Lella Secor Florence
Lella Secor Florence, née Lella Faye Secor, was an American writer, journalist, pacifist, feminist and pioneer of birth control.Life
Lella Faye Secor was born in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1887. In 1892 her family moved to Ventura, California before moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin and finally, in 1898, returning to Battle Creek. In 1906 she became a journalist in Battle Creek and then in a variety of towns in Washington state. She sailed on the Henry Ford Peace Ship in 1915 as a reporter.
In 1917 Secor married the economist Philip Sargant Florence and in 1921 they moved to Cambridge, England. In Cambridge she became actively involved in campaigning for birth control, and for a period lived away from her husband in a flat in Paris.
In 1929, Philip was appointed to the chair in commerce at the University of Birmingham and the couple moved to the Birmingham district of Selly Park, where they bought a large house called Highfield. In 1930 she published Birth Control on Trial. Their house Highfield became a focal point for the intellectual life of Birmingham in the 1930s – the poet Louis MacNeice lived in the converted coachman's quarters and the writer Walter Allen described how "Most English Left-Wing intellectuals and American intellectuals visiting Britain must have passed through Highfield between 1930 and 1950". Lella remained committed to disarmament, birth control and women's rights and continued to write and campaign. She died of pneumonia following a stroke in 1966.
