The Frenemies Who Fought to Bring Birth Control to the U.S.

Judging by how commonly birth control is practiced in the United States, it ought to rank among the least controversial of subjects. In surveys, ninety-nine per cent of women of reproductive age report having used contraception in their lifetimes. Catholics avail themselves of it at about the same rate as other Americans. Evangelicals do, too. Given the fact that heterosexual Americans, like humans in general, tend to be fans of non-procreative sex, this is not so surprising. Nor is it new. In the nineteenth century, lots of people tried to game their gametes, especially anyone lucky or wealthy enough to have a discreet private physician; or who could read between the lines of newspaper ads slyly offering “rubber goods for men” or “married women’s friends” or “French periodical pills”; or who knew a midwife able to whip up an herbal concoction that might or might not work. Between 1800 and 1900, the average number of children for white married couples (the group most studied) dropped from just over seven to less than four—a decline marked enough to suggest the purposeful wrangling of fertility, whether through abstinence or intervention.

And yet birth control is contested: condemned, still, by the Catholic Church; regularly undermined by attacks on reproductive rights that are aimed at abortion but take access to contraception as collateral damage; and scrambled into weird fulminations about female sexuality from right-wing talk-show hosts and Trumpian influencers. In Stephanie Gorton’s timely and well-researched new book, “The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America” (Ecco), you can read a number of quotes from champions of reproductive rights which seem bracingly relevant and even radical today.

But the quote that best captures the maddening persistence of this conflict comes from the other side—the judge who, in 1917, presided over the trial of Margaret Sanger for the crime of opening a birth-control clinic. Women, he said, simply did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” For all that women’s roles have changed, for all the new contraceptive products that have appeared since, this attitude seems never to have been entirely vanquished.

“The Icon and the Idealist” is a dual biography of two twentieth-century birth-control crusaders—one (Sanger) famous, the other (Dennett) far less so. It’s also a closeup portrait of their rivalry—tactical, temperamental, and at times political.

Dennett was the older of the two women by seven years, born Mary Coffin Ware in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1872. Her father, who made a precarious living as a hide-and-wool merchant, died the year she turned ten. To support Mary and her siblings, her mother became a tutor and a chaperon for young American women touring Europe. The children went to live in a brownstone in Boston occupied by two maternal aunts and an uncle, along with a parade of boarders and guests. The family maintained a proud legacy of New England progressivism—one relative was Lucretia Coffin Mott, the suffragist and abolitionist—and this legacy clearly inspired the young Mary.

The New England prudery that went with it confounded her. Dennett once glimpsed an aunt taking a bath in a “long-sleeved, high-necked night gown,” she later wrote, washing “from head to foot without once unbuttoning that stern white cotton emblem of modesty,” as though hiding her naked body from herself. It “made me feel that I should be a very shocking and reprehensible little girl if I did not take my own bath in the same manner.”

Dennett remembered her youth as “a mixture of rebellion and beauty-hunger.” She grew into a self-consciously bohemian new woman, who wore glasses and shirtwaists, rode a bicycle, took a keen interest in William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and did not rush into marriage. In her late twenties, she tied the knot with William Hartley Dennett, an M.I.T.-educated architect who shared her admiration for Morris. The couple built a house outside Boston in the Arts and Crafts style, attended anti-imperialist and world-peace-movement meetings, and took to sex like ducks to water. “She was determined to shed the prudery of her upbringing,” Gorton writes, “and seemed to have succeeded.” But Dennett’s labors and deliveries were difficult. The birth of the couple’s first son, Carleton, in 1900, almost killed her. A second son was unable to nurse from breast or bottle and died of malnutrition at three weeks. The precipitate delivery of their third son, Devon, left her in pain for years. The Dennetts did not want to risk another pregnancy, and, because neither knew much about contraception, they stopped having sex altogether, unhappily for both.

