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Several of the earliest women in the American psychoanalytic movement, among them, Louise Brink, Elida Evans, and Caroline Newton, were rejected for membership in the early New York Psychoanalytic Society because they were not physicians. In the society, however, there was no official opposition to women as such. The first woman to be elected, in November 1911, was Dr. Beatrice Hinkle. She was a physician but had an unusual career in the New York Psychoanalytic Society, at a time when members could be dropped for trivial reasons. After Jung's break with Freud, Hinkle was blackballed for reelection in 1916, probably because of her association with Jung, and possibly with Smith Ely Jelliffe, her mentor, who had lingering Jungian sympathies until the early 1920s.
Despite the New York Society's opposition to lay-analysts, there was a category of “associate members” who need not be physicians (Minutes, 1911-1933). Notwithstanding this provision there was a group of women who received analytic training, sufficient for the standards of that era, who were rejected because they were not M.D.s. One of the first was Louise Brink, an associate of Jelliffe's, who coauthored several books with him, and wrote Women Characters in Richard Wagner (1924). At 48, she was a Ph.D. with a nursing degree who had treated patients of Jelliffe's, and he considered her ready for independent work. Nevertheless she was rejected by the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1920, after a semicomic correspondence between A. A. Brill and William Alanson White about a “lost”—and apparently nonexistent—constitution of the American Psychoanalytic Association that denied membership to women (D'Amore, 1978, p. 129).