Birth control became legal in the U.S. for married couples in the mid-1960s, and a few years later for unmarried people. But today, many are worried about that right being taken away.
It’s in that context that a new book explores two of the pioneers of the birth control movement. "The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America" tells the story of these two women who had many differences, but also much in common.
Stephanie Gorton is the book’s author and joined The Show to discuss how she defines the rivalry between the two women.
Full conversation
STEPHANIE GORTON: I think it's a rivalry of both personalities and policy differences. Margaret Sanger was a really bold and courageous and complicated person. Mary Ware Dennett, like the title suggests, was a bit more of a straightforward and stubborn idealist. I think she always wanted to have some of Sanger's boldness and, and, you know, her talent for stoking outrage and for breaking the law when it was beneficial to the birth control movement. Whereas Sanger always felt really judged by Dennett. Dennett had this much more elite New England background.
So in a way they were both jealous of each other on a personal level, and as time went on, and they each developed their own group within the birth control movement, they were rivals on a political level as well.
MARK BRODIE: What did that do for their ultimate goal here in terms of having two people who seemingly were looking to achieve the same thing, but having different ways to get there and maybe different sort of in the fine details of what they wanted, maybe that was a little bit different, too.
GORTON: Initially, they definitely very much wanted the same thing. The idea, the overall goal was to make birth control legal for Americans. There was a federal postal censorship law called the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to distribute any information or any methods connected with birth control. Margaret Sanger eventually realized that she would need to make some concessions in order to make legal birth control a reality within her lifetime. So she began building bridges and making alliances with doctors, with leaders in the eugenics movements.
These were compromises that Dennett was not so eager to make. Sanger eventually put forward a version of legal birth control that placed access to it firmly within the hands of doctors, so women would only be able to get a diaphragm with a doctor's prescription. Dennett called this a medical monopoly. She didn't like it at all, and I think she rightly saw that poor and rural women would be left out of this great leap forward.
BRODIE: Did that set their movement back at all? I can just imagine, you know, policymakers who maybe weren't so keen on birth control in the first place, being able to say, look, these two people who are both advocating for birth control, like they don't even know what they want, they can't agree on this. How are we supposed to?
GORTON: Absolutely. I mean, it's something that has so many parallels to activism today. But reading through their congressional lobbying diaries is so fascinating because that was a response that they got very much over and over again. You know, that there are these two competing branches of the movement. And why should we support this call? Cause when you haven't even figured out what you want yet.
This was not a topic that was good for politicians to be connected with. So any pretext to delay or to say, well, you know, this needs to be moved along a little further, those pretexts, you know, would be just leaped upon. And then, of course, there's the reality that they were competing for the same pots of money and they were applying to the philanthropists. So that didn't do them any favors either.
BRODIE: Did Sanger and Dennett recognize that their rivalry was maybe not ultimately serving their end goals?
GORTON: I definitely think that Dennett did because she wrote quite a few mostly conciliatory letters to Sanger, although she never stopped wanting Sanger to set aside what she called the doctors only compromise or the medical monopoly.
So she called a couple of times for what she called the, the joining of forces that, you know, they should both get behind their original goal, that there should be, you know, a broad effort to legalize birth control, that birth control should be accessible, just, you know, on your, on your drugstore shelf, and the, the review process should be more like an FDA review than an individual doctor, you know, eyeing a patient up and down and deciding whether they were morally worthy of the birth control that they wanted. But they never, you know, they never came close to it. Instead, unfortunately, there was a lot of sniping at each other in the press.
BRODIE: One of the things you write about that I wanted to get into with you a little bit is why you think it is that Sanger is so much more well known than Dennett.
GORTON: That's a really interesting question, and I think honestly, a big part of it is that she just lived a lot longer. She lived through the late 1960s long enough to be on the radio quite frequently and to even appear on TV. Dennett died in the 40s, and she was also just a much more private person.
BRODIE: What kind of lessons or parallels do you take from the stories of these two women?
GORTON: To sort of the issues going on today, not just with reproductive rights, but I guess sort of activism in general. I really think this is a, you know, a big part of what I got out of the book and out of the research. One of the most surprising things that came out of it is that activism is a really long game. There are very few instances of neat linear progress, you know, then it returned to Congress for five grueling years each session and felt she had, she had made no headway at all because her bill kept getting rejected.
But in a way, she laid the groundwork for everything that came next. So she, you know, she did, she, she, she was, I argue, a real visionary for being the first person to take such an essential and, you know, taboo issue to Washington, really.
I also think there's just, you know, there's something to be said for finding some way to collaborate between leaders in a movement, even if their visions are so far apart. There has to be some conciliation and some way to work together so that their conversations with elected leaders and their funding doesn't get as split up and as scattered as they got with the birth control movement.
BRODIE: Well, it seems like that kind of goes to the issue of compromise, right? Because it, it sounds like, you know, Sanger was willing to make compromises that Dennett just simply was not, and that kind of precluded them from from getting together and and working as a unified force in any meaningful way, at least, you know, for a decent part of both of their activist careers.
GORTON: Yes, there are two extremely flawed and complicated personalities, and, you know, the fact that they were so unable to work together is a good example on the personal level, and of course Sanger's infamous allegiance to the eugenics movement, is a big part of this story also.
BRODIE: I'm also interested in the fact that, you know, we've been talking about how different these two people were, but as you write, they also had a decent amount of stuff in common, right?
GORTON: Yes, their lives really intersected in some bizarrely similar ways, you know, they both married and later divorced architects. They each had three children and lost one of their children young. You know, they ended up in downtown Manhattan, moving in the same circles, and of course both of them sort of felt fully entirely dedicated to the birth control movement. So it's, it's really interesting that there are these intersections in their lives, and yet they felt this rivalry, this contest, with each other, really a jealousy of each other, I think.
