in a way that leaves me regretting abandoning them. They’ve all been rejected in one way or another by a few big houses, and then I decided not to shop them around as I lit on projects that kept me focused for long stretches of time.

My three unpublished manuscripts fall into the romance genre. One’s a historical, the other a contemporary, the third a romantic suspense.

I’m considering self-publishing them, at least at the Kindle store. I know how to put a cover together, how to write the metadata for the book, how to set it all up for e-publishing.

And as I contemplate this possibility, I impishly want to call this series of unrelated books “Rejected by the Best.” 🙂

One of them, the historical, I’d written to target a publishing house holding an Open Submissions month (when authors can submit works directly and not through an agent). Before that month rolled around, but after I’d finished writing, the publishing house announced it was closing.

The other two I’d written targeting another house and sent in the manuscripts at the proposal stage. Maybe that was a mistake. They were both rejected. Perhaps if I’d finished them and sent in the whole story, I’d have had a better chance. Who knows?

All I know is I wasn’t up for the long slog of finding an agent to market these books, so they’ve sat in my Novels file for a year or more. Anyway, below is a description of each one. I might release them on Kindle in the coming months. Let me know if you’d be interested in reading them:

CORA’S SECRET ENGAGEMENT (historical romance): In the summer of 1919, Cora Montague returns from working in a London woman-staffed hospital yearning to become a doctor. When she encounters an old friend, Bill Watkins, at a party her parents give to bring her back to life after the war, she finds hetoo has hopes that might go against parental wishes — he wants to study to be an artist. The wounded war vet Bill and the fiercely independent Cora strike a bargain. They’ll pretend to be engaged to get their parents to leave them alone while they study during the summer for their prospective goals–a medical school entrance exam for her, and an entree into a prestigious French painter’s studio for him. The only problem with this plan? When they fall in love and hate the thought of parting. Cora’s Secret Engagement is more than a love story, though. It contains historical information on how Johns Hopkins came to admit women to its medical school from its founding, the result of a smart woman’s donation to the institution that had one caveat–that admissions not be limited to men. Note: I started a cover for this book. It’s posted below.

VALENTINE STORY (contemporary romance): Grace Dunleavy and Jason Vanderfeld want the same car — a sweet 1969 Camaro, a vehicle released during the year of Woodstock, the moonshot and fifty-cents-a-gallon gas when both their parents were young and eager to show their independence. It was the first vehicle Jason’s father ever bought, and it was the first one Grace’s adopted mother ever wanted. As Grace and Jason clash over who gets the car, they fight an inner war over their growing attraction for each other, a battle stoked by a generational feud between their families of haves (Jason’s) and have-nots (Grace’s) that ultimately finds resolution on Valentine’s Day when they come to a mutual agreement on who should have the Camaro. Note: I actually started a cover design for this book, too, which I post below!

TAkING THE FALL (romantic suspense): FBI Agent Anna Jankowski feels like a failure after panicking during a sting operation that costs a fellow agent his life. She transfers to desk work after that incident where she becomes the handler/surveillance partner/eyes and ears for agent Gavin Bodine as he tries to bring down a financial scam operation. Though they’ve never met, Gavin is used to hearing Anna’s honeyed voice in his Bluetooth device while undercover, and the two develop a warm, bantering relationship. They’re finally thrown together face-to-face when their boss asks them to take on a ransom-ware case involving a big financial firm. With the clock ticking on the ransom, they both dive into the hunt, only to find their every step dogged by danger–villains who trail them and worse, make them, especially Anna, look like the perpetrators of the scheme. When she believes Gavin is starting to wonder about her innocence, Anna goes rogue to find the real culprit, only teaming up with Gavin again when he convinces her he trusts her implicitly. In a sting to bring in the wrongdoer, it is Gavin on the mic whispering instructions in Anna’s ear through her Bluetooth, a reversal of how they first met.

Both of the above contemporary romances are short–only about 50,000 words, a standard length for what is called “category” romance, while the historical is a bit longer.

Stay tuned for when I do release them, and I hope more authors start proudly releasing their own Rejected by the Best series, telling readers how their stories didn’t catch the eye of a publisher but might be something average readers like!

Libby is an Edgar finalist, a Launchpad Prose Top 50 finalist, and a BookLife quarter finalist twice. She writes mystery, historical fiction, women’s fiction and more under the names Libby Sternberg and Libby Malin, and one of her romantic comedies was bought for film. Her retelling of Jane Eyre,  titled Sloane Hall,  was one of only 14 books highlighted in the Huffington Post on the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte’s birth, and her recent refashioning of The Great Gatsby, titled Daisy, has been praised by Booklist as “original and charming.” Go here to read more about her: www.LibbySternberg.com