London, 1923: Women, Medicine, and the Edge of Change
In 1923, London stood poised between two worlds. The Great War had ended less than five years earlier, yet its presence lingered in every hospital ward, boarding house, and quiet drawing room. Mourning clothes were worn less often now, but widows remained a common sight. Motorcars rattled alongside horse-drawn carts, electricity crept into middle-class homes, and women—changed by war and necessity—were testing freedoms that had once seemed firmly out of reach.
For women, this was not an era of ease, but of transition. Rights had been partially won, opportunities cautiously extended, and boundaries actively contested. Nowhere was this tension more apparent than in medicine, particularly at the London School of Medicine for Women. It is into this fragile, shifting world that Ginger Gold and her close friend Nurse Haley Higgins move, women shaped by war service, shared experience, and an understanding that the old rules no longer quite fit. This is the historical backdrop of Murder at Hartigan House.
A City Still Healing
London in the early 1920s was a city recovering rather than celebrating. Hospitals remained crowded with veterans suffering from shell shock, amputations, and chronic illness. Many of these men had been treated during the war by women like Haley Higgins, whose service as a nurse placed her on the front lines of both physical trauma and psychological collapse.
The influenza pandemic earlier in the decade had exposed deep weaknesses in public health. Poverty remained entrenched, particularly in East London, while wealth and tradition held firm in the West End. The contrast between progress and stagnation was impossible to ignore.
During the war, women had stepped into roles once denied to them: nurses, ambulance drivers, clerks, factory workers, and medical professionals. Haley Higgins was among those who had proven her competence under the most harrowing conditions imaginable. Yet with peace came pressure to step back, to resume quieter lives. Many women, Ginger included, found they no longer fit comfortably into prewar expectations.
The London School of Medicine for Women: A Bastion of Determination
Founded in 1874, the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW) was nearly fifty years old by 1923, and still controversial. As Britain’s first medical school established specifically for women, it represented both hard-won progress and the profession’s continued resistance to equality.
Located on Hunter Street in Bloomsbury, near University College London, the school offered access to clinical training through University College Hospital, an opportunity denied to women for decades elsewhere. For women with medical ambitions, it remained the most viable path forward.
The LSMW was no relic of past battles. Students in the early 1920s still faced skepticism and open hostility. Many male doctors questioned women’s stamina, intellect, and emotional resilience. Others insisted women were suitable only for treating women and children, if they belonged in medicine at all.
Women like Ginger Gold, moving through this world as an observer, investigator, and increasingly independent woman, would have understood these tensions intimately. And Haley Higgins, whose nursing experience had earned respect in wartime but less so in peace, stood at the uncomfortable intersection between proven capability and institutional dismissal.
The Women Who Studied There
Students entering the LSMW in the early 1920s were often:
-
Middle-class, though not always wealthy
-
Academically driven, having fought for access to advanced education
-
Intensely motivated, knowing every mistake would reinforce existing prejudice
Their curriculum—anatomy, surgery, pathology, obstetrics—was no less rigorous than that of male medical students. Many graduates went on to work in women’s hospitals, public health initiatives, missionary medicine, or private practice, both at home and abroad.
For nurses like Haley Higgins, these women doctors were often allies: professionals who understood the realities of patient care and respected the expertise earned through experience rather than pedigree.
Professional Limits and Quiet Triumphs
Despite their qualifications, women doctors faced severe professional constraints. Hospital appointments were rare. Senior posts rarer still. Marriage frequently ended careers, whether through formal marriage bars or informal assumptions that a woman’s work was temporary.
Yet women physicians—and nurses—played crucial roles in areas male doctors often neglected:
-
Maternal health
-
Infant welfare clinics
-
Treatment of venereal disease among women
-
Public health work in poor communities
Here, women like Haley Higgins found purpose and authority, even as formal recognition lagged behind. These were quiet triumphs, built patient by patient, case by case.
Women’s Rights in Britain: Progress Without Parity
Politically, women in 1923 Britain had achieved only partial victory. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 allowed women over 30 with property qualifications to vote, enfranchising about 8.4 million women—but excluding many younger and working-class women.
True electoral equality would not come until 1928.
Elsewhere, inequality persisted:
-
Women could not sit in the House of Lords
-
Employment discrimination was widespread
-
Married women’s financial independence was limited
-
Social respectability demanded restraint and deference
Yet the modern woman was increasingly visible. She cut her hair shorter, wore simpler clothes, pursued education, delayed or rejected marriage, and, like Ginger Gold, navigated society on her own terms when possible.
Across the Atlantic: A Parallel World
In the United States, women faced similar contradictions. The 19th Amendment (1920) granted nationwide suffrage earlier than in Britain, but Black women in the South remained effectively disenfranchised. Professional barriers persisted, particularly in medicine.
Women’s medical colleges existed as both opportunities and reminders of exclusion—much like the LSMW. The American “New Woman” mirrored her British counterpart, though often with greater visibility and sharper backlash.
Living on the Threshold
What makes 1923 so compelling is not what had been fully achieved, but what hovered just out of reach. Women could walk into a medical school built by women, for women—but not yet into equal professional standing. They could vote—but not on equal terms. They could imagine independence—but rarely claim it without cost.
For Ginger Gold and Haley Higgins, this was a world of contradictions: progress tempered by resistance, opportunity shadowed by limitation. The London School of Medicine for Women stood as a symbol of that moment—a building filled with ambition and resolve, surrounded by a society not quite ready to accept what it represented.
Progress did not arrive as a triumphal march. It came through endurance, intelligence, and quiet defiance—one exam passed, one patient treated, one truth uncovered at a time.
And those women, whether doctors, nurses, or investigators, changed everything.
Join Ginger and Haley on their new adventure arriving in London, one to pursue her dreams and the other to finally discover hers!
Buy ebook and paperback on AMAZON
AUDIOBOOK available at leestraussbooks.com
