Born: 17 April 1845, United States
Died: 24 October 1913
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Katherine Isabel Hayes Chapin
The following is republished with permission from the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.
Isabel Barrows (1845-1913), the first woman stenographer in the US State Department, earned an MD and opened the first private medical practice for women. She later settled in Dorchester.
A groundbreaker on several fronts, Dr. Barrows was born in Irasburg, VT, and educated in Derry, NH, where she married William Chapin in 1863. They traveled to India to work as missionaries. William died soon after their arrival, leaving Isabel a nineteen-year-old widow. She remained in India, serving as a teacher at a school for girls before returning the U.S. Isabel remarried in 1867. Dr. Barrows’ second husband, Samuel Barrows, obtained employment in Washington D.C. as an assistant to Secretary of State William Seward. When Samuel became ill, she filled in for him becoming the first woman to work as a stenographer for the State Department. Dr. Barrows later enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College in New York, earning a degree in medicine. The Barrows traveled to Europe, where Isabel studied ophthalmology at the University of Vienna, another first. Upon their return to Washington, Dr. Barrows opened a private medical practice becoming the first woman to do so. The couple became active in prison reform and other religious and charitable causes. They settled in Dorchester after Samuel entered Harvard Divinity School and was named pastor of the Unitarian Church at Meeting House Hill. As a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Isabel testified before Congress in 1908 in support of the 19th Amendment along with Anna Howard Shaw, president of the organization. After Samuel’s death in 1909, she continued to write and remain active in reform movements until her death in 1913.
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Katherine Isabel Barrows, an American editor and penologist. She studied medicine in New York City, and secured the degree of M.D. In 1865 she became the wife of Samuel June Barrows, the author.
In early life she was employed by the Department of State at Washington as a stenographer, the first woman to hold such a position in the department. For twenty years she edited the Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, and notable service was rendered by her as secretary to the National Prison Association.