Dr. Clemence Lozier became one of the very first women doctors in the country in order to save other women from her own sorrowful fate. She was also one of the most successful, using the vast fortune she earned to open one of the first medical colleges for women and to fund the fight for women’s suffrage alongside her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Now that her only son is marrying, Dr. Lozier is so close to having what she has always wanted most: the family she was never blessed with herself. Charlotte, however, a doctor too, has big dreams of her own. She is determined to prove, generations ahead of her time, that women can successfully combine careers with family life. But wanting more, at a time when women didn’t even have basic rights, will risk not only both of their dreams, but Charlotte’s very life, as well as that of her unborn child.
Set against the backdrop of the women’s rights movement, The Doctoress opens at the start of the fight for suffrage, ending with its split into two opposing factions a few short years later. Peopled with some of the most famous women of the era, from Clara Barton to Lucy Stone, it brings to life a period of time when deadly epidemics were a constant threat, alternative medicine was flourishing, in particular homeopathy, and women, for the very first time in American history, were actively pursuing careers, not simply work, outside of the home.