W hen I first saw Nancy Raphael, who has died aged 94, she was honorary secretary of the Family Planning Association (FPA). It was the mid-1960s, and she was addressing a meeting, for which I was late. I felt the withering, blue-eyed glance and formidable presence that I later recognised as expressing her determination, rather than a reproof.
Born and brought up in London, Nancy was the daughter of a highly cultured Anglo-Jewish family. She was well educated at St Felix school, Suffolk, and went on to take an economics degree at the London School of Economics, where she was taught by Hugh Dalton. She was an individualist, who combined a profound interest in the arts with a determination to be an activist on behalf of women - a model much followed in her circles in the 1930s.
The field Nancy chose was birth control through the FPA, which was then bringing contraception out of its shady, barber's shop past into the medical light of clinics run by doctors and nurses, with the help, all over Britain, of numerous volunteers. Before the second world war, she, too, became a volunteer in the FPA clinics in some of the most poverty-stricken parts of London, combining that work with the motherhood of three children.
During the war, Nancy and her family were sent by her lawyer husband, Geoffrey, to Princeton, where she built up a new circle of friends, among them Albert Einstein. Her marriage did not survive the wartime separation, however, and she was divorced in 1956.
In the late 1950s and 60s, the FPA was in its greatest period of growth and turmoil about policies. Indeed, once the contraceptive pill had been introduced in 1961, it changed the world of family planning. Nancy was one of the group of women in that decade who took forward the association's development - the others included Margaret Pyke, Jean Medawar, Lady Tewson, Helen Brook and Pamela Sheridan. Nancy was elected honorary secretary and, in particular, gave crucial leadership concerning the association's policy on providing contraceptive services for unmarried women.
It is hard now to realise the passions that were unleashed at policy debates of the FPA national executive and council over things we now take for granted. Contentious issues followed on each others' heels - the proposal, in 1950, to provide services for "marital difficulties"; then research into better contraceptives; the age of consent; domiciliary family planning; the role of GPs as against clinics; thalidomide and abortion in 1963; and, of course, at the 1964 annual general meeting in Church House, Westminster, the resolution to provide services for single people, in view of the rise in illegitimacy and abortion.
To her friends, Nancy Raphael was charming. She was a talented pianist and painter, though a dodgy car driver and a shaky bridge player. At the FPA, she was known for her strikingly handsome looks, her strong voice and firm chairing of meetings, together with her great sense and patience in listening to all points of view.
She saw that the provision of services for unmarried women was going to tear the FPA in two, just when unity, in the cause of growth and providing services for more patients, was needed. So, at that Church House AGM, she proposed and spoke for an amendment, seconded by Lady Medawar, that the FPA should encourage special and separate youth advisory services for the unmarried. The stormy delegates breathed a shared sigh of relief, and voted for the amendment by a large majority.
This was one of several occasions when Nancy's standing and intelligence shone out. The outcome of that decision was the birth of Helen Brook's excellent Brook Advisory Centres and, three years later, the FPA council decided (on a motion proposed by Nancy) to allow clinics to provide services for unmarried people. The point to make here though, is that Nancy Raphael saw - as she so often did - the wisest timing.
During the later decades of her life, she maintained contact with the FPA, but her deep interest moved on when family planning was taken over by the national health service in 1974. She was also closely involved with the Jung Institute. She had a happy old age, getting much pleasure from her numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, her art collection and her painting expeditions. She is survived by her children, Juliet, Virginia and Adam, the political journalist.
· Nancy Raphael, family planning campaigner, born January 23 1908; died Jan-uary 19 2003
