Mabel S. Ulrich

Ulrich practiced medicine in Minneapolis, where she served on the vice commission,[6] the Board of Public Welfare,[7] and the Health and Hospitals committee.[8] She was a student health advisor to young women at the University of Minnesota, and Supervisor of Social Hygiene Education in the Division of Veneral Diseases at the state Board of Health.[9] She spoke in favor of eugenics education in high schools at a teachers' conference in Montana in 1913,[10] but favored preventive measures such as education and premarital health certificates, and denounced eugenic sterilization.[11]

In 1914, Ulrich was appointed by the YWCA to tour schools and colleges, lecturing on sex and hygiene subjects.[4][12] In 1916, she gave a summer institute for teachers interested in teaching sex education classes.[13] Her pamphlet "Mothers of America" (1919), aimed at young women, has been described as an unusually direct, detailed, and informative example of the genre from before World War I.[14] Another Ulrich pamphlet was "The Girl's Part" (1918).[15] She debated with Alice Stone Blackwell in an essay in The Woman Citizen in 1919; she was in favor of laws confining women with sexually-transmitted diseases, Blackwell was opposed.[16]

Beyond medicine and public health, Ulrich was interested in writing. She published short fiction, including "The Swede's Angel" (1905),[17] and a play, Daylight Saving (1933).[18] She opened a bookstore in Minneapolis in 1921, and by 1927 owned five bookshops in Minnesota.[19][20] Her shops also sold rare prints.[21] In 1931, she was appointed to head of the Minnesota implementation of the Federal Writers' Project, a program of the federal Works Progress Administration.[22] She resigned that post in 1938.[23][24] She edited a collection of essays by women, titled The More I See Of Men (Harper & Brothers, 1932), with an introduction by Frederick Lewis Allen.[25] In the 1930s and 1940s, she wrote book reviews for The Saturday Review of Literature.