What a woman!

This was too good not to post. Feminists for Life is sending me bios of courageous women, and I hope I'm not violating copyright by sharing an excerpt from the life of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell:
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Struck by an article in the New York Herald about Madame Restell, a woman notorious for selling abortifacient medicines and performing surgical abortions, Blackwell wrote in her diary:

The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term “female physician” should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women…. I finally determined to do what I could do “to redeem the hells,” and especially the one form of hell thus forced upon my notice.

The fact that other people considered her medical education impossible only spurred Blackwell on. She read medical texts with physician friends and applied to several medical schools. She was eventually accepted by Geneva Medical College in New York in 1847...Blackwell graduated at the top of her class.
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Top of her class, indeed.