March is Women's History Month, so to celebrate we learned more about a strong, adventurous woman who traveled Appalachian Kentucky by horseback to deliver babies and change lives. Asia Burnett speaks with Kentucky Historical Society Governing Board President Constance Alexander on Frontier Nursing Service founder Mary Breckinridge: A Woman of Courage.
Young Life:
Mary Breckinridge was born in 1881 in Memphis, Tennessee into a prominent Southern family. Her grandfather was John C. Breckinridge, who was Vice President under James Buchanan. Her father was also in public service, and she spent some of her growing up years in Russia when he was an ambassador there.
As part of her upper-class upbringing, Breckinridge learned how to ride very well on horseback. She hunted, enjoyed nature and had many beaus.
Her first husband, a lawyer from Arkansas, died after just two years of marriage, and Breckinridge decided to go to nursing school at St. Luke's in New York.
She returned to the South, remarried, and had two children (a boy and a girl). But tragedy struck again when the boy died at age 4, and the girl just a day after birth. Breckinridge divorced her husband and took back her maiden name.
The War Years:
Devastated after her losses, Breckinridge immersed herself in helping others. She went to England during the first World War to be a nurse and learn about being a midwife. After the war, she traveled to devastated post-war France, where she learned how to do her work in reduced circumstances. People were starving and child mortality was high, so (ever-resourceful) Breckinridge wrote to her mother, and her mother wrote her other well-to-do friends - and soon a passel of goats arrived to help Breckinridge's French families survive.
Frontier Nursing Service:
When Breckinridge returned to America, she wanted to continue her service of women in children and saw the great need that existed in rural Appalachia. She founded the Frontier Nursing Service in Hyden, Kentucky - a group of midwives that traveled on horseback to provide care and deliver babies in these rural areas.
Frontier Nursing Service worked with the locals and delivery was only $5. But during the Depression era, when funds were scarce, they would also take chickens or manual labor as payment, and didn't turn families away. This resourcefulness helped Breckinridge build her hospital.
At a time when infant mortality was high and women died much more often in childbirth, Breckinridge's work and that of her Frontier Nurses had a huge and measurable impact on the lives of families in Eastern Kentucky.
Today, Frontier Nursing Service has become Frontier Nursing University, which trains nurse-midwives worldwide through distance learning.
You can learn more about Mary Breckinridge in her autobiography Wide Neighborhoods. Or in this article from Constance Alexander.
