We associate free love, health food and New Age spirituality with the 1960s counterculture, but more than a century ago those ideas were championed by a remarkable Wisconsin woman.

Born in New York, Juliet Severance (1833-1919) embraced the anti-slavery movement, temperance and women's rights while just a teenager in the 1840s. She was one of the first women to enter medical school, earning her M.D. in 1858. Finding that scientific medicine did not always work, she took up vegetarianism and psychic healing, too.

In 1862, she moved to Whitewater, then a national center of the spiritualist movement and mystic experimentation. Her views on religion, health and politics found a receptive audience there, and soon she had a flourishing medical practice.

"She is especially interested in the emancipation of women from every form of serfdom, in church, state or home," wrote suffrage leader Victoria Woodhull. Severance even advocated the abolition of marriage, which she argued threatened women's moral, legal, medical and spiritual well-being.

After the Civil War, she moved to Milwaukee, where she joined the fledgling labor movement. Throughout her career, Severance gave free medical care to any working woman who asked. She kept up her radical advocacy until the day she died, at the age of 86 in 1919.

When she died, a colleague recalled her as someone "as admirable for her domestic, social and lovable qualities as for her public and professional services. She was a good writer, orator, parliamentarian; a good mother, a good friend, and a good woman. There is nothing more to be said."

-- Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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