As their entwined histories show, the two were frequently at odds, personally and ideologically: Dennett was wary of Sanger’s radicalism and hoped to change the law by persuasion, while Sanger’s deliberate provocations brought the law, and the spotlight, down on her head. Dennett came from a family of, in her words, “New England granite”—genteel, intellectual people who were active in abolitionist, suffrage, and antiwar circles. Sanger’s fiercely socialist Irish immigrant parents were also politically engaged, but lacked the money or power to turn their convictions into action. Sanger’s mother, wracked with tuberculosis, endured 18 pregnancies before dying at 50: Sanger was the sixth of 11 children who lived. She trained as a nurse and would later attribute her activism to the memory of her mother and the death of a patient who had begged her for some way of preventing another pregnancy.
Fired up by her experience of poverty, Sanger came to birth control, at first, as an issue of social justice. For Dennett, who had endured three agonizing births and the loss of one baby, before a luridly reported divorce, it was a feminist problem, part of the larger question of how women could take control of their bodies and lives. By the early 1910s, both women were young mothers active in New York radical circles. Dennett was working for the national suffrage campaign, although increasingly disillusioned by its conservative attitudes, and she found a more congenial, outspoken version of feminism in Heterodoxy, a club of prominent women that included artists, lawyers, social workers, and journalists. Sanger’s interests, meanwhile, were sharpening to a point. Before long, she would break ranks with fellow feminists who did not place what she termed “birth control” at the center of their activism.
The split between Dennett’s and Sanger’s approaches—persuasion versus provocation—is widely mirrored in other movements of the time, especially women’s suffrage. Examining them together, and seeing all the ways they overlapped, changed course, and compromised over the long fight, is both fascinating and frustrating. Might they have gone further, faster, if they had worked together, or at least managed to get out of each other’s way? Perhaps. But what their shared story also reveals is the relentless, hypocritical, and cowardly nature of their opposition; it’s damning to see how rare it was for men to speak out in support of something that demonstrably improved their own lives. We have all seen how complacency over “settled law” and the belittling of feminists’ warnings hurtled us into the overturning of Roe. Fired up by that recent history, this book makes it clear that we still have a long way to go to match Mary Ware Dennett’s simple, fundamental belief that women are people.