The World Was Not Worthy of Them: Mary Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born on 7 May 1845 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, to Charles and May Jane Mahoney. Her parents were formerly enslaved but had been free by the time of Mary’s birth. The Mahoneys had moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts for a life with less racial discrimination.

Mahoney and her family were fervent Baptists and faithful members of the People’s Baptist Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts. When she was 10 years old, she was admitted to the Phillips School, one of the first integrated schools in Boston. While there she learned English, history, morals, and mathematics. It is believed that school and the teaching that she learned about Jesus at church influenced her interest in nursing. 

Mahoney, like all Black women faced systematic barriers when trying to get formal training. Nursing schools in the South would not even accept Black women’s applications and in the North opportunities were very limited. She was determined, so she worked at the New England Hospital for Women and Children (now the Dimock Community Health Center) as a washerwoman, cook, and maid for 15 years as she awaited an opportunity to enter the nursing program.

In 1878 at the age of 33, Mahoney was accepted into a 16-month program at the same hospital where she worked as a laborer for all those years. Her class began with 39 other women including one of Mahoney’s sisters, Ellen. Her training required that she spend time in the hospital’s different wards so that she could gain wide-ranging nursing experience. The days were long, beginning at 5:30 am and ending at 9:30 pm. She attended classes and lectures on topics including: nursing in families, physiology, food for the sick, surgical nursing, child-bed nursing, disinfectants, and general nursing. Of the 40 woman that began the program only three, Mahoney and two white women graduated, so in 1879 Mary Mahoney became the first Black person to be professional trained and certified as a nurse in the United States. 

Mahoney worked as a private nurse, predominately for wealthy, white families. She mostly cared for mothers and newborns. Mahoney was praised for efficiency throughout her career. In an article in the American Journal of Nursing a patient said, “I owe my life to that dear soul”.

Mahoney was an original member of the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAUSC) in 1897. The NAAUSC would eventually become the American Nurses Association (ANA). Not long after the founding of the NAAUSC would stop allowing Black nurses to join so Mahoney supported two other Black nurses, Martha Minerva Franklin and Adah B. Thomas, as they founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN). The new organization, which allowed anyone to join, sought to celebrate all outstanding nurses regardless of race, and to eliminate racial discrimination in the nursing community.

Mahoney finished her career as the director of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, New York from 1911 to 1912. After she retired she was a supporter of the continued advancement of Civil Rights and women’s suffrage. When the 19th Amendment was passed Mahoney at the age of 76 became one of the first women in Boston to register vote.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1923 and battled the disease for three years. Mary Mahoney died on 4 January 1926 at 80 years old at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, the same facility that she received her nursing training.

My mother is a very accomplished Black nurse, and she is a member of the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses (MMPN) organization in Detroit, Michigan. The mission of the MMPN is “to preserve the memory of Mary Eliza Mahoney through education and mentoring, and through awarding scholarships to eligible students pursuing a career in the profession of nursing.”