OCCOQUAN | Lavinia Lloyd Dock

Lavinia Lloyd Dock, Suffragist

May 1, 2020—It being the time of the Pandemic, it is appropriate to remember suffragists who were nurses. One of them was Lavinia Lloyd Dock. She is the subject of the May suffragist-of-the-month post by the Long Island suffragists.

Beginning with her work with the United Workers of Norwich, Connecticut, Lavinia Lloyd Dock made valuable contributions to public health nursing, including work with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement in New York. 

She was also a prolific author; her works include Materia Medica for Nurses, one of the earliest nursing textbooks, and a four-volume History of Nursing, written with Adelaide Nutting.

In addition, she was active in the women's suffrage movement and an advocate of legislative control of nursing practice. She was jailed three times at the Occoquan women's workhouse, which I have visited. This will be the site of the Turning Point Suffrage Memorial.

She and her husband had a daughter Mira Lloyd Duck who became a botanist and a civic leader in her home town of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.