On this date in 1911, Mary Stone Dewing Morain was born in Cambridge, Mass. She studied social work and therapy and earned her master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Morain spent time as president of the International Society for General Semantics and was a member of its board of directors and executive committee.
Morain served on the birth control boards in Massachusetts and California in the 1940s and 1950s and supported Planned Parenthood. She married Lloyd Morain in 1946. She devoted much of her life to popularizing humanism and supporting worldwide humanist organizations. In 1954 she and Lloyd published Humanism As the Next Step, which explained the basics of humanism. She and Lloyd founded the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 1952. In 1994 they won the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award jointly.
She died in 1999 after contracting pneumonia.
