Blanche pendant

{The Blanche pendant.}

Blanche Ames was an artist and outspoken feminist. She created botanical drawings for her husband's research on orchids, and thanks to them the Orchidicae is now the best researched and classified of all the large plant families.

Ames published an article in The Birth Control Review that stated, "The long arm of the Catholic Church is reaching into our legislative halls and is directing our legislators to act according to its will...We have all been troubled by the fear that this Catholic threat to our free institutions would materialize if Catholics were given positions of power in our government, but never before in so short a time have events developed in such irrefutable sequence as in this case of opposition to the Doctors' Birth Control Bill." Because of the ban on distributing birth control information, Ames encouraged women to teach their daughters how to protect themselves, and provided instructions on how to make their own spermicidal jellies and diaphragms.

Blanche Ames died in 1969 at the age of 92.