The rivalry between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett profoundly shaped reproductive rights in America. While Sanger went on to found Planned Parenthood, Dennett’s name has largely faded from fame, though she was also a suffragist and sex education pioneer. The tale of the battle between them reveals the two competing visions for what reproductive autonomy should look like in America — visions that had an enduring impact on the lives of ordinary Americans.
In The Icon and the Idealist, my new book about the story of the 1910s-1930s uprising for birth control, I explore why Sanger and Dennett came to activism, the origins of the clash between them, and how their missteps and breakthroughs have reverberated for generations. The book weaves together a personal narrative of two fascinating, complicated women and the political history of a country rocked by changing social norms, the Great Depression, and a fervor for eugenics. Alongside the dual biographies of Sanger and Dennett, I trace how the taboo around sex crumbled over the course of the Jazz Age — and what the end of that taboo meant for reproductive rights. It’s a very human story of a radical cultural movement.
The following excerpt is adapted from two chapters of the book. One of Dennett’s most fateful choices was her decision early in her career to write a sex education booklet, The Sex Side of Life, for her teenage sons, in 1915. Fifteen years later, long after she’d published it and started selling it via mail-order, she faced a federal indictment for obscenity. She’d mailed the booklet out to the wrong person — a vice agent acting as a customer under an assumed identity. A powerful censorship law, the Comstock Act, prohibited any information relating to sex, birth control, or abortion from circulating in the mail; Dennett had knowingly broken the law.
Dennett’s obscenity trial showcased her grit, as well as the cultural forces set against her. It marked the high point of her modest fame. This excerpt contrasts the meticulous, sex-positive spirit she put into composing The Sex Side of Life with her bruising time in the courtroom. (In 1930, not only were judges always white men, but juries were all-male as well — and, in Dennett’s case, decidedly unsympathetic to sex ed.) It’s a snapshot of Dennett as a conscientious mother who was also a rebel, and a reluctant celebrity seizing her moment in the spotlight to defy a culture of shame and repression.
Few timelines of reproductive rights history mention Mary Ware Dennett, a visionary birth-control activist and sex educator of the early 20th century. In a way, it’s no wonder: she hated fame. Unlike her savvier and more notorious rival, Margaret Sanger, Dennett was too guileless to construct a heroic persona for the press and public, and perhaps more fatefully, she was an indifferent fundraiser, always penniless or close to it.
Dennett made a mark, however. She beat Sanger to Washington, lobbying to legalize birth control between 1919 and 1924, a full decade before the battleground for reproductive rights moved from congress to the courts. But perhaps the most radical project Dennett undertook was her sex education booklet, “The Sex Side of Life.”
Had she not been a single mother to teenagers, she probably wouldn’t have written it. But she had been very publicly divorced when her children were young, humiliated by her husband’s hypnotic attachment to another woman. She had entrusted her boys to boarding schools and moved to New York in 1910, seeking a way to make a living and put the past behind her. Eventually, the time came to talk to them about the facts of life.
Early in her career, she was a suffragist; later, a peace worker and a proponent of Twilight Sleep. Just before she dedicated herself fully to the birth control campaign, she wrote the sixteen pages that, long after they satisfied her son’s curiosity, landed her in court with a federal indictment for obscenity and, eventually, a landmark verdict for free speech about sex.
“I will mail your sex book in a day or two,” Dennett wrote her son Carleton in January 1915. Fourteen-year-old Carleton had stayed with her in Manhattan for the winter break, bringing with him a sex education book he’d gotten hold of at school. Dennett had studied it closely.
She was galvanized—and indignant. The author was a full-throated Victorian, prudish and patriarchal. “He talks as if women were made to be taken care of, and not as if they were the partners in life with men,” she wrote. And another thing: he talked “as if the sex relation was in itself a wrong thing … It isn’t.”
She wondered why “he does not explain carefully enough just what the sex act is. He takes it for granted that people know what it is and how it should be done but they don’t.” She urged Carleton to “save all your questions and ask me. I will tell you everything.”
Sex education in the classroom was not a feature of the schools Dennett or her boys attended, but there were glimmers that this would change. The draft for World War One had revealed a silent epidemic of STIs among American men, and physicians found many of their wives infected with gonorrhea or syphilis without even knowing it.
Of all the women who came to New York Hospital for syphilis treatment, wrote sex-education advocate Dr. Prince Morrow, 70 percent had been unknowingly infected by their husbands. “The male factor,” Morrow punned, “is the chief malefactor.”
Physicians and policymakers began trying to reconcile the public health-based movement for sex ed with widespread anxieties that were alive and well among many American parents. Direct talk about sex, it was thought, would annihilate teens’ self-control and make them sex-obsessed. But some parents and teachers made the opposing argument: that keeping children in ignorance would only breed misinformation and a hysterical attitude toward the topic.
In 1913, in Chicago’s public schools, Superintendent Ella Flagg Young planned the nation’s first lecture course on anatomy and sexuality to be delivered in public schools. Despite the fact that it focused on purity over physiological detail, it ended after a year amid protests from parents and churches.
