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Birth:          9 Nov 1922 Conn.
Death:          19 Feb 2010 King Co., Wash.

Notes
!PUBL
owt
1930 in West Hartford, Conn.
1940 in West Hartford, Conn.
obit of Margaret French Myers Bruce
of Boulder, Col.
per Bio and Gen Master idx on ancestry, she is in Contemporary Authors; Feminists 
Who Changed America, Who's Who in the Midwest, Who's Who of American Women, 
Who's Who
pub rec on ancestry 4423 Valli Vista Rd., Colorado Springs, Col.
ssn no num last resid Redmond, Wash.
Wash Death Idx on ancestry
intelius rel to S Wang, Shu Wang, Sharon Wang, Caroline Wang
Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, on google books, she is a medical 
doctor who founded NARAL. Also founder of Citizens for the Extension of Birth Control 
Services and Illinois Citizens for the Medical Control of Abortion. BA Vassar College 
1944, MD Univ of Mich 1948. five children
Mich Alumnus vol 57
From https://perceptionsofpregnancy.com/2014/11/24/the-doctor-i-didnt-expect/:
The Doctor I Didn’t Expect
Posted on November 24, 2014 by jennifercevans
The Doctor I Didn’t Expect: Lonny Myers’ Mid-Twentieth Century U.S. Sex Radicalism

While at the Schlesinger Library recently, working in the National Association for the 
Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) records, I came across an unfamiliar name. In the 
program for the First National Conference on Abortion Laws: Modification or Repeal? 
(Chicago, Illinois, 14-16 February 1969) the local contact for the working group that 
would become NARAL was Lonny Myers, M.D.



Great, I thought.  Another male doctor. During the 1950s-60s, the abortion reform 
movement was dominated by male medical professionals. The two other individuals 
centrally involved in NARAL’s organization — author Lawrence Lader of New York and 
ecologist Garrett Hardin of California — were both men. Lonny Myers, M.D. seemed to 
fit this pattern — until I started digging deeper.

Caroline (Lonny) Rulon Myers was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1922 to wealthy 
parents who sent their daughter to Vassar College, where she graduated in 1944 with 
a degree in biology.[1] In 1948 she graduated from the University of Michigan with an 
M.D. and went on to practice anesthesiology in Chicago while her husband, Shu Yu 
Wang, completed his medical training. During Myer’s residency at Michael Reese 
hospital, the couple had five children. In the late 1950s, Myers became involved in 
political organizing around family planning, beginning with efforts to extend birth 
control services to women receiving public assistance in Illinois. Soon, she was 
considering a move out of anesthesiology into family planning.

After hearing a talk by Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, 1968), Myers became 
committed to the cause of limiting human reproduction before human consumption 
became unsustainable for the planet’s limited resources. Like many of her 
contemporaries, Myer’s family planning activism turned around ecological concerns. 
Unlike many of the abortion rights proponents of her era, Myer’s was committed to 
discussing not only “population” and “family planning,” but also sex. “I decided I really 
wanted to do something in population” rather than anesthetics, she told Ellen Chesler 
in a 1976 oral history interview, “and have this whole idea that the attitude toward sex 
has to do with population…that until you’re willing to deal with sex you can’t deal with 
population.”[2] A year after 1969 First National Conference, Myers helped found the 
Midwest Population Center where, among other activities, she provided free 
vasectomies. She became an active researcher in human sexuality, publishing books, 
articles, and speaking widely on matters from abortion to zero population growth.[3] As 
she and her husband grew apart they separated amicably (remaining married) and 
Myers became an advocate of open marriage.[4]

While the Lonny Myers papers, housed at the University of Illinois, are open for 
research it appears that very little work has been done on Myers’ life and work in 
historical context.[5] Searches for Myers in various bibliographic databases turn up 
work by, but very little about, this quietly radical figure. This is a shame because 
Lonny Myers’ young adulthood and early professional life span a crucial period in 
American women’s history — post-suffrage (1919) yet before the women’s liberation 
movement of the Sixties.

Born after feminist activists had expanded educational, economic, and political 
opportunities for women, Myers was of a generation of privileged, white American 
women generally expected to attend college before marriage.[6] As college students, 
these women had pioneering female professionals to look up to — Myers describes, for 
example, spending one summer during college in Kentucky volunteering with Mary 
Carson Breckinridge’s Frontier Nursing Service.[7] While baby boomer women often 
take center stage in our accounts of the women’s liberation movement, their mothers, 
aunts, and professors were often fellow travelers — though their radicalism did not be 
the focus of national attention the way boomer rebellion would.

