Rachelle Yarros

Rachelle Slobodinsky Yarros (18 May 186917 March 1946) was an American physician who supported the use of birth control and the social hygiene movement. A graduate of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, Yarros resided at Hull House for many years and opened the second birth control clinic in the nation there. She was an obstetrician/gynecologist affiliated with the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Chicago Lying-in Hospital.

Yarros' social causes included assisting with the founding of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) and founding the first premarital and marital counseling service in the United States. Yarros was married to journalist and anarchist Victor Yarros. Late in life, she left Chicago for Florida and then California, dying of heart problems in San Diego. She also used the penname Rosa Slobodinsky when writing an Anarchist pamphlet.

Early life Rachelle Slobodinsky was born into a wealthy family in Berdychiv, a city near Kiev. Her parents were Joachim and Bernice Slobodinsky. She fled to New York, where she got a job sewing at a sweatshop. She later moved to Boston, where she met her future husband, Victor Yarros. He was a Russian immigrant, journalist and anarchist.

Career In 1890, Slobodinsky became the first woman admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston. Attending a year of medical school there, Slobodinsky graduated from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1893. She married Victor Yarros in 1894.

Yarros was on the UIC faculty until 1928, becoming an associate professor, and she served as an associate director of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. Between 1907 and 1927, Rachelle and Victor Yarros resided at Hull House, where residents were heavily involved in social reform movements.

For many years, Yarros was the director of the Illinois Birth Control League. With the encouragement of Margaret Sanger, Yarros opened a birth control clinic at Hull House. It was the second such clinic in the United States. The clinic, which provided married females with diaphragms, faced criticism from Chicago's health commissioner, Herman N. Bundesen. However, similar clinics were established across the city in a short time.

An advocate for sexually informed women, Yarros wrote Modern Woman and Sex in 1933, which was reissued a few years later as Sex Problems in Modern Marriage.

Later life In the late 1930s, Yarros moved to Winter Park, Florida. She moved again in 1941, this time to La Jolla, California. Victor Yarros, who had at one time been a law partner of Clarence Darrow, lived until 1956. They had one adopted daughter named Elise.

Yarros died in San Diego in 1946 of heart failure; she had suffered a heart attack several years earlier. Her obituary quoted a passage from an unpublished autobiography, which said that "the enlightened, socially minded doctor will sympathize with labor, with victims of exploitation and industrial autocracy, with the juvenile and adult delinquents who are the products of slums and blighted, ugly, depressing districts. He will work and fight for ripe and genuine reforms."