With seed money given by May's father Arthur Farquharson, Bailey traveled to London with Una Marson[6][7] to raise funds for providing food, clothing and textbooks to Jamaican school children.
[9] The goal of these organizations was to promote birth control among the populace as a means to improve their social condition, provide care and education about health needs to mothers and children, and to enlist government backing of the program.
[10] To that end, Farquharson kept a wide correspondence with other reformers, such as Vera Houghton, Edith How-Martyn, and Margaret Sanger,[11] as well as birth control suppliers, such as Holland–Rantos.
[14] Though in some ways, the efforts of the FPLJ were opposed by the Catholic Church of Jamaica, clergy and birth control advocates were in agreement that illegitimacy and co-habitation without marriage were social ills.
[9][14] Farquharson and the FPLJ, believed that limiting birth rates would not only reduce immorality, but also would diminish demand on the over-burdened and under-funded health services.
[17] But, Farquharson's friend and fellow activist, Bailey, daughter of a notable family of black educators,[18] was outspoken in support of the FPLJ, seeing birth control as a means of economic survival.
[22] In 1956, Farquharson donated a furnished house in Kingston, with capacity for fourteen people, and an endowment to the Anglican Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands as a home for clergy, aged parishioners, or convalescing patients of limited means from the Nuttall Memorial Hospital.
[25][26] That same year, a documentary on the lives of Bailey and Farquharson, their remarkable friendship, and their work for women's political and economic equality was produced by Sistren Research.