Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born free in Boston (Dorchester) on the seventh of May 1845, the eldest of three children of formerly enslaved parents who had migrated north before the Civil War. She worked as a cook, scrubber, and unofficial nurse at the New England Hospital for Women and Children — the first hospital in New England founded and staffed entirely by women — through her teens and twenties.

In 1878 — at thirty-three — she was admitted to the hospital's professional nursing program. The sixteen-month program was extraordinarily demanding (twelve-hour days, six days a week, with classroom and clinical work) and admitted only forty students per year. Of those forty, four were Black women. Three dropped out within the first six months. One — Mary Eliza Mahoney — completed the program.

She received her professional nursing license on the first of August 1879, becoming the first African American to earn a professional nursing license in the United States.

She worked as a private-duty nurse in Boston and across the eastern seaboard for the next thirty-three years. Black patients were systematically denied admission to most American hospitals through her entire working life; Black professional nurses like Mahoney provided most of the formal nursing care to Black households in the post-Civil War era.

She co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908 — the principal national professional organization of African American nurses through the segregated decades of the American medical establishment. The NACGN was absorbed into the integrated American Nurses Association in 1951.

She lived to see — and to register her vote in — the Boston elections of 1920 under the new Nineteenth Amendment. She was seventy-five.

She died of breast cancer in Boston on the fourth of January 1926, age eighty.

She is honored here as the first African American professional nurse.