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Undaunted: Mary Breckinridge, Nurse-Midwife

Challenging the medical establishment that was outlawing her profession; practicing in a part of the country that was too remote and too rugged for any doctor, where birthing children often meant death for mother and child; creating an all-woman staff at a time when women were not granted equal citizenship; fundraising during the Depression; these were just a few of the obstacles that Mary Breckinridge faced.

Undaunted: Mary Breckinridge, Nurse-Midwife is the working title for a documentary film about a life that personified much of the turmoil of the first half of 20th-century America. Part Florence Nightingale, part John Wayne, and part P.T. Barnum, Mary Breckinridge had the grit and savvy to bring a modern profession and an ancient skill to the United States: the nurse-midwife.

Braving raging rivers and blinding blizzards, her nurses on horseback saved tens of thousands of lives in eastern Kentucky. Motivated by her own personal tragedy, Breckinridge exhausted her family fortune, but not her fathomless energy, on creating a model of care that has been replicated around the world.