Mary Eliza Mahoney

She was affected with breast cancer in 1923.

A ‘Mary Mahoney Memorial Health Center’ was built in Oklahoma City in her honor.

Mary Eliza Mahoney was born in the Dorchester area of Boston, Massachusetts, United States on May 7, 1845. Her parents were free slaves who had moved to Boston from North Carolina before the American Civil War to save themselves from racial discrimination.

She was the eldest of the three children in the family.

She studied at the ‘Phillips School’ which was one of the integrated schools in Boston which took in children from all communities.

Mary Eliza Mahoney wanted to be a nurse from a very young age and joined the ‘New England Hospital for Women and Children’ as a cook, janitor and washerwoman at the age of eighteen. She worked in this hospital for fifteen years before at the age of thirty-three she was accepted as a nursing student in 1878 by the hospital’s nursing school which was the first in its kind in the United States.

She graduated as a registered nurse in 1879 after the sixteen-month course as one of the four students out of forty three who passed the final examination and the only black woman to do so in the whole of the United States.

Mary Eliza Mahoney registered with the ‘Nurses Directory’ at the ‘Massachusetts Medical Library’ and started working as private care nurse after getting her nursing diploma.

She strove to maintain a high degree of nursing level which was praised by all those who employed her.

She treated all patients as if they were her own family members and always considered herself as household staff in spite of invitations from the families to join them.

She was determined to change the mindset of people regarding nurses from the minority community and she was successful in her mission with the high nursing standards that she set for herself.

Often she came across racial discrimination while working in a predominantly white society. She was against all types of racial discrimination especially in the field of nursing and tried to remove them whenever and wherever she could.

The ‘Mary Mahoney Award’ for outstanding nurses was established in 1936 by NACGN which was continued even after NACGN merged with ANA. Today it is bestowed upon nurses from the minority groups biennially.

Mary Eliza Mahoney was inducted into ANA’s ‘Hall of Fame’ in 1976.

In 1993 she was inducted into the ‘National Women’s Hall of Fame’.