The Mountain Maternal Health League and the changing politics of birth control in Kentucky, 1936-1949

Abstract

In 1936, Clarence J. Gamble, heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, established the Mountain Maternal Health League (MMHL) in Berea, Kentucky. Gamble had a strong interest in testing the effectiveness of simple birth control methods as a means to reduce the birth rate of impoverished and rural people and he would fund the organization for nearly six years as an experiment to test a jelly-and-syringe method of birth control in rural Kentucky. After his financial support ended, however, the organization continued. The women activists who worked with Gamble shifted the organizational focus, models of operation, and available methods to accommodate changing perspectives and expanding communities.