Yarros, Rachelle Slobodinsky (1869-1964) (birth control)

Rachel Slobodinsky was the first woman admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston in 1890 but she finished her education at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, receiving the M.D. degree in 1893. She married Victor S. Yarros, like her a Russian immigrant, and the couple moved to Chicago, where RachelleYarros began an obstetrical and gynecological practice. She became an unsalaried instructor at the medical school of the University of Illinois at Chicago and continued her relationship with the college until 1928, reaching the rank of associate professor. She was, among other things, an associate director of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital at the University of Chicago. From 1907 to 1927 Yarros and her husband lived at Hull House and she became very much identified with the reform movements emanating from Jane Addams and others. Yarros was active in the social hygiene movement in its efforts to eradicate prostitution and eliminate venereal disease through education and legislation, but most importantly she was the Chicago leader in the birth control movement. Shortly after the beginning of World War I in Europe, Yarros persuaded the Chicago Women’s Club, to which she belonged, to establish a birth control committee. This committee evolved into the Illinois Birth Control League, which Yarros directed for many years. In 1923, at the urging of Margaret Sanger,Yarros opened the nation’s second birth control clinic close to Hull House on Chicago’s west side. She also campaigned for greater access to sex information for women and to this end she wrote Modern Woman and Sex (1933), which was reissued in 1938 as Sex Problems in Modern Marriage. Yarros also published a number of articles on birth control. Like many others in the birth control movement, she was both a socialist and an agnostic. The Yarroses had no children born to them but adopted a daughter, Elise Donaldson.