Maine Physician Broke National Barriers For Women While Hiding Personal Secrets

A female surgeon who proudly helped shatter the military glass ceiling did so while surreptitiously closeting gay women such as herself.

But that concealed part of the Owls Head physician’s life is conveniently missing from a whitewashed new Smithsonian magazine takeout on the “progressive” medical doctor.

The real tale of Barbara Stimson M.D., the “brave” woman who convinced military brass that women could turn a scalpel, too, is shrouded in the latest issue of Smithsonian.

Stimson’s so-called public women’s crusade began after France fell to the Nazis in 1940 when she answered the call from Great Britain’s Royal Army appeal to the United States for military physicians at the beginning of World War II.

Stimson, who 25 years later would move to Owls Head, was one of the first female medical doctors to travel to the United Kingdom to help fight the war – along with her medical colleague and secret gay lover.

After helping Britain provide medical care to its wounded combat soldiers, Stimson returned to the U.S. to lobby for female physicians who until the mid-1900s were denied entry into the military.

She went to her cousin, Henry Stimson, secretary of war in the 1940s, persuading him to lift the prohibition on women military physicians.

Achsa Bean, who became one of the first female doctors enlisted in the U.S. military, befriended Barbara Stimson when they were both at Vassar College.

Bean, a native of Detroit, Maine who went to the University of Maine and became its dean of women, later built a cottage off Lucia Beach Road for her and Stimson in the tiny coastal town 90 minutes north of Portland.

After retiring to Owls Head with Bean in 1963, Stimpson, a secretly gay woman who broke the military code for female physicians yet kept women’s sexuality in the closet, served on staff at Knox County General Hospital in Rockland and Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport.

Stimson and Bean worked and lived together for nearly 40 years, and though they never said so publicly, people who knew them confirmed it was a romantic relationship, not simply a friendship as the newspapers at the time claimed.

Now Smithsonian is featuring in its latest issue a so-called Stimson profile in a hyped breakout piece, its coverage frozen in the 1940s – only disclosing that Stimson and Bean “were close personally and professionally.”

Smithsonian’s piece coyly flirts with their controversial, unconventional lifestyles, never addressing their homosexuality head-on even though the publication claims in its canned promotions to “embrace a combination of intellectualism, science and culture with a childlike sense of wonder.”

Meanwhile, few people knew that Stimson helped Bean, who spent her adult life in a committed same-sex relationship, keep her own secret – a son born in 1929 when Bean was studying at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

She gave him up for adoption, continuing the charade.

For that juicy discovery you’d have to rely not on haughty Smithsonian but on a working-class newspaper in Rochester, New York – where Bean went to medical school – that gets journalistic kudos for its seminal 2022 piece publicizing the true nature of the Stimson-Bean relationship.

Bean’s deathbed wish in 1975 was for her partner to leave the couple’s Owls Head home to the son she neither publicly acknowledged while alive nor even mentioned in her obituary.

Stimson died in 1986 at the age of 88 at Pen Bay Medical Center.

Though hailed a hero by Smithsonian as the country’s first woman physician to so publicly take on the male-dominated military power structure, Stimson made sure her own lifestyle was far more protected and private – no matter how much her growing political influence might have advanced the gay cause she intentionally kept in the dark ages.

Stimson’s tack adhered to the set of morals preached by alleged liberals – one rule for them and another for thee, especially when their own public campaigns might well be unmasked and derailed by self-promoted deceits.

For Stimson, integrating the military was just fine but openly acknowledging that her same-gendered romantic partner had given birth to a son wasn’t.

In fact, Stimson aided and abetted her partner’s keeping the child forever under wraps.

He died 10 years ago having never had the blessing of confirmed parentage.

The pain that bedeviled Bean’s unacknowledged child for his entire life was partly due to Stimson’s complicity, yet deemed a fair tradeoff to protect her own public accomplishments.

Bean’s son, Gordon Hendrie, did not know about his mother until he was 16 years old, partly due to Stimson’s co-conspiracy.

Hendrie’s widow is still trying to process the way her husband was not only disowned by his mother but buried without ritual by his mother’s partner.

“You can imagine it was confusing for me too,” said Deirdre Hendrie.