Clarence defied the conventionally held views of the role of women at that time and decided to take advantage of the adroit management and diplomatic social skills that he had observed older women often possessed, exactly the skills that were needed to introduce such a potentially controversial topic as birth control into a community. As he had in the 1930s, when he was engaging field workers to open clinics in the United States, Clarence chose women in their fifties to be his envoys. Margaret Roots was a widow with three grown children, touring the world with friends, when Clarence met her in India in 1953. She worked first in Sri Lanka, then in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Korea. Edith Gates had been working for the YWCA and similar organizations internationally for 30 years when Clarence met her in Hawaii in 1954 and asked her to go to Africa and South America.