Papers of Edna Rankin McKinnon, 1893-1978

Edna Bertha Rankin, birth control advocate, was born in Missoula, Montana, on October 21, 1893, the youngest of the seven children of John and Olive (Pickering) Rankin. For biographical data concerning the Rankin children, see the Inventory for the Jeannette Rankin Papers, Schlesinger Library. Her oldest sister, Jeannette Rankin, was in 1916 the first woman elected to the United States Congress. Both Jeannette and their brother Wellington, a major Montana landowner and Republican politician, were influential in shaping Edna's educational and career choices. She entered Wellesley College in 1912, left for the University of Wisconsin in 1914, and two years later left again to work on her sister's Congressional campaign in Montana. In 1916 she received her B.A. from the University of Montana and her LL.B. in 1918. She practiced law briefly in Helena, Montana, before her marriage to John Wallace McKinnon, Jr., in 1919.

The McKinnons had two children, Dorothy Pickering, born in 1920 (later Dorothy McKinnon "Mackey" Brown) and John Wallace McKinnon III, 1923-1930. The marriage lasted eleven years; McKinnnon frequently told others that she had "lost her husband during the Depression."

In 1929, McKinnon travelled in Europe and upon returning found that the stock market crash necessitated her returning to work. She became a sales representative and then manager for Best and Company in New York City. In the mid-1930s, Jeannette found McKinnon a position in the Legal Division of the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. McKinnon attended a birth control lecture in 1936 and, having expressed an interest in the movement for legalization, was asked to accept the position of Executive Director of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, a division of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau. Her interview with Margaret Sanger began a close professional association that spanned thirty years.

The target of McKinnon's legislative campaign was the Comstock law, which outlawed birth control, classing it with pornography. She was unaware that a test case, "United States v. One Package of Pessaries," was pending before the Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. A Federal decision against the Comstock law was reached several months later -- and McKinnon immediately lost her job. However, Dr. Clarence J. Gamble, an heir to the Procter and Gamble fortune and a strong birth control advocate, convinced Sanger to retain McKinnon at her Research Bureau as a field worker. Initially paid by Dr. Gamble and then by the Research Bureau, she established local birth control clinics across the country between 1937 and 1946.

During these eleven years, McKinnon visited thirty-two states. She attempted to set up clinics in Montana, but Wellington Rankin's objections put an end to this and she moved on to Knoxville, Tennessee, where she successfully established the first hospital birth control clinic. On a consultation visit to Chicago, she became convinced that she herself could best establish the major clinic needed there; from 1947 to 1957 she was Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood Association, Chicago Area, where she coordinated many local family planning organizations.

In 1952 McKinnon accompanied Margaret Sanger to the founding conference of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Bombay. She left Planned Parenthood Federation, CA in 1957, in part because of a deepening belief in Christian Science, which she felt conflicted with her medically oriented work. In 1957 Dr. Gamble began the Pathfinder Fund, a private organization for international family planning, and asked McKinnon to be a field worker. She accepted Dr. Gamble's offer and in 1960 left with her daughter, Dorothy, for a tour of Asia.

Between 1960 and 1966 McKinnon traveled in India, Africa, and the Middle East, promoting birth control as a family planning and maternal health measure. She was instrumental in the formation of many family planning organizations and clinics throughout these areas. In each country, she met with local leaders, who then established their own organizations with financial assistance from the Pathfinder Fund. After retiring in 1966, McKinnon made one last follow-up tour in 1968 to Indonesia, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

On a trip to Russia in 1970 she renewed a friendship with Martha Ragland, who persuaded McKinnon that author Wilma Dykeman (Stokely) should write a biography concentrating on McKinnon's Pathfinder Fund experience. The book, Too Many People, Too Little Love, was published in 1974. Following a promotional tour for the book, McKinnon received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Montana in 1975. After a brief residence in Missoula in 1966, she settled in Carmel, California, where she died in 1978.