Faye Wattleton
First Black President of Planned Parenthood
Faye Wattleton was born in 1943 in St. Louis Missouri. As the only child to a construction worker father and mother who was a traveling minister, her childhood was shaped by the intersection of faith and personal choice. She observed the process of how women made life decisions and held onto their values with guidance from their faith. Her nursing career began at the young age of 16. She received her Bachelor’s of science in nursing in 1964, and her Master’s of science in nursing from Columbia University in 1967, specializing in maternal and infant health.
She worked as a public health nurse in Dayton, Ohio where she eventually established a local clinic to better address the prenatal needs of women. She eventually became the President of the local Planned Parenthood and was appointed as the youngest President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1978. Wattleton was the second nurse leader in the organization’s history, after being founded by nurse Margaret Sanger in 1948. She served as president for 14 years, stepping down in 1992. In 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and published her autobiography Life on the Line in 1996. She founded a non-profit think tank, The Center for the Advancement of Women from 1995–2010 to “promote strategies for dismantling the obstacles that impede full equality for women," and in 2017 she co-founded a quantum computing company, Eeroq.
Advocacy Note: Supported by all three nurse congresswomen, the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021 was recently re-introduced in Congress — call your representative to help the pass the only bill written to address the Black maternal health crisis.
Sources
We sourced information for the above biography from Nursing Theory, National Woman’s Hall of Fame, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona.
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