Women’s History Month is celebrated every year in March to honor the efforts that women have made to society.
This year, the National Women’s History Alliance (NWHA) will celebrate this month under the theme of “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations.”
In the spirit of moving forward together, we will honor three women who have educated and inspired generations. Their important breakthroughs in reproductive health stretched across the 19th century to improve where we are today.
Marie Stopes and the Fight for Birth Control
Marie Stopes, born in 1880 in Scotland, was a botanist and a birth control advocate. She founded the UK’s first ever birth control clinic and helped convince the Church of England to accept birth control. Her interest in advocating for birth control came from her first marriage, which was without intimacy and later annulled.
Believing birth control could help happy marriages and prevent unwanted pregnancies, she and her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, worked to educate women on the available methods of the time. They carried out this work through their clinic and the Society of Constructive Birth Control – which Stopes founded and led as president.
Stopes wrote many books such as Married Love and Wise Parenthood.
In 1923, she wrote Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice, which was the most in-depth treatment at the time. Stopes passed away in 1958 from breast cancer in Surrey, London.
Miriam Menkin and the Birth of In-Vitro Fertilization
The story of Miriam Menkin, an American scientist, is a classic case of a woman being overlooked in scientific achievements. Menkin brought in a new era of reproductive technology, which would be known as in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
Her story goes a little like this: Menkin was a technician to John Rock – a Harvard fertility expert who wanted to cure infertility in women who had healthy ovaries but damaged fallopian tubes.
Menkin’s goal was to fertilize an egg outside of the human body. She would usually place the egg and the sperm for half an hour in the hopes that the egg and the sperm would become one.
However, on February 3, 1944, after staying up with her newborn daughter, she had mistakenly allowed the egg and the sperm to be placed for one hour. On February 6, she found that the egg had fertilized, and this marked the first successful human life conceived outside the body.
Dr. Helena Octavia Dickens and Her Fight Against Cervical Cancer
Dr. Helena Octavia Dickens was the first African American woman admitted into the American College of Surgeons and the first African American board-certified OB/GYN in Philadelphia. Born to a freed slave in 1909, Dr. Dickens dedicated her life to bringing the best possible care to her community. This involved getting as many Black women as possible to take a new test at the time: the pap smear.
She promoted the pap smear test’s capabilities to save her patients’ lives by bringing the test to them. She did this by holding clinics and workshops at Black churches and giving free pap tests out of a van by the American Cancer Society.
After joining the faculty of University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine in 1965, she led the way for a program for pregnant teens. Dr. Dickens passed away from a stroke at 92, in 2001. Her legacy is the gift she gave of healthcare to every woman who came within ten feet of her.
The strides these women have made, despite the challenges they faced because they were women, are great. Whether having birth control, overcoming infertility and having a baby or testing for cervical cancer, their contributions have greatly improved the health of women, and therefore, humanity.
