Executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut who led the legal battle for elimination of Connecticut's anti-birth control statute.

Estelle was born in Hartford in 1900. As a young woman, she studied voice at the Hartt College of Music and in Paris. In 1927, she moved to Washington, D.C. with her husband, where she began pre-medical studies and was employed as a medical technologist. Working with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association and world-wide church organizations in the 1940's, Mrs. Griswold helped relocate displaced persons and learned first-hand about the devastating effects of poverty when she visited the slums of Rio de Janiero, Algiers and Puerto Rico. These travels motivated Estelle's interest in population control.

She believed that inadequate information about contraception was a major cause of human misery both abroad and even in certain segments of the Connecticut population. Returning to New Haven, she joined the Planned Parenthood League and soon became its Executive Director, a position she held until 1965. Under her leadership, Planned Parenthood volunteers initiated "border runs" to shuttle women to birth control clinics in Rhode Island and New York, where such medical attention was legal.

In 1961, in order to put Connecticut's ban on birth control to the test, Griswold and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a birth control clinic to dispense contraceptives. This simple act of civil disobedience, followed by their arrest and conviction, ultimately led to one of the most far-reaching revolutions in constitutional history. The 1965 Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut not only overturned an archaic obscenity law but ended up defining a new constitutional right to privacy.