Mary Ware Dennett, Feminist, Birth Control Activist, and Civil Libertarian, Dies
Mary Ware Dennett, a leading feminist and birth control advocate in the first half of the 20th century, died on this day.
In the 1920s, she was Margaret Sanger’s chief rival for leadership of the birth control movement. After World War I Sanger developed a more conservative approach to birth control policy, advocating a “doctors only” policy in which contraceptive information and devices would be legally available only to doctors. Dennett argued for a more egalitarian and feminist position, in which contraceptive information and devices would be available to all adults.
Before and during World War I, Dennett was an active feminist, pacifist, and civil libertarian. After the war she began to focus on sex education and birth control.
Dennett achieved national attention in 1929 when she was prosecuted for sending her sex education pamphlet for children, The Sex Side of Life, through the mails, in violation of the infamous Comstock Act (passed on March 3, 1873). She had written the pamphlet for her own children, and then published it after receiving many requests for copies. She was convicted at trial but the conviction was overturned on appeal, on March 3, 1930, in a major victory for freedom of speech.
Read Dennet’s account of her casee: Mary Ware Dennett, Who’s Obscene? (1930)
Read: Constance Chen, “The Sex Side of Life”: Mary Ware Dennett’s Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education (1997)
And more about the pivotal Dennett case: Laura Weinrib, The Taming of Free Speech (2016)
Watch a video on the Dennett-Sanger rivalry over birth control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0TYgwjoc0