The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America

In this brilliant account, journalist Gorton (Citizen Reporters) explores the early 20th-century feud between the high-profile, charismatic Margaret Sanger and the earnest, “unyielding” Mary Ware Dennett, rival feminists who championed two different versions of birth control access. Starting out as colleagues in the Voluntary Parent League, the two came to loggerheads over the course of the 1920s, as Sanger favored (as more realistically achievable) a system controlled by the medical establishment, with doctors prescribing contraceptives to married women, while Dennett—an ideological purist who wanted no compromise with conservatives—pushed for widespread contraceptive access unencumbered by gatekeepers. Sanger’s vision won out, while Dennett was pushed out of the mainstream women’s movement. But Gorton, in a fine-grained and propulsive examination of the rivals’ careers, depicts their antagonism as foundational to modern feminism: Sanger copied Dennett’s innovative tactic of direct, intensive one-on-one lobbying of legislators; Dennett’s ideological victories on behalf of free speech around sex (especially her triumph in a court case involving her production of a sex education manual for children) became a bedrock of the reproductive rights movement; and Sanger was able to succeed in her early incrementalist goals because of how her competition with Dennett fueled her ambitions. By turns analytical and dishy (both women were involved in free love scandals), this captivates. (Nov.)