The expansion of college education, along with increasing opportunities for women’s 
financial independence during the post-suffrage era, created spaces for some to 
explore and perform gender and sexuality in non-conventional ways.[8] Myer describes 
being playfully sexually active with Wang, the man she eventually married, as well as 
fellow interns during her medical training. She also articulates impatience with 
heteronormative romance conventions (“I don’t like [sex] to depend on pretending”[9]) 
and claims, at one point, “The first time I really felt I understood the word female was 
not until I was thirty-nine years old.”[10] Her nieces and nephews referred to her as 
“Uncle Lonny.”[11] Still, there were limits — and Myers was aware of them. Looking 
back on her decision to become a doctor, she observed that one motivation was 
“once I get an M.D. (since I can’t be a man and have people listen to me because I’m 
male) people will listen to me.”[12]

Myer’s professional work is equally notable when examined through a historical lens. 
Her insistence that human sexuality could not separated from the political question of 
population and natural resources, foreshadows later feminist framing. During the same 
period that Virginia Masters and William Johnson were conducting their research with 
human subjects, and as The Joy of Sex was hitting the market on both sides of the 
Atlantic, Myers was also challenging Americans to think about human sexuality in 
expansive ways; she explored topics such as childhood sexuality, disability and 
sexuality, and female ejaculation that even today receive too little attention.

Lonny Myers retired in 1989 and spent two years with the Peace Corps in Malawi.[13] 
Upon returning to the U.S. Myers moved to Colorado, where as far as my research 
indicates she still lives at the age of 92.

http://findingaids.library.uic.edu/ead/rjd1/LMeyersf.html
Lonny Myers was a doctor, sexologist, activist, and author. Her interests lie primarily in 
issues of sexuality, reproduction, and gender, and her research and activism engaged 
these in a broad manner. Her professional and personal life informed one another, and 
her intellectual passion arose from her lived experiences.

Born Caroline Myers to an upper class Hartford, Connecticut family in 1922, Her 
father, Rawden W Myers, was an insurance executive and her mother came from a 
prominent east coast family. She went on to Vassar College for her undergraduate 
degree, where she continued to play squash and tennis competitively. During her 
summers off, she worked in a factory located near her family's home. She graduated in 
1944.

She met Shu-Yung Wang during her first year of medical school at the University of 
Michigan, and the two would marry several years later. Myers completed her medical 
degree in 1948, and went to Chicago where she took up residency at Michael Reese 
Hospital in Anesthesiology. Upon marrying, Wang and Myers planned to eventually 
return to Wang's homeland of China to practice and teach medicine, a move they later 
abandoned. Together they had five children, and Myers continued to practice 
anesthesiology until 1970, at which time she helped found the Midwest Population 
Center. There she served as Director of Medical Education and performed and 
promoted vasectomies. She continued later in private practice offering vasectomies 
for a reduced cost.

She was active in many advocacy organizations, and played a key role in the founding 
of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). During her work with the 
Midwest Population Center, she organized and facilitated conferences and events, 
offered sex counseling, and lobbied within professional organizations such as the 
American Medical Association to take stands on issues of reproductive freedom.

Myers' writings reflect her passionate engagement with issues of human sexuality. She 
authored or co-authored four books, numerous articles, and engaged in many letter-
writing campaigns to periodicals and organizations. Her writings focus on issues of 
open marriage, fertility control, bisexuality, medical approaches to sexuality, sex and 
disability, and female sexuality. Her writings offer many personal anecdotes and 
provide a rich picture of her own biographical experience. Myers also undertook 
research on STD treatment, and wrote an unpublished manuscript reflecting her 
findings.

After retiring from her practice, Myers served in Malawi with the Peace Corps in 1989
-1991. Upon her return to the United States, she relocated to Colorado.

Parents
MYERS Rawdon Wright (11 Jun 1884 - 20 Oct 1967)
MILLER Emily Springs (18 May 1887 - 13 Nov 1960)

Siblings
MYERS Freeman Rawdon (16 Sep 1913 - 23 Nov 2001)
MYERS Margaret French (16 Sep 1915 - 21 Oct 2002)
MYERS Emily Springs (24 Sep 1921 - 4 Jul 2010)
MYERS Caroline Rulon ("Lonny") (9 Nov 1922 - 19 Feb 2010)
MYERS Eleanor F. ()

Marriage To WANG Shu Yung (1914 - 26 Aug 1999)
    m. 1949 

Notes


Children by WANG Shu Yung 1914 - 26 Aug 1999
WANG Sheila ()
WANG Sandra ()
WANG Susan ()
WANG Sharon (7 Nov 1950 - 31 May 2005)
WANG Sherwood R. ()

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