Author looks at tense relationship between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett

Stephanie Gorton released well-researched book in November that shows fascinating look at arguments and ideas at center of dispute.

A new book shows the rivalry between two of the most essential birth control pioneers in the early part of the 20th century.

Author Stephanie Gorton, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily, published The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America in November. The work is a fascinating case study of how Dennett and Sanger’s different styles and philosophies shaped how the birth control movement unfolded.

“There were several levels to this,” Gorton said of the rivalry. “There's definitely a personal level to it, but also a strategic level.”

Sanger is the more famous of the two. She began the American Birth Control League, which eventually turned into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her legal battles and efforts are widely known among much of the public. Dennett is a little less known. She was an important suffragist known more as a free speech advocate by her death. But she was just as important a figure within the birth control movement.

“Sanger was so savvy, both with building a functional organization and having hard-working people around her, and also in how she managed publicity and her own persona,” Gorton said. “She was so good at writing herself as this mythical central figure, as a hero, or even as a martyr of the birth control movement.

“Dennett was almost allergic to that kind of myth-making, that kind of persona building. She really wanted the movement to be about the ideas and about getting something done.”

While they had differences rhetorically, each had separate ideas on how to succeed. Dennett felt birth control should be accessible to all women, whereas Sanger thought medical professionals should distribute it. Despite sharing the same enemies, Sanger’s and Dennett’s relationship had a passive-aggressive dynamic.

“It just seemed even though they rarely shared the same space, their sniping at each other in the press was just kind of merciless,” Gorton said.

Each had seminal trials in developing reproductive rights. United States v. Dennett was a case centered on Mary’s publication of a sex education manual. Authorities arrested her for violating the Comstock laws, which banned obscene materials. A lower court convicted her, and then she won an appeal to overturn the verdict. It advanced First Amendment protections to include expressions and publications dealing with sex.

Sanger was involved in several trials, but the most important was the United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, litigated because Sanger had several diaphragms mailed to a doctor at one of her clinics in New York City. It was confiscated in violation of the Comstock Act. That empowered doctors to order birth control if they felt it was necessary. Those cases established the precedent that eventually led to the Griswold v. Connecticut case, which first established the right to birth control extended to married couples.

“Their legal victories in the mid-30s really set the stage for the decision that underpins our right to birth control today,” Gorton said.

The book is timely because it shows the path not taken. Dennett wanted to secure these rights through Congress. Both her and Sanger’s frustrated efforts to get legislators to help led them to take the battle to the courts.

“It's really interesting today for us to imagine that this belongs in the halls of power,” Gorton said. “This isn't only something that should be settled in the courts. I think this is something where we should be asking our elected leaders to be held to account, to recognize that women's rights are human rights and that reproductive rights are absolutely essential.”