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Reconstruction & Gilded AgeProgressive & Modern Era

Women of Idenlea

Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

Idenlea was the country estate of two generations of trailblazing women: first woman physician in PA Dr. Hannah E Longshore (1819-1901), her sister and successful early woman physician Dr. Jane V Myers (1831-1918), and her daughter, prominent women’s advocate Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg (1845-1937). These women were most notable for their leadership in advancing the causes of women’s rights, suffrage, and women in medicine; abolition of slavery; and civic and municipal reform in Philadelphia.

Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

The Story

On this Lower Merion estate lived a remarkable line of women who pushed against the hard limits placed on their sex in 19th-century America. Dr. Hannah Longshore became one of the first women to practice medicine in Pennsylvania at a time when medical schools barred women outright, and her sister Dr. Jane Myers followed the same difficult path. Hannah's daughter, Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg, carried the family's reforming spirit into the suffrage movement and Philadelphia's municipal politics. Together they linked the causes of medicine, abolition, and votes for women across three generations.

Why it matters

Idenlea shows how women's entry into medicine, the fight against slavery, and the long campaign for suffrage were often carried forward within single families across the 19th century.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the countryside west of Philadelphia was dotted with the estates of families who had made their mark in the growing city and wanted room to breathe beyond it. Lower Merion, with its rolling farmland and rail links back into town, was exactly the kind of place where a prosperous, forward-looking household might settle. Idenlea sat in that world.

But the era these women lived through was defined less by geography than by hard limits placed on their sex. For much of the 1800s, American women could not vote, faced enormous obstacles to higher education, and were shut out of the learned professions almost entirely. Medicine, law, and public office were treated as male preserves, guarded by custom and often by outright rule.

Against that backdrop, Philadelphia became an unlikely engine of change. It was home to the nation's first medical college for women, and to a lively community of reformers — Quakers, abolitionists, and early advocates for women's rights — who kept pushing the boundaries of what women were allowed to do. The women of Idenlea belonged to that reforming current, and helped carry it forward.

People & events

The story begins with Dr. Hannah E. Longshore, born in 1819, who trained as a physician at a time when established medical schools slammed their doors on women. She became one of the first women to practice medicine in Pennsylvania, building a career in a field that had insisted such a thing was impossible. Her sister, Dr. Jane V. Myers, followed the same demanding path and made her own success as an early woman physician.

To appreciate what that took, remember that a woman doctor in this period had to overcome not just the difficulty of the training but the open hostility of male colleagues and a skeptical public. That two sisters from one family both broke through says something about the determination — and the mutual support — inside this household.

Hannah's daughter carried a name that was itself a statement: Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg, born in 1845 and named for one of the great reformers of the age. She turned the family's energy toward the vote and toward cleaning up city government, becoming a prominent advocate for women's rights and for civic and municipal reform in Philadelphia. Across three generations, one family bound together the causes of medicine, the fight against slavery, and the long campaign for suffrage.

Its place in the American story

The struggles these women joined were national in scale. The opening of medicine to women, the abolition of slavery, and the decades-long fight for the vote were among the defining reform movements of nineteenth-century America, and each of them was resisted fiercely and won only slowly.

What Idenlea illustrates so clearly is how often those movements advanced not through lone heroes but through families and communities that passed conviction from one generation to the next. A mother who forced open the profession of medicine could raise a daughter who would force open the ballot box. The private household became a training ground for public courage.

That pattern repeated across the country wherever reform took root, but it is rare to find it marked so plainly in one place. The women of Idenlea stand in for countless others whose names never made it onto a marker — the sisters, mothers, and daughters who made the modern expansion of women's rights possible.

If you visit

You are in the leafy suburban landscape of Lower Merion Township, and the marker asks you to slow down and imagine the estate that once stood in this setting — a country home that doubled as a seedbed for some of the era's boldest ideas.

Stand for a moment and think about the distance between then and now. The right of a woman to become a doctor, to vote, to help run her city — the things we take for granted today were, within these families' lifetimes, radical goals that demanded a fight. This quiet spot was part of that fight.

If you are building a day around it, this corner of Montgomery County pairs naturally with Philadelphia's deep well of reform and women's history just to the east. Let Idenlea be your starting point: read the marker, picture three generations of trailblazing women under one roof, and carry that thread into the city where so much of their work played out.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Hannah E. Longshore
  • · Jane V. Myers
  • · Lucretia Mott Longshore Blankenburg

Themes & tags

Women's HistoryCivil RightsHome

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