biography
| name: |
Hale, Clara
|
| |
known as Mother, née McBride
|
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1905–92)
|
| biography:
| Childcare activist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Widowed in 1932, she supported her family by offering home child care, becoming a foster mother to some 40 children. Living in Harlem, New York City, with the encouragement of her daughter, Dr Lorraine Hale, in 1968 she began to take in babies suffering the effects of birth to drug-addicted mothers, and in 1973 formally founded Hale House to put her programme on a sounder financial basis. By the 1980s an increasing number of the babies were afflicted with AIDS. President Reagan awarded her the Medal of Freedom in 1985. |
|
|
