More to the Story Documentary: The First Two Known Women Students at Georgetown University

Gender+ Justice Fellow and Georgetown’s Director of Medical Advancement Communications Jane Varner Malhotra (G’21) introduces these trailblazers in her short documentary More to the Story: Documenting the Lives of the First Known Women Students at Georgetown, Dr. Annie E. Rice and Dr. Jeannette J. Sumner.
Many people are surprised to learn that the first two women to enroll at Georgetown did so in 1880 in the medical school-twenty years before the School of Nursing opened. The groundbreaking students were Annie E. Rice and Jeannette J. Sumner, who spent one year at Georgetown’s school of medicine before transferring to the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, where they completed their medical degrees. The friends returned to Washington, DC, and opened a free clinic for women of color staffed exclusively by women physicians, the first of its kind in the nation’s capital.