Background
Fannie Hagan was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio where she graduated with high marks from Old Gains High School. Her husband was born in Macon, Georgia on December 1, 1862 and had relocated to Chicago from New York in 1887.
Fannie Hagan was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio where she graduated with high marks from Old Gains High School. Her husband was born in Macon, Georgia on December 1, 1862 and had relocated to Chicago from New York in 1887.
In 1908 Emanuel attended classes in social sciences at the Graham Taylor School of Civics and Philanthropy, Chicago and later that year established the Emanuel House, a settlement house on Armour Avenue in Chicago.
In 1908 she founded the Emanuel Settlement House in Chicago. The Emanuel chiropody clinic remained opened on the Chicago Loop for over thirty-five years. In her mission statement Emananuel’s stated goal was.
To inspire higher ideals of manhood and womanhood, to purify the social condition, and to encourage thrift and neighborhood pride, and good citizenship.
Emanuel House maintained a kindergarten and offered cooking and sewing classes. Boys" and girls" club, free dental clinic, employment bureau and domestic science class for adults.
Though located in a predominantly black neighborhood known as the Black Belt, her settlement house was available to all races. The Emanuel Settlement House closed in 1912.
Emanuel attended the Jenner Medical College of Medicine and, beginning in 1911, the Chicago Hospital College of Medicine (now Chicago Medical School at Rosalind Franklin University) where she graduated with her medical degree in 1915, not too long after becoming a grandmother.
She eventually set up her private practice with offices in the Roosevelt State Bank Building at Grand Boulevard and 35th Street, Chicago. Emanuel served on the Board of Directors of the Phyllis Wheatley Club, an organization tasked with helping improve the lot of African-American women and was active with such organizations as the Young Women’s Christian Association, Ida B. Wells Women's Club, Women’ Aid of Old Folks Home, Elizabeth Chapter, Order of the Eastern Star, Warden Temple, Order of Elks, Court of Calanthe and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. See L. Mara Dodge, “African-American Women and the Social Reform Tradition: The Phyllis Wheatley Women's Clubs and Homes,” in Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), pp.
566-68.
And L. Mara Dodge "Doctor Fannie Emanuel: African-American Clubwoman, Activist, and Doctor,” in Women Building Chicago, 1790-1990 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001): 248-49. Into the 1920s the family maintained a summer residence in Idlewild, Michigan.