Mary Eliza Mahoney

Mary Eliza Mahoney worked for fifteen years in various roles, including cook, janitor, and washerwoman, at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston before finally gaining admission, at age 33, to its rigorous sixteen-month nursing training programme in 1878. The programme accepted only a handful of the roughly forty students who enrolled each year, and Mahoney was one of just four to graduate from her cohort.

In 1879, Mahoney became the first African American to earn a professional nursing licence in the United States, a milestone achieved in a field that offered Black women few professional opportunities of any kind at the time. She went on to work extensively in private nursing, building a strong reputation for her professionalism and skill, and she deliberately confronted the racism she encountered within the nursing profession throughout her career.

In 1908, Mahoney co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, an organisation created specifically to address the discrimination Black nurses faced within the mainstream American Nurses Association, and she delivered its welcoming address at its first convention. She remained active in civic and professional causes, including women's suffrage, throughout her later years, and the NACGN's professional achievement award was later renamed in her honour.