Anna Blount

Anna Blount (January 18, 1872 – February 12, 1953) was an American physician from Chicago, and Oak Park. She was awarded Doctor of Medicine June 17, 1897 by Northwestern University. She volunteered her medical services at Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago that was founded in 1889. She encouraged other women to become physicians and was the president of the National Medical Women's Association.

Sex education and birth control
Blount was a proponent of birth control and a leader in the birth control movement in the United States. She was a frequent contributor to the Birth Control Review. She served on the committee of the First American Birth Control Conference. Blount gave lectures on "sex hygiene" to Chicago high schools, clubs and to universities. She created pamphlets, such as A Talk With Mothers, which discussed condom use. She believed that "shielding women" from information about sexually transmitted disease was wrong. When it was still illegal to do so, Blount gave out information about birth control in direct violation of laws against discussing birth control in order to test those laws.

Blount also supported the idea of eugenics. Blount called eugenics "the most important movement of modern times." She chaired the Eugenics Education Society of Chicago. Blount believed that people should choose to have children with only the most mentally and physically healthy individuals. She believed that "cruelty is a hereditary characteristic." She connected alcoholism with heredity as well. Blount even believed that lowering the population size would prevent war and world hunger.

Blount did not believe that people who were unhappy with one another should stay married, and proposed that obtaining a divorce should be made easier in the courts. She advocated that juries on divorce trials should be made up of women.

Woman's suffrage
Blount was a leader in the women's suffrage movement. She was a member of the Chicago Woman's Club and the Nineteenth Century Woman's Club of Oak Park. Blount spoke out against club organizations attempting to prevent African American women from joining. Concerning Dr. Blount's involvement in the woman's suffrage movement, The Gentle Force says,

Note that Grace Hall Hemingway was the mother of author Ernest Hemingway and Anna Lloyd Wright was the mother of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

In The Young Hemingway Michael Reynolds says, "In 1907, to the amusement of male Oak Parkers, the Illinois Equal Suffrage convention was held at Scoville Institute, where Dr. Anna Blount, a local woman, was the wittiest and most persuasive voice."

Concerning Blount's high reputation, at pages 106-107 Reynolds states,

Personal life
Anna Blount and her husband, Ralph Earl Blount, both worked at Hull House. They lived in Oak Park, IL, and had three children: Walter Putnam, Earl Ellsworth, and Ruth Amelia. Both Walter and Ruth became doctors, with Ruth, who received her Doctor of Medicine degree from Northwestern University on June 16, 1934, being one of the women "encouraged ... to become physicians" by her mother, as has been referred to above.

Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska refers to Blount as "a physician, suffragist, and social activist. She graduated in medicine from the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University and in gynecology and pediatrics from a university in Munich.”  Blount had an active medical practice.  For example, she delivered Iovanna, the daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright and his mistress, later wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright:

Blount's prominence in the Chicago area was illustrated by a 1934 photograph of her, her daughter-in-law, and recently born granddaughter appearing on the front page of the Chicago Herald and Examiner. The caption to the photo reads, "ALL SMILES ... Dr. Anna Blount ..., a veteran of the Women's and Children's Hospital, is shown holding her granddaughter, Elizabeth, 5 days old, as her daughter-in-law, Esther Stamm Blount, smiles happily." An article also on the front page is titled, "Hospital Run Efficiently By Women Alone," and states that the Women's and Children's Hospital had existed since Civil War days and had just celebrated its seventieth anniversary.