Two years later, feeling a rush of creative energy after an exhilarating love affair, Dennett began her project. First, she absorbed the entire canon of sex education literature, reading more than sixty pamphlets and books aimed at school-age readers and parents. What she found struck her as a grave injustice to children.
Parents still sought out scripts that used metaphors instead of anatomical terms, many of them having received instruction that way from their own parents. One popular example came from Good Housekeeping in 1911: “When God wants to send a little child into a home, he fits up just beneath the mother’s heart a snug nest not unlike the nests birds live in. Then out of two tiny eggs the father and mother bring together in the nest, a little child is hatched just like a little bird.”
By August 1915, Dennett had produced “The Sex Side of Life.” With a straightforward tone and line-drawn illustrations she’d done herself, it was a corrective to the older generation of sex-ed books. Sex was “a vivifying joy . . . a vital art,” Dennett wrote.
With its assumptions of heterosexuality and an eventual monogamous marriage, Dennett’s pamphlet still had plenty in common with its ancestors. It pinned most of the blame for STIs on prostitution. But it was sex-positive to a degree that was rare for the genre. The female and male orgasms were given equal focus. “We have contented ourselves by assuming that marriage makes sex relations respectable,” she wrote; “We have not yet said that it is only beautiful sex relations that can make marriage lovely.”
Carleton approved. On a visit to her apartment, he stuck his head out from the shower to yell to her that it was “all right,” which Dennett recognized as high praise from a teenaged boy. “I would far rather have had those few words from him,” she later wrote, “than all the thousand-dollar prizes in the world.”
The following years found Dennett discreetly selling “The Sex Side of Life,” now printed under a handsome blue cover. As journalism, scholarship, and media fanfare around sex ed ramped up through the 1920s, her customers included physicians, clergy, educators, YMCA staff, and parents.
In his May 1926 article “The Literature of Sex,” in the American Mercury, H. L. Mencken praised Dennett’s work as the single exception in a dispiriting genre. Most sex education resources, Mencken wrote, were “written by prudes, and apparently for hogs.” Dennett alone, he wrote, had “sound sense and decent thinking.” By 1928, The Sex Side of Life had gone through more than twenty small print runs, always financed by Dennett and her family. It was eventually translated into fifteen languages.
Vice agents took notice. Dennett received the envelope that held her federal indictment on January 2, 1929. It came as a surprise, as the result of a good-faith sale. She had answered an inquiry from a Mrs. C. A. Miles of Grottoes, Virginia, but Mrs. Miles turned out to be a decoy created by law enforcement.
At the initial hearings, the courtroom was “crowded with an exceedingly interested audience,” Dennett wrote. Her attorney Morris Ernst, donating his time on behalf of the ACLU, laid out a powerful argument against censorship, reminding the judge of Comstock’s heyday, when works by Emile Zola and Walt Whitman were banned and fine-art paintings covered with splotches of lamp-black. “If this pamphlet is obscene,” Ernst declared, “then life itself is obscene.”
Assistant District Attorney James Wilkinson pushed to delay the trial, saying he needed more time to find witnesses. He also used the hearing to lay out the bones of his overall argument: young people should have their sexual paranoia bolstered, not eased. They should “retain all their fears in order to keep themselves straight.”
The judge, Warren Burrows, was appalled by “The Sex Side of Life” and didn’t mind saying so; he told Dennett’s attorney, Ernst, that he “had never in his life before seen the term vagina in print and was inexpressibly shocked,” Dennett wrote.
The trial began on April 23 and lasted three days. In their contrasting arguments, Ernst and Wilkinson neatly paralleled the national divide between traditionalists and progressives. On Dennett’s side, twenty witnesses had been called for the defense, gynecologists and psychologists alongside ministers and social workers, headmasters and superintendents alongside magazine editors. John Dewey and Katharine Bement Davis showed up in solidarity.
On the opposing side, purity crusaders like the Canon William Sheafe Chase, a Brooklyn Episcopalian, blustered at Dennett’s glorification of female sexual pleasure. Her elevation of the woman’s physical enjoyment was “simply untrue,” he wrote, “because, as my wife says, it is not to be mentioned on the same day with the joy of nursing one’s own baby.”
The day of the verdict, Dennett came to court in a velvet coat and a small black hat bedecked with pale flowers. Forty-two minutes after the jury—all men, as was the law then--began deliberations, the foreman announced they had found Dennett guilty.
Ripples of disbelief ran through the court, turning to rage. The Rev. Dr. William Milton Hess, a pastor and Yale philosophy professor, cornered Wilkinson in the hallway and said, “In all my life I have never heard such medieval fatheadism and hot air as you spouted today.” The Nation compared Dennett’s ordeal to the persecution of Galileo.
“I shall not pay any fine, no matter how small, either now or later, nor shall I allow anyone to do it for me,” Dennett announced. Ernst immediately added that they would appeal. Reporters hustled out to file their stories: “GRANDMOTHER FOUND GUILTY,” went the headlines.
Dennett herself, meanwhile, balked at the media’s fixation on her gray hair. “I am not doddering yet,” she assured her family.
From The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton. Copyright © 2024 by Stephanie Gorton. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