Hartley, as Dennett’s husband was known, soon took up with a friend of the couple’s, a young suffragist named Margaret Chase, whose husband did not object. Mary did—she was open-minded but monogamously inclined. She viewed Margaret as “the tiger type, but intellectual in her method,” and was unmoved by Hartley’s new conviction that “no woman should expect the monopoly of her husband’s affections.” The Dennetts divorced, and, since Hartley refused to pay child support, Mary had to become self-reliant. She moved to New York, and went to work for a women’s-suffrage association, where she grew frustrated with the movement’s reluctance to racially integrate its first national march, in 1913. (“The suffrage movement stands for enfranchising every woman in the United States,” she pointedly wrote in a letter to one of its leaders.) According to Gorton, Dennett soon “formulated her theory that three elements were necessary for a fair society: economic independence for women, the end of every type of privilege, and safe, reliable contraception.” Men had to become much more involved in child rearing, too. “It is not possible,” Dennett wrote, “for the selfsame work to be broadening and beautifying if women do it, and petty and inconsequential if men do it.”

In Greenwich Village, and, in particular, in a radical women’s group called Heterodoxy, she found like-minded comrades. The feminists of Heterodoxy engaged in deliriously taboo-bending discussions of free love, free speech, Freud, and socialism, often gathering in a basement bistro on MacDougal Street known as Polly’s, where the anarchist management liked to address patrons as “bourgeois pigs.” After her divorce, Dennett seems to have had only one other physical relationship in her life, a brief affair, at forty-two, with a married man in the suffrage movement. Before their assignation, in a borrowed apartment, Dennett had to ask him “to look after some safe-guard”—despite committing herself to the cause of family planning, she still knew little about how birth control itself might work.

But, for a person whose life did not contain a lot of sex, Dennett proved to be an ardent and scandalizing champion of it. In 1915, she began work on a sex-education pamphlet for young people. Her boys were then adolescents, and the educational materials available to them about sexuality seemed absurdly sentimental and euphemistic to her, heavy on botanical and pollination metaphors—the birds and the bees, quite literally. Dennett’s pamphlet, “The Sex Side of Life,” which was published in 1919, enjoyed the unusual distinction of being purchased for chapters of the Y.M.C.A. and lauded by the caustic anti-prig H. L. Mencken. The mutual sexual pleasures that Dennett’s text tenderly evokes are, to be sure, restricted to the married, heterosexual sort. Yet its heartfelt dispensing with shame, its empathetic treatment of sexual curiosity and yearning, its reassurances about masturbation, and its anatomically correct drawings (made by Dennett herself) could probably get “The Sex Side of Life” banned in certain school districts in the U.S. today. On one subject, though, Dennett had to be circumspect. “It is against the law,” she wrote, “to give people information as to how to manage their sex relations so that no baby will be created unless the father and mother are ready and glad to have it happen.”

It was at one of Heterodoxy’s meetings, probably at Polly’s, that Dennett first met Margaret Sanger, a small, auburn-haired woman with lively hazel eyes, who was perfectly willing to talk animatedly and publicly about birth control. One reason the Dennetts had been so clueless about contraception was the Comstock Act, the federal obscenity statute hustled onto the books by the fervid anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. Adopted in 1873, the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials—pornography and sex toys, but also any item or information “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” Advocating openly for contraception required nerve and a certain charisma. Sanger had both. Dennett invited her to lunch at her studio apartment, where they told each other their life stories all afternoon. It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship, or at least a long and productive collaboration. It wasn’t.

Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins, in 1879, in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her parents were Irish immigrants, and the family never had much money. Her father, Michael, was a stonemason. Her mother, Anne, suffered from tuberculosis, but managed to survive not only those eleven childbirths but seven other pregnancies that ended in miscarriage, before she died at fifty. When Margaret was just eight, she assisted for the first time at one of her mother’s deliveries, Gorton tells us, while Michael stood by “offering his wife a flask of whiskey.” The Comstock Act and the spirit of repression that gave rise to it meant that such an experience might have no purchase outside the home—no reality, almost. A child could see her mother give birth, in whatever paroxysms of pain or distress, clean up afterward, and then go out into a world where no one was supposed to depict or discuss things like that. (Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, the Hays Code, which governed what could be shown in the movies, explicitly forbade any representation of childbirth, “in fact or in silhouette.”) That cognitive dissonance would, in time, radicalize Sanger.

