Dentistry changing for women

For women, gaining the opportunity to practice dentistry was harder than pulling teeth.

In 1854, Emeline Roberts Jones of Connecticut married a dentist. When her husband rejected her requests to learn the trade, she pocketed the teeth he pulled in his office and secretly practiced on them at home. After drilling and filling hundreds of canines, molars and incisors, Jones showed her husband her work.

Duly impressed, he took her on as a partner. After he died in 1864, Jones filled and extracted teeth for the next 50 years, and became known as the first female dentist in the United States.

Two years after Jones' husband died, Lucy Hobbs Taylor became the first woman to …