Clisby, Harriet (1830–1931)

Australian doctor and feminist. Born Harriet Jemima Winifred Clisby in 1830 in London, England; died in 1931; daughter of a corn merchant; graduated from New York Medical College for Women, 1865.

In 1838, Harriet Clisby's father, a corn merchant, took his family from London to South Australia where they farmed until moving to Adelaide in 1845. Harriet began work as a journalist and joined the Swedenborgian New Church in 1847. The link between spiritual health and physical health was to be of concern to Clisby for the rest of her long life; accordingly, she became a vegetarian and practiced gymnastics.

After traveling to Melbourne in 1856, the next year Clisby began working as editor of the Southern Photographic Harmonia, a publication written in shorthand. The Interpreter, a literary journal, which was the first Australian journal produced by women, benefitted from Clisby's work with Caroline Dexter and was published in 1861. Clisby, who had read Elizabeth Blackwell 's 1852 work Laws of Life, was prompted to train as a doctor. A friend provided her tuition for two years' of physiology and anatomy before Clisby moved on to England where she worked as a nurse at Guy's Hospital in London. She did not have the funds to follow Elizabeth Garrett Anderson 's advice for training in America until a friend finally financed her studies at the New York Medical College for Women. Clisby graduated from the program in 1865. She lectured and was for many years involved with feminist and Christian groups, founding in 1871 the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. In Geneva, to which she later retired, Clisby founded L'Union des Femmes. She died in 1931, having lived a century.