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.

In the late 1920s, the Mudds were among those who founded the Maternal Health Center, a birth control clinic in Delaware County, just outside Philadelphia. As in most states, Pennsylvania laws restricted the availability of birth control devices and information. The Maternal Health Center was unable to find a nurse willing to give out information about birth control; EHM did this as a volunteer. Many of the women she saw were physically, emotionally, or economically burdened by the number of children they had. EHM became convinced that young women should be able to learn about contraception before becoming overwhelmed with more children than they wanted, and that potential marital problems deriving from disagreements over such issues as contraception and mutual expectations should be worked out early in a marriage. Believing that "prevention" is better than a later "cure," she joined a committee that was considering forming an agency to address these concerns. The Marriage Council (until 1947, Counsel) of Philadelphia (MCP) was founded in 1932 or 1933, with EHM as its counselor.

The MCP was only the third such agency in the United States. EHM served as director part-time while working toward a Master in Social Work degree at the University of Pennsylvania. When she earned her degree in 1936, she became executive director of the MCP, a post she held until her retirement in 1967. In 1950 she earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1952, the MCP affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The council became the core of the newly founded Divison of Family Study in the Department of Psychiatry. EHM was director of the division and became a full professor in 1956, the first woman to reach that level in the medical school.

In addition to providing marriage counseling to men and women, the MCP conducted research on clients and other families, and on the results of its services. It became a center for training counselors from the U.S. and abroad. EHM participated in all aspects of the council's work. She counseled clients, taught counselors, and introduced medical students, pastors, and others to marriage counseling techniques. She conducted and oversaw studies, lectured and offered courses in Philadelphia and elsewhere, and wrote or edited six books and well over a hundred articles about the MCP, research results, and other topics, most related to marriage counseling. For a fairly comprehensive list of EHM's publications, see #119. In the 1940s and early 1950s, at the request of the publisher, EHM worked with Alfred Kinsey as one of five consulting editors for the Institute for Sex Research's book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).

EHM was also concerned with marriage counseling, family planning, and population control overseas. She enjoyed learning about practices in other countries as well as sharing her own expertise. She and SM travelled around the world giving lectures in their respective fields. Among the countries they visited were the Soviet Union (1946), South America (1950), Japan (1955, 1974), Sweden (1958), Israel (1961), Australia and New Zealand (1964, 1968), Poland (1966), Korea and the Philippines (1967), and India (1968). The Mudds were both active with the Pathfinder Fund, which has founded family planning services around the world (many in developing countries) and supports research on contraceptives.

After EHM's retirement in 1967, she continued to be active in the medical school's Departments of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology as well as in the Marriage Council. She was senior advisor of the Teen Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, which serves teenage girls, their mothers, and their boyfriends. Always involved in professional and other organizations, in the 1970s and early 1980s she increased her volunteer work and served on a number of boards: e.g., the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Experiment in International Living, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the World Academy of Art and Science (as treasurer for eight years, then chair of the Awards Committee). In the early 1970s Governor Milton Shapp appointed her co-chair of the Pennsylvania Abortion Law Commission, and she was co-director of continuing education for the Masters & Johnson Institute (earlier the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation) in St. Louis from 1970 through 1981.

Stuart Mudd died on May 6, 1975. In 1980 EHM married Frederick Gloeckner, chair of the Board of Directors of the Winchell Company, Printers and Publishers. They live in Haverford, Penn.

For additional biographical information, see published articles in #10-18, particularly those from Current Biography (1956), Health Affairs (1973), Who's Who of American Women (1977-1978), and Who's Who in America (1990-1991), and papers about EHM in #3-9. EHM was interviewed by James W. Reed for the Schlesinger Library's Family Planning Oral History Project; the transcript is available at the library: OH-1/ Mudd. JWR's interview with Stuart Mudd and biographical material about SM are in #17 of the Family Planning Oral History Project collection, MC 223; papers about EHM there duplicate material in this collection.

From the guide to the Papers, 1873-1990, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)