Papers of Hilda Crosby Standish, 1888-2004

Physician and lecturer on family planning, Hilda (Crosby) Standish was born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of Julia (Case) and Albert Hutchings Crosby. A graduate of Wellesley College (1924) and Cornell University Medical College (1928), she interned at the Philadelphia General Hospital (1928-1930), traveled and substituted at Bellevue Hospital, New York, New York (1930-1931), and did a year long residency in obstetrics at the St. Louis Maternity Hospital (1931). The following year she accepted a five year appointment to teach obstetrics at the Women's Christian Medical College and the Margaret Williamson Hospital in Shanghai, China. While studying at the Peking Language School, she took a few months leave of absence in early 1934 for a family medical condition. Unable to return to China because of the Japanese invasion, Standish was able to accept the position of medical director at the Hartford Maternal Health Center, the first birth control clinic in Connecticut, which opened in July 1935. Birth control was then illegal in Connecticut and the clinic closed in 1940, following the arrest of staff at a similar clinic in Waterbury. In 1983, Planned Parenthood of Connecticut renamed the West Hartford clinic the Hilda Crosby Standish MD Clinic.

In 1936, she married Erland Myles Standish, a dermatologist. They had five children: Nancy, E. Myles, Jr., Susan Crosby (Sukie), Jared Butler II, and Richard Perkins. Standish gave up the practice of obstetrics and lectured widely--often to groups of students--on sex education and family planning. She served on many community boards and as trustee of Wellesley College and Hartford College for Women. She was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame in 1994 and received Wellesley's Alumnae Achievement Award in 1998. In 1989, a year after her husband Myles died, Standish moved into the McAuley, a continuing care retirement community in West Hartford. During the 1990s, Standish began writing reminiscences of her life and childhood, her views on aging, the birth control struggle in Connecticut, etc. Standish died in 2005.