Mudd, Emily H. (Emily Hartshorne), 1898-1998

Emily Borie (Hartshorne) Mudd (EHM), marriage counselor, advocate of family planning, researcher, and educator, was born in Merion, Penn., on September 6, 1898, the daughter of Edward Yarnall and suffragist Clementina (Rhodes) Hartshorne. After entering Vassar College in 1917, she worked in the Woman's Land Army and enlisted in the nursing corps of the U.S. Army rather than return to college. A bout of typhoid interfered with her plans to become a nurse or to attend any college that required mostly indoor activity. She transferred to the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture (Groton, Mass.), where she earned an L.A. degree in 1922. That same year she married Stuart Mudd (SM), whom she had met while he was a fellow in biophysics at Harvard Medical School. They had four children: Emily Borie, Stuart Harvey, Margaret Clark, and John Hodgen.

The Mudds lived briefly in New York City, where they met Margaret Sanger and Dr. Abraham Stone. They moved to the Philadelphia area in the early 1920s, eventually settling in Haverford. There they lived next door to EHM's sister, Clementine Hartshorne Jenney. EHM and CHJ mutually raised the Mudd and Jenney children, making it easier for each of them to do other work. EHM served as microbiologist and SM's unpaid laboratory assistant until the early 1930s. Their research included work on the immunology of spermatozoa, which they hoped might result in a new method of birth control; together they published fourteen articles about their work.

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