A doctor could enter homes, treat disease, advise families, and occupy a position of authority that Native women were almost never allowed to hold within the American professional system.

The barriers were enormous.

Women remained a small minority in medicine.

Many physicians and professors claimed that rigorous higher education threatened female health or fertility.

Medical schools routinely excluded women.

Racial prejudice added another layer.

A Native woman seeking to become a physician was pushing through two professional barriers at once.

Susan did not merely apply.

She found a way to have the education financed.

The funding itself reveals another contradiction in the story.