Mary Eliza Mahoney
First Black nurse to earn a registered nursing license
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1845, Mary Eliza Mahoney began working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children as a teen. Over 15 years, she worked a variety of roles including as a nurse’s aide. The hospital operated one of the first nursing schools in the country. Of the 42 who entered the program in 1878, Mahoney was one of 4 graduates in 1879, making her the first Black nurse to receive a registered nursing license. She worked as a private nurse and also served as the director of the Howard Orphanage Asylum for black children in New York City.
In 1896, after joining the Nurses Associated Alumnae of the United States and Canada (NAAUSC, now the ANA), she realized an organization more welcoming to Black nurses was needed and thus co-founded National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN) in 1908 with 52 other nurses. By 1920, membership had risen to 500 nurses. In part to meet the nursing demand during World War 1 and the 1918 flu pandemic, Mahoney lived to see NACGN successfully advocate for Black nurses to be permitted to join the American Red Cross, which broke the barrier for Black nurses to serve in the US Army Nurse Corp.
Sources
- We sourced information for this biography from the National Women’s History Museum, Mary Mahoney Professional Nurse Organization, and Pioneers of Nursing. A new obituary on Mahoney was also published by The New York Times in 2022 in their series called Overlooked, which reports remarkable people whose deaths went unreported.
Learn More
To learn more about inclusion in nursing and be part of the national discussion to address racism in nursing, check out and share the following resources:
Know Your History
- American Association for the History of Nursing to attend monthly webinars on topics of nursing history, view the calendar here.
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
Support & Advocate
- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
Help us paint the internet with nursing’s diverse origin stories. Follow this Medium publication, NursesYouShouldKnow on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, or @KnowNurses on Twitter to share and re-post our articles far and wide.
If you wish to be involved in the project, provide feedback, submit past or present day nurses to be featured, or to receive a monthly calendar in advance of which nurses will be featured each month, please sign up here.
