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title. I made a mistake in yielding to him on that, but I 

 had to get somebody, and there didn't seem to be much other 

 choice than getting him. He did pretty well at the job, 

 getting these fellowships, applications distributed, and 

 picking the people. 



Sharp: And picking good candidates to come? 



Reveller Yes, that's right. The man in charge of the AID program was 

 a man named Ray Ravenholt. I don't know whether his name 

 appears or not in the correspondence. He had a very simple 

 notion, and that was that if you just saturate the air with 

 ■ condoms that birthrates would go down! I mean, that's of 

 course figurative speech, but he felt very strongly that all 

 that was really needed was just to push contraception, make 

 contraceptive devices available and free and cheap and 

 widely distributed. The administration of Family Planning 

 programs was his bag and making large grants to anybody 

 anywhere who would distribute contraceptives . 



I never felt that that was the most important thing to 

 do. I felt, and I was only partly right, that what was 

 essential was to see what the social conditions were that 

 made people have lots of children and try to change those 

 social conditions. 



Sharp: 



Well, it turns out that both things are true. Lots of 

 people will use contraceptives if they are available, and 

 there are lots of people who won't. If you make them easily 

 and freely available to the people who will, that will 

 certainly reduce the birthrate somewhat. If you try to 

 change the conditions, that will also reduce the birthrate. 

 Those two things really have to be done together. 



The fellowships and having the candidates come to study at 

 the center and in the department from these less-developed 

 countries — the idea was that they would then take their 

 expertise back to the countries and work on change? 



Revelle: Exactly. And they did that, 

 successful program. 



It was a really quite 



One of the most successful, in some sense, was a woman 

 named Sabiha Sayed, who was a Pakistani, [spells her name] 

 Her stepfather, who was also her uncle, was the Pakistan 

 High Commissioner to India. She came from an aristocratic 

 family in Pakistan. She had been married at the age of 

 sixteen, one of these typically subcontinental marriages of 

 convenience. She had two children, I guess at a fairly 

 early time after getting married. And she had no education 

 at the time, a typical Pakistani woman, but she wanted to 

 get an education, and she did. She went to the University of 

 Lahore in the Punjab. They called it, the University of the 

 Punjab. She then went to Berkeley and got a Master's of 

 Public Health, and eventually she showed up at our place 

 looking for a D.S.C. The School of Public Health didn't 

 give Ph.D.'s, it gave D.S.C. 's. 



She had just a burning desire in her belly to do 

 something about the status of women anywhere, but 



