Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, E

CWHP Home | Alphabetical Index | Topical Index

Cambridge Women's Heritage Project

~ E ~

Martha May Eliot (b. April 7, 1891 in Dorchester, d. February 14, 1978 in Cambridge)
Pediatrician, Public Health Administrator, Educator
     Martha May Eliot was born in 1891 in Dorchester to Christopher Rhodes Eliot, a Unitarian minister, and Mary Jackson May. She attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, graduating in 1913, the same year as her friend and life-partner, Ethel Collins Dunham, who like Eliot, went on in pediatrics and received her M.D. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1918. After a residency in pediatrics at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, May was appointed as a resident at Yale University and rose through the ranks to a position on the faculty.
     With Dr Edwards Park she developed a treatment for rickets using cod-liver oil, vitamin D and exposure to sun. In 1924, she was named director of the Division of Child and Maternal Health at the U.S. Children’s Bureau on a part-time basis while she continued to teach and practice at Yale, but moved to Washington when she was appointed to the full time position of assistant chief at the bureau.
     During the Second World War, she studied the effects of moving children out of the cities to the countryside in England and published a book on the subject. She also headed a federal program, Emergency Maternity and Infant Care, which provided health care and assistance for wives and infants of armed forces personnel for which she was awarded the Lasker prize in 1948. She was the first woman to be elected president of the American Public Health Association in 1947.
     In 1948, she was elected president of the National Conference on Social Welfare. She was the first woman ever awarded the American Public Health Association's Sedgewick Memorial Medal, in 1958. Soon after the war, Eliot was a member of the group that founded the World Health Organization, the only woman to sign its founding document. She left the Children’s Bureau to serve as assistant director general of W.H.O. in Geneva from1949 to1951. On her return, she was appointed chief of the Children’s Bureau. When she left the Bureau in 1956, she became chair of the School of Public Health at Harvard Medical School until her retirement in 1960. She introduced the use of social workers into public health programs. In 1964 the American Public Health Association established an annual award in her name to recognize her achievements in maternal and child health. In 1972, she was awarded the prestigious Howland prize by that organization, the first woman to receive it.
Reference: Phyllis J. Read and Bernard L. Witlieb, The Book of Women’s Firsts (1992); “Changing the Face of Medicine” National Library of Medicine web site. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_99.html

Zelma Olivia (Bradshaw) Evelyn (b. 1921)
African-American activist, city employee, volunteer
Zelma Olivia (Bradshaw) Evelyn was born in 1921 to Reginald Bradshaw and Estelle Olivia (Bourne) Bradshaw. She married Louis Evelyn and had one son, Robert Evelyn. She worked for the City of Cambridge for forty years during which period she was secretarial assistant to Ken Reeves during his first two terms as Mayor (1992-1995). She has been active in St. Paul's A.M.E. Church. The Cambridge Public Library honored her with a “Friend of the Library” award in 1999, and in 2005 she was awarded the Cambridge NAACP “Drum Major for Justice” Award. On the later occasion, she was praised as “our Rosa Parks" and “the jewel of the city”.
References: Cambridge Chronicle, January 20, 2005; Cambridge Public Library Annual Report FY99