The first woman to receive a medical doctorate in Clark County descended from William Whipple of New Hampshire, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence on Aug. 2, 1776. M. Ella Whipple carried on the family’s dedication to freedom by advocating for suffrage, education, temperance and health.
Whipple was born in 1851 in Batavia, Ill. Her parents left the Midwest a year after she was born. They lugged baby Ella behind a team of oxen as the family tramped six months westward on the Oregon Trail. Whipple spent her early childhood on her family’s farm before they moved to Vancouver for her education. She became a teacher, like her mother, after her graduation from the Vancouver Seminary in 1870.
Two years later, she obtained a Bachelor of Science from Willamette University in Salem, Ore. After that, she bounced around Oregon and Washington, teaching in various schools for the next nine years. Her instruction and leadership skills helped her rise to become head of Baker City Academy and, later, principal of the Astoria Public Schools. Sometime in 1880, she left teaching for medicine but would return to it later in Clark County and California.
Whipple enrolled at Willamette University for three years of medical training, graduating in 1883 with honors and earning the M.D. title after her name, something few women had achieved before the 20th century. Next, she trained at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, a highly respected institution of the era. John Harvey Kellogg founded the hospital in 1866 and would go on to invent Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in 1898.
A progressive political activist, Whipple was a two-time delegate to the Washington Territory Republican Convention and twice a delegate to its Territorial Convention, one of the few women serving in that capacity.
Although vigorously involved in her medical practice, Whipple got herself elected superintendent of Vancouver Public Schools in 1884, serving until 1887. During that time, she organized the Clark County Normal Institute. Forty-three teachers attended this first teachers’ conference held in the Washington Territory in 1885.
Committed to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union since its opening in Washington and Oregon, Whipple wrote about women’s suffrage and the effects of drinking. Whipple often published articles in the press and spoke at WCTU conventions on the West Coast.
In the final decades of the 19th century, women’s suffrage and temperance merged. In the Washington Territory, women and mixed-race persons won the vote in 1883. Unfortunately, the Territorial Supreme Court overturned the law in 1887. The territorial legislature proposed suffrage again in 1888 and 1889 but lacked enough votes to pass it.
About 1890, Whipple moved to California, where she died in 1924. She took an aged husband, Rev. John Marsh, who died in 1909. Shortly after arriving in California, Whipple became a Los Angeles County and California supervisor of public schools. She held several WCTU offices and served on its committees. In 1912, she was appointed deputy Los Angeles County registrar to administer voting registrations for Long Beach. She continued writing and promoting prohibition throughout her time in California, often speaking at state WCTU conventions about school finances, temperance, health and why women sought the ballot.
Martin Middlewood is editor of the Clark County Historical Society Annual. Reach him at ClarkCoHist@gmail.com.
