the Female Body GOVERNING

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conference. In Puerto Rico, two North American female doctors—who,
one suspects, found a wider scope for professional respect and work on
the island than on the mainland in the 1950s—conducted the trials.
Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, medical director of the Asociación and director of
the Health Department work in Río Piedras, and Penny Satterthwaite of
Ryder Hospital were the primary physicians recording the effects of the
Pill. Each had a Puerto Rican female counterpart still more intimately
involved in the trials: in Río Piedras, nurses Mercedes Quiñones and
Iris Rodríguez of Pro-Familia, and in Humacao, with Ryder, social
worker Noemí Rodríguez. These were no mere lackeys in this process,
but well-educated, professional women who came to birth control work
because they believed in the cause. Both Rice-Wray and Satterthwaite
continued contraceptive research elsewhere when they left Puerto
Rico, the former with the Pill in Mexico, the latter, with the IUD in
Thailand (Reed, 1974; Rice-Wray, 1962). Like their male colleagues
in the study, both also cited concerns about “overpopulation” as the
motivating force that brought them to this work. Satterthwaite (Reed,
1974), the missionary, told the following story:
On my way to Puerto Rico . . . [I met] Dr. Ralph Allee. He said to me,
“Here [sic] you’re going to Puerto Rico, out to save lives and to deliver
babies, and full of enthusiasm. Have you ever thought about what
you may be doing to complicate the future of the [island].” Here was
an agricultural man . . . worrying about food supply. And so he was
perhaps the fi rst one that really faced me up to a responsibility.
Rice-Wray (1957, p. 78), similarly, wrote, “Puerto Rico is one of the
most densely populated countries in the world. We are all interested in
fi nding some reliable contraceptive which is cheap, acceptable to the
people, easy to take and something the people themselves would be
interested in taking.” She later also used similar language to characterize
the situation of Mexico (Rice-Wray, Schultz-Contreras, Guerrero
& Aranda-Roselli, 1962). Of the motivation of Iris and Noemí Rodríguez
and Mercedes Quiñones it is more diffi cult to say anything defi nite
because they wrote no letters or articles for the study, which makes
guessing at their frame of mind diffi cult. Nevertheless, they acted in a
way consistent with both the leadership and membership of Pro Familia
and the other asociaciones during the previous 20 years. From one point
of view, they practiced the art of the possible, seeking to promote birth
control and hence jumping onto whatever project some North American
group or company was willing to fund. From a more cynical perspective,
they collaborated with North Americans in the project of making over