The Maternal Health Clinic of Austin
By the late 1930s Austin, the capital of Texas, had grown to about 87,000 residents, but it was a much smaller city than it is today: the northern boundary of the city limits ran along 45th Street, the southern boundary along Oltorf. The local economy was steadied during the Great Depression by several New Deal construction projects and by the dramatic growth of the University of Texas, but many of the city's residents lived in poverty. Some families, in fact, had been reduced during the Depression to occasionally eating out of garbage cans, even while the local newspaper's society pages chronicled galas attended by the city's wealthy elite. Austin was also quite consciously divided by race. A 1928 city ordinance had pushed most of the city's African-Americans to east of East Avenue (present-day Interstate Highway 35), and the city's public and private institutions were thoroughly segregated. In many ways Austin was still a sleepy, fairly isolated southern city. But its unique atmosphere was enlivened by politics at the State Capitol and enriched by intellectuals connected with the University of Texas, such as historian J. Frank Dobie and naturalist Roy Bedichek.
Margaret Sanger visited north Texas in the late 1930s and helped to inspire a group of women to establish the Fort Worth birth control clinic there, but she does not seem to have had a direct influence on events in Austin. On April 14, 1937 a small group of people, quite possibly including Dr. Banner Gregg, Austin's city health officer, met at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Goldwin Goldsmith "to discuss the possibility of opening a birth control clinic" in Austin. According to a brief history of the clinic written about 1960 by Charles Wright, the group had been inspired to action by "an increasing number of mothers" seeking information about birth control at "welfare agencies, the City-County Health Unit, and private physicians." The group was informed that Dr. Elizabeth Patterson, an Austin physician, had already volunteered to operate a clinic if one were established, and that Mrs. Haywood Nelms, Vice-President of the Houston Maternal Health Clinic, had offered to travel to Austin to "speak to the group in the interest of getting a clinic started." By the end of this first meeting an "Organization Committee" had been created, and according to Wright, it "set to work at once."
On July 20, 1937, the Maternal Health Clinic of Austin was officially established. Twenty board members, and four officers, were elected and a constitution adopted. The minutes of that meeting have been lost but the original board was probably identical, or nearly identical, to the board listed in the Maternal Health Clinic's articles of incorporation which were submitted to the State of Texas in June 1938. These original board members were an eclectic mix of some of Austin's most interesting and civic-minded citizens. Many of them were connected, in one way or another, with the University of Texas, but the group also included some of Austin's wealthiest and most socially prominent people.
They included, to name just a few, Lillian Bedichek, the wife of Texas naturalist Roy Bedichek and an intellectual and author in her own right (she was the Austin clinic's first president); Herman Brown, the wealthy businessman who later controlled the huge Brown and Root construction firm; Anna Sandbo, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Texas and Austin's first female lawyer (she owned her own practice); Ouida Nalle, the daughter of Texas Governors "Pa" and "Ma" Ferguson and author of the popular book The Fergusons of Texas ; Captain Everett Smith (one of the clinic's first vice-presidents, and for many years its treasurer); Dr. Mary Jourdan Atkinson, an ethnologist who wrote two acclaimed books on Native Americans in Texas; Katherine Hart, who later earned a Ph.D. in French literature from the University of Texas and was one of the founders, and for many years the curator, of what is now the Austin History Center; Abram V. Goodman, the rabbi of Austin's Congregation Beth Israel; the Reverend Clabe Hall, director of the Wesley Bible Chair Institute at the University of Texas; Johnnie Slaughter, a wealthy philanthropist actively engaged in many of Austin's civic organizations (a few years earlier, she had helped to establish Austin's first public library); Dr. Banner Gregg, the city's health officer; J. Mabel Busfield, a working journalist who was published for many years under her maiden name, J. Mabel Clark; Janet Long, the wife of Walter Long, Austin's city manager at the time; Dolly Bolton, a journalist who was also an early environmentalist and preservationist; Timothy H. Williams, one of Austin's best-known businessmen and a man long active in Austin civic affairs; Mary Graves, the civic-minded wife of Judge Ireland Graves; and Marian Lee Powell (the wife of Judge Ben Powell), who taught college mathematics before moving to Austin, where she was for many years involved in civic organizations (she was another founder of the city's public library).
To raise funds to operate the clinic, which would offer services at little or no charge and only to poor, married women, each of the original members of the board of directors agreed to donate or raise a hundred dollars. People who wished to support the clinic but were not on the board could purchase "memberships" for twenty-five dollars. Though several years later the clinic would also begin to conduct annual fund-raising drives, this basic arrangement (though dollar amounts fluctuated) would continue to serve as the most important source of the clinic's financial support for more than ten years.
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