In her early thirties, Margaret went to work as a visiting nurse in the tenements of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many of her patients begged her for contraception, but she had none to give. “Middle-class women,” Gorton writes, “were far more likely to have a diaphragm, sponge or douching solution on hand.” The women Margaret was seeing “passed each other advice about how to use a knitting needle, or a cup of turpentine, or a strategic fall to end an unwanted pregnancy.” On a hot summer day in 1912, she was summoned to Grand Street by a father of three whose twenty-eight-year-old wife had become unconscious after trying to abort her latest pregnancy on her own. In the story Margaret often told about her epiphany, she called the woman Sadie Sachs. Three months later, she returned to the same apartment, where a comatose Sachs was now dying from another self-induced abortion. By then, Margaret was married to William Sanger, an architect and a socialist, with whom she would have three children. (Unlike Dennett’s life, Margaret’s was filled with affairs—H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, one of her defense attorneys, a Greek anarchist, a Spanish anarchist—along with an alienating later marriage to a wealthy older man who helped fund her cause while complaining bitterly that he had married one.) “After Sadie Sachs’s death, Sanger went home to her sleeping household, where she stayed awake all night,” Gorton writes. Sanger, in a memoir, recalled vowing to “tell the world what was going on in the lives of these poor women. I would be heard.”

Being heard, to Sanger, meant being confrontational in a way that suited a personality more flamboyant than Dennett’s. Soon she was writing a column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for the New York Call, a socialist paper. It drew the attention of Comstock’s Post Office censors, who declared the paper unmailable. Demonstrating a flair for creative provocation that would serve her and her movement well, Sanger produced a final column in the form of a blank box under the headline “What Every Girl Should Know: NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.” Sensational arrests for breaking the law were part of Sanger’s M.O. from early on. In 1916, when she opened a Brooklyn clinic that distributed diaphragms and contraceptive advice, men and women, some pushing baby carriages or trailing children, lined up around the block, dramatic testimony to the demand that Sanger was trying to meet. And when, ten days later, the police shut the clinic down and arrested her, Sanger “insisted on walking the mile-long route to jail, thus making herself available to reporters,” Gorton writes. At least one desperate patient yelled after her, “Come back! Come back and save me!”

Dennett took a dim view of Sanger’s commitment to lawbreaking—shortsightedly, given how much publicity it brought for their shared mission. She was focussed instead on changing the laws, and, specifically, on getting Congress to excise the reference to contraception from the Comstock statute. In 1915, Sanger returned from Europe to face charges at home stemming from her latest publication, a magazine called The Woman Rebel. Pegging Dennett as an amiable comrade who knew her place in the movement, she paid her a visit, asking for the support of Dennett’s new organization, the National Birth Control League. Dennett turned her down. For Sanger, who, as Gorton points out, had spent a year in exile and would shortly be grieving the death of her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, from pneumonia, this must have been a galling disappointment. For Dennett, it was simply a matter of protecting the strategy she believed in from unnecessary scandal or controversy. She would lobby the virtually all-male House and Senate for that change in the Comstock law repeatedly, and fruitlessly, throughout the next decade. Now and then, she’d win commitments from a member of Congress—who would later back out. One admitted that his willingness to address the issue had made him the laughingstock of the Senate cloakroom.

The rift that began with Dennett’s refusal to back Sanger in 1915 grew wider over the years. Dennett periodically turned up at rallies and meetings to support Sanger, but she also prodded her single-mindedly, and with little encouragement on Sanger’s part, to endorse Dennett’s lobbying goals. The tactical dispute had a deeper significance. Sanger eventually supported a change to the Comstock Act that would allow physicians, and physicians only, to mail birth-control information and devices—a compromise she thought would win institutional legitimacy and insure safety. Dennett’s approach, by contrast, was based on the idea that freely circulating information was a good in itself, and should not be subject to a professional monopoly that might help some people more than others.