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Overview
Miss Mattie Ingram, “Miss Brunson”, was a nurse during the late 1920s and on. She did institutional and private nursing for nine years and continued to do public nursing for several years. The Federal Writer's Project interviewed Ingram on January 31, 1939.

Early Life
Ingram was born in Southern Georgia on an unknown date. She was raised there along with her eleven siblings. Ingram's father was unable to afford college for her, so after high school, she decided to become a nurse. She took a training course at Macon Hospital which she completed in 1920. Ingram worked as a private nurse for nine years before switching to public health work and moving to coastal South Carolina.

Nursing Career
Ingram’s public work consisted of conducting clinics, instructing a weekly class of mid-wives, examining and vaccinating school children. Ingram found it difficult to improve the health conditions of the African American people she treated during that time because many of them lived in poverty and lacked access to information about health and medicine. Several of the families she treated were employed through The Works Progress Administration, but in 1939, the administration experienced a decline resulting in layoffs. Ingram witnessed many mothers struggling to provide necessities for their children. She helped these families by conducting three venereal clinics, and three prenatal and well-baby clinics as well as doing home visits. Ingram had many stories from her long career and said she was "able to see a slow and steady advancement (2)." She lived with her widowed sister and her niece and continued nursing in her predominately black county for many years. The date of Ingram's death is unknown.

Decline of the Works Progress Administration (1939)
During The Great Depression, the unemployment rate reached 20 percent. The Works Progress Administration was created by President Roosevelt as a way to combat unemployment, specifically for those working in the arts, by providing public works projects. These projects included road building and constructing buildings. During its peak in 1938, the program provided 3.3 million jobs to Americans.

The WPA also provided many jobs for African Americans who found it especially difficult to find work. In 1935, the WPA employed approximately 350,000 African Americans which was about 15 percent of its total workforce. Around 45 percent of the countries African-American families were on relief or employed by the WPA in 1938.

The WPA was criticized for it's wastefulness. Politicians and members of Congress argued that the administration was spending more money on it's projects than it was making. Some of the WPA's projects costed 3 to 4 times as much as private projects. With World War II production increasing, many men were joining the army, and the need for the Works Progress Administration declinded. As the administration reached it's end, it laid-off several of its workers and many people who depended on the WPA were unemployed again.

The Effects of Lack of Access to Birth Control on the Black Community
By the end of the 1920s, state and federal legal restrictions on access to birth control remained unchanged, despite a large movement in support birth control during the 1910s. Access to birth control continued to be heavily debated during the 1930s. Many couples and young women believed birth control was necessary during the period of economic hardship when people struggled to make ends meet.

African American's were disproportionately effected by the lack the access to contraceptives during a time when white Americans were employed at much higher rates. In 1941, The National Council of Negro Women became the first national women’s organization to officially endorse the practice of contraception.

In 1939, national groups advocating for birth control joined together to form the Birth Control Federation of America. The organization changed its name, in 1942, to Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In 1970, Congress passed Title X of the Public Health Service Act which created a federal grant program dedicated to providing low-income individuals with comprehensive family planning services, including contraceptives.

[1]Folder 875: Chlotilde, M. (interviewer): “The County Health Nurse.” the Federal Writers' Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (March 1, 2021). 1-15

Tone, Andrea. "Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political Economy of Birth Control in the 1930s." Journal of Social History 29, no. 3 (1996): 485-506. Accessed March 7, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788942.