Some children never rebel. Others never stop. Mildred Scott Olmsted was among the latter. Born in Glenolden, Olmsted was among the early advocates of birth control. She organized the first social service department at Bryn Mawr Hospital, and she worked for the YMCA and the Quakers in France and Germany during World War I, coming away from the experience a committed pacifist.
Born Mildred Scott, she was the second of three daughters of Henry Scott, a lawyer, and Adele Hamrick, a high-society beauty. Her older sister was prettier, her father was cold, and her mother allowed herself to be treated with disrespect.
Scott attended Friends’ Central School and graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts with a degree in history. In 1915, the Main Line Federation of Churches hired her as a field secretary. Through the job, she came in contact with Bryn Mawr Hospital, which had no social work department. Soon, Mildred put a proposal in the hands of their board, and she was hired as a social worker. She also crossed paths with birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger, who swayed her to join the Main Line Birth Control League.
In 1919, Scott went to France for the YMCA, which had hired her to organize recreation for troops awaiting demobilization. She moved on to Berlin, where she worked for the American Friends Service Committee.
In 1921, when she married lawyer Allen Olmsted, she informed him that she would neither obey nor promise to love him.
“Would you promise to strive to love me?” her husband replied.
To that she consented.
Olmsted’s work attracted the attention of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom. She served on its international executive committee from 1937 to 1953. In 1940, she opposed a bill to resume the military draft. She’d met Franklin Roosevelt twice, and she knew Eleanor Roosevelt well through WILPF activities. She’d supported FDR, but now she felt betrayed by the president, much like her father had let her down so many years ago.
Somehow, it always comes back to the same thing: What a difference better parenting might’ve made.
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