Caroline Still Wiley Anderson (1848-1919)

December 16, 2009 
/ Contributed By: Michelle Granshaw

Caroline Anderson|

Caroline Anderson

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Caroline Still Wiley Anderson, physician and educator, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to William and Letitia Still.ย  Supporting his family through coal mining investments and a stove store, William Still, a prominent antebellum abolitionist, helped escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.ย  He wrote about these fugitive slaves in his book The Underground Railroad.

Caroline Still attended Mrs. Henry Gordonโ€™s Private School, The Friends Raspberry Alley School, and the Institute for Colored Youth.ย  At sixteen, she went to Oberlin College where she was the only black woman in her class.ย  After graduating from Oberlin Collegeโ€™s Literary Course in 1868, Still moved back to Philadelphia to teach.ย  In 1869, she married Edward A. Wiley, a former Alabama slave, who she met at Oberlin.ย  Before Wileyโ€™s death in 1873, they had two children, William and Letitia. Caroline Wiley left Philadelphia for Washington, D.C. and Howard University where she was hired to teach music, drawing, and elocution.

Once there she decided to become a medical doctor.ย  After attending Howard University Medical School for one term, Wiley transferred to the Womenโ€™s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1876.ย  She graduated in the spring of 1878 and then interned at Bostonโ€™s New England Hospital for Women and Children.ย  When she returned to Philadelphia in 1879, she became one of the stateโ€™s first black female doctors.

In 1880, Caroline Wiley married Matthew Anderson, a Doctor of Divinity and founder of Philadelphiaโ€™s Berean Presbyterian Church.ย  The couple had three surviving children, Helen, Maude, and Margaret. In addition to her private medical practice, Anderson worked with her husband to serve Philadelphia’s poor women and children. She ran the Berean Dispensary and the Berean Cottage on the New Jersey coast. She also helped found the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School and then acted as its assistant principal and teacher of elocution, physiology, and hygiene.ย  At the beginning of the 20th Century she fought to establish Philadelphiaโ€™s first black Young Womenโ€™s Christian Association (YWCA).

Until she suffered a stroke several years before her death, Anderson remained involved in a variety of community and professional organizations.ย  She was treasurer for the Womenโ€™s Medical College Alumnae Association and president of the Berean Womenโ€™s Christian Temperance Union.ย  She also was a member of the Womenโ€™s Medical Society and on the board of the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People of Philadelphia.

About the Author

Author Profile

Michelle Granshaw is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. She is affiliate faculty with the Global Studies Center, the European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center, Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Program, and Cultural Studies. At Pitt, she teaches in the BA, MFA, and PhD programs and mentors student dramaturgs. Granshaw was honored to receive the University of Pittsburghโ€™s 2021 Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Graduate Mentoring Award.

As a cultural historian, her research focuses on disenfranchised, and migrant communities and how they shaped and were influenced by the embodied and imaginative practices within theatre and performance. Her research interests include U.S. theatre, popular entertainment, and performance; performances of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; global and diasporic performance; and historiography.

Granshawโ€™s articles have appeared in Theatre Survey, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Popular Entertainment Studies, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Topics, and the New England Theatre Journal. In 2014, Granshaw was awarded the American Theatre and Drama Society Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication for her Theatre Survey (January 2014) article โ€œThe Mysterious Victory of the Newsboys: The Grand Duke Theatreโ€™s 1874 Challenge to the Theatre Licensing Law.โ€ Her book, Irish on the Move: Performing Mobility in American Variety Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 2019) argues that nineteenth-century American variety theatre formed a crucial battleground for anxieties about mobility, immigration, and ethnic community in the United States. It was named a finalist for the 2019 Theatre Library Association George Freedley Memorial Book Award and supported by grants and fellowships including the Hibernian Research Award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, American Theatre and Drama Society Faculty Travel Award, and Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship. โ€œInventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage,โ€ part of Irish on the Moveโ€™sfirst chapter, also won the 2018 Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Currently, she is working on a new monograph titled The Fight for Desegregation: Race, Freedom, and the Theatre After the Civil War. In November 2022, she received an American Society for Theatre Research Research Fellowship in support of the project.

Granshaw currently serves on the Executive Board for the American Theatre and Drama Society (term 2021-5) and co-organizes ATDSโ€™s First Book Bootcamp and Career Conversations series.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Granshaw, M. (2009, December 16). Caroline Still Wiley Anderson (1848-1919). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/anderson-caroline-still-wiley-1848-1919/

Source of the Author's Information:

Margaret Jerrido, โ€œCaroline Still Anderson,โ€ in Notable Black American
Women
, ed. Jessie Carney Smith (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1996);
Darlene Clark Hine, โ€œCo-Laborers in the Work of the Lord:
Nineteenth-Century Black Women Physicians,โ€ in โ€˜Send Us a Lady
Physicianโ€™: Women Doctors in America, 1835-1920,
ed. Ruth J. Abram (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985);ย  Susan Wells, Out of the Dead
House: Nineteenth Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

Further Reading