Mary Steichen Calderone

Dr. Calderone, the daughter of the photographer Edward Steichen, was a woman of many talents and diverse interests who did not find her true calling until midlife. Following graduation from Vassar College, where she majored in chemistry, she decided to go on the stage, but abandoned her acting career when she realized she could never be as good as Katherine Cornell. At the age of 30, after a failed marriage to a fellow actor, W. Lon Martin, and the birth of two daughters, Nell and Linda, she decided to go to medical school. She received an M.D. degree in 1939 from the University of Rochester and a master's degree in public health in 1942 from the Columbia University School of Public Health. While at Columbia she met Dr. Frank Calderone, then a district health officer on the Lower East Side who would soon become deputy commissioner of health for New York City and her second husband. The couple was married in 1941. Dr. Calderone served for some years as a school physician in Great Neck, L.I. In 1953 she became medical director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she carried forward Margaret Sanger's mission for family planning. she took part in the first American Conference on Church and Family run by the National Council of Churches. Attended by sociologists, religious leaders, educators and public health professionals, the conference highlighted the suffering of thousands of people because of ignorance about frigidity, impotence, homosexuality and contraception. With five colleagues at the conference, Dr. Calderone set up an informal committee to study human sexuality. Out of that committee grew Dr. Calderone's signature achievement, the co-founding of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States in 1964. Dr. Calderone then resigned from Planned Parenthood to turn her attention from reproductive biology to education in human sexuality. A devout Quaker and a Republican, she was once labeled by the John Birch Society as an ''aging sexual libertine.' Dr. Calderone's own experiences as a mother were also difficult. Her 8-year-old daughter, Nell, died of pneumonia, plunging her into a debilitating depression. Her marriage to Dr. Calderone, who later became chief administrative officer of the World Health Organization, produced two more daughters, Dr. Francesca Calderone-Steichen, a gerontologist, and Dr. Maria Calderone, a veterinarian in Galena, Ohio, born almost 20 years after her oldest daughter, Linda Hodes, a psychotherapist in Albuquerque, N.M. The Calderones separated in 1979 but never divorced. Dr. Frank Calderone died in 1987. In addition to her daughters, Mary Calderone is survived by three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.