Mabel Wadsworth: championed women’s health care

Mabel Antoinette Sine Wadsworth, a pioneer in the advancement of women’s health care and birth control in Maine, was 95 years old when she died at her Bangor home on Jan. 11, 2006. She was born Oct. 14, 1910, in Rochester, N.Y., one of six children of David Albert and Effie Maude (Harrison) Sine.

Her life’s work helped inspire the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center, a private, nonprofit facility that opened in 1984 in Bangor and still provides full-service health care to women.

“The work that she did for women around reproductive rights and delivery of service has been long-lasting,” longtime friend Ruth Lockhart, executive director of the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center, told a Bangor Daily News reporter shortly after Wadsworth’s death. “Her legacy lives on through the center and to those here who are devoted to her own principles.”

Wadsworth moved to Bangor in 1946 with her husband, Dr. Richard Wadsworth. She had just earned a nursing degree from the University of Rochester and had become intrigued by the ideas of Margaret Sanger, a national leader in women’s reproductive rights. Mabel Wadsworth joined the Maternal Health League, a volunteer organization patterned after Sanger’s work promoting birth control education.

“Mabel really grasped early on that women would feel more comfortable talking with other women about issues such as sexual well-being and birth control and that those conversations didn’t have to take place while wearing a hospital gown on a doctor’s table,” said Lockhart in a 2005 interview with the BDN.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Wadsworth recruited many like-minded women to join her in a door-to-door campaign educating rural Maine women about birth control.

“It wasn’t about feminism back in those days,” Wadsworth said in a December 2005 interview with the BDN. “It was simply educating women that you really and truly could take a pill and not have any more babies. It took some convincing for a lot of them, but when they tried it, they found it worked quite well.”

She went on to become the first president of the Maine Family Planning Association, and in the early 1970s, Wadsworth was instrumental in helping pass legislation that mandated teenagers’ rights to confidential contraceptive services.

“Fundamentally, she thought about these issues in a way that was very progressive and innovative,” said Sharon Barker, director of the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Maine and another longtime friend, told the BDN shortly after Wadsworth’s death. “She addressed issues before they arose, and really worked to place the power about women’s bodies in the hands of the women themselves.”

Wadsworth’s community involvement in volunteer organizations included the League of Women Voters and the Eastern Maine General Hospital Auxiliary. According to the Mabel Wadsworth Center’s Web site, Wadsworth helped form the Abnaki Council of Girl Scouts, was instrumental in starting the first NAACP chapter in Maine, served as the first president of the Bangor Counseling Center’s board of directors. She also was active in the development of the Women’s Resource Center, out of which evolved the Displaced Homemakers Organization.

She served on the Legal Services for the Elderly board of directors, helped raise funds for the Bangor Symphony, Spruce Run and United Way, and served in an advisory capacity for the Eastern Area Agency on Aging. Wadsworth and her achievements were recognized in the late 1980s when she was presented with the Mary Ann Hartman Award by the University of Maine. Wadsworth was inducted into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame in 1990, and received an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Maine in May 1993.

The family lived on Grove Street on the east side of the city, and Janet Pease, one of the Wadsworths’ three daughters, remembered during a 2005 BDN interview how her mother stood out from other mothers in the neighborhood.

“I can remember Christmas afternoons all the kids would gather together, and everyone always wanted to know what the fathers had gotten the mothers for Christmas. It was always something fabulous – coats or jewelry. I remember one year for us it was a toolbox. My mother had wanted her own toolbox, and my father had bought her one for Christmas. She was just so dang different,” said Pease.

Robert Woodward, longtime librarian at Bangor Public Library, once quipped, “In 100 years a historian might not know who Mabel Wadsworth was, but what he might notice is that during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s there was a zero population growth in Bangor. There is no one else that we can attribute that to but Mabel Wadsworth.”

Sources: Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center’s Web site, www.mabelwadsworth.org; files of the Bangor Daily News.

Maine’s history is full of female pioneers who blazed a path for the women of today. The Bangor Daily News, in cooperation with the Maine Historical Society’s online museum, Maine Memory Network, the Maine FolkLife Center and others, will highlight a different woman each day throughout March. If you are just joining us for this series, you may find the installments you have missed at www.bangordailynews.com.