Mary S. Calderone

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Calderone, Mary S. (01 July 1904–24 October 1998), physician and educator, was born Mary Steichen in New York City to Edward Steichen, a photographer, and Clara Smith Steichen. While Mary and her younger sister were growing up, living in both New York and France, their father emerged as one of the most acclaimed photographers in the world, and Mary Steichen later said that her father's ability to portray “human life and the human condition” made a deep impression on her at an early age. Her parents separated when she was ten, and Mary went to live with her father; she remained alienated from her mother for many decades, not restoring their relationship until Mary herself was in her sixties.

Mary Steichen was educated in private schools and at Vassar College, from which she graduated in 1925 with a degree in chemistry and several years of experience in amateur theatricals. With an aptitude for both science and dramatics, she decided to choose the latter as a career and spent several years studying with prominent actors at the American Laboratory Theater in New York City. However, by the late 1920s she had begun to realize that she would never be a first-rate actress, and she withdrew from the profession with a sense of failure. Compounding her unhappiness, she had married a fellow actor, L. Lon Martin, in 1926, and the marriage was not satisfying. The couple had two daughters, one of whom died of pneumonia, before divorcing in 1933.

During this troubling period, Mary Steichen searched for direction, reading widely, undergoing psychoanalysis, and taking a series of aptitude tests in an effort to discover what she should do with her life. She concluded that because of her skills in science she could probably become a first-rate doctor, and at the age of thirty she entered medical school at the University of Rochester. Five years later, in 1939, she received her degree. After interning at Bellevue Hospital in New York City for a year, she attended the Columbia University School of Public Health on a fellowship from the city's public health department and received the master of public health degree in 1942. A year earlier she had married Dr. Frank Calderone, a public health physician under whom she worked while attending Columbia.

Mary S. Calderone, as she was now known, continued to work in the field of public health after receiving her M.P.H. degree. For more than a decade she served as a physician in schools in the suburbs of New York City, and her experiences led to a deepening interest in the medical aspects of human sexuality, particularly in contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. In 1953 she became medical director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, headquartered in New York, which had been founded by Margaret Sanger earlier in the century to make birth control information available to the public. During Calderone's eleven years in the post she became an outspoken advocate of birth control, through lectures, media essays, and literature that was widely distributed by the organization. At the beginning of her tenure, the subject of birth control was still regarded as “indelicate” and rarely mentioned in public: contraceptive techniques were limited (“the pill” was not made available to the public until 1960) and most abortions were illegal. In many areas of the nation, physicians refused altogether to even discuss birth control—known euphemistically as “family planning”—with their patients, and sexually transmitted diseases were viewed with such shame that many people went untreated rather than acknowledge their condition.

One of Calderone's major accomplishments at Planned Parenthood was her success in persuading the American Medical Association to formally adopt a policy in 1964 that directed physicians to give birth control information to their patients as a matter of course. By this time Calderone had become aware, through thousands of letters she received at Planned Parenthood, that millions of Americans were woefully ignorant about all areas of sexuality, not just birth control. In 1961 she had participated in a wide-ranging conference on the family, sponsored by the National Council of Churches, and she and several other participants had subsequently formed a committee to look at existing studies on human sexuality. This group was the nucleus of the Sex (later Sexuality) Information and Education Council of the United States, Inc. (SIECUS), which Calderone and her colleagues founded in May 1964. Calderone resigned from Planned Parenthood to become the executive director of SIECUS (pronounced SEE-kuss), which had as its broadly defined goal “to define man's sexuality as a health entity.”

Under Calderone, SIECUS undertook a massive education campaign throughout the nation, distributing information on all aspects of sexuality. Crusading for openness and frank talk about sexuality and its consequences, Mary Calderone became a revolutionary in the field of sex education. She traveled throughout the country, lecturing to audiences of all ages, her platform skills aided by her earlier dramatic training. Her major focus was the establishment of sex education programs in the nation's schools, and to this end SIECUS created the publication Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten Through Twelfth Grade; updated periodically, the guide is still in use.

In the early days of her tenure as the director of SIECUS, Calderone encountered opposition from all but the most liberal elements of the population, for at that time many people believed that sex was not an appropriate subject for discussion in the classroom. She remained undaunted, however, and by the time she stepped down as executive director in 1979, on her seventy-fifth birthday, some form of sex education had become the norm in most of the nation's schools.

From 1979 until 1982 Calderone served as president of SIECUS. After retiring, she became an adjunct professor for several years at New York University, teaching in its program on human sexuality. In addition to her writings for SIECUS and her many contributions to professional journals, she was the coauthor of two bestselling popular books, The Family Book About Sexuality (1981, with Eric Johnson) and Talking with Your Child About Sex (1982, with James W. Ramey). She also edited several books on abortion and family planning.

Mary Calderone had two more daughters with her second husband, from whom she separated in 1979; he died eight years later. She retired from public life at the age of eighty, though she continued to contribute letters and op-ed pieces to newspapers from time to time on such issues as abortion rights, of which she was a strong proponent. That advocacy attracted wide attention and put her briefly at the center of controversy again when she published in the 16 September 1989 issue of the New York Times an op-ed piece called “Fetuses' Right Not to Be Born”; there she argued that terribly damaged fetuses had the God-given right to be aborted rather than suffer endless misery after birth.

Mary Calderone was a Democrat in politics and a lifelong Quaker. During the last years of her life she suffered from Alzheimer's disease and was confined to a nursing home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where she died.