Dennett, Mary Coffin Ware (1872-1947) (birth control)

Mary Coffin Ware, the second of four children of George Whitefield Ware and Livonia Coffin, was raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Her first interest was in the Arts and Crafts movement, and she studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1891-1894). She taught decoration and design at the newly established Drexel Institute in Philadelphia from 1894 to 1897. After an 1897 trip to Europe, she returned to Boston to open a handicrafts shop with her sister Clara and became an active member of the artistic community. In 1900, she married architect William Hartley Dennett (1870-1936) and worked with him, providing interior decoration for the homes he designed. The Dennetts were “utterly ignorant of the control of conception” and Mary quickly bore three sons, Carleton (1900), Appleton (1903) and Devon (1905). She described the births as “hideously difficult” and her middle son died three weeks after birth. With her third pregnancy Dennett suffered a lacerated uterus that was a major health problem until a 1907 operation corrected it. Her physician advised the Dennetts not to have any more children, but gave no practical advice. The marriage faltered as they abstained from sex. Hartley Dennett began a relationship with a client that blossomed into a life-long love affair, and by 1909 divorce and custody wrangling began. Mary Dennett won sole custody of the children.

Shaken by the breakup of her marriage, Dennett sought meaningful work in reform. In 1908 she took a job as field secretary for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and in 1910 was elected corresponding secretary of the New York City-based National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Her work in the suffrage movement gave Dennett organizational skills and experience making political arguments. NAWSA put her in charge of the bustling literature department, where she was responsible for coordinating branch offices across the country. To take the position, Dennett moved to New York in 1910. She left her sons with family and friends in New England and visited them regularly. The Dennetts did not settle their bitter and increasingly public divorce until 1913.

While on her own in New York, Dennett took up socialist reform and Greenwich Village bohemian thought. Increasingly critical of the leadership at NAWSA, she was forced out of her position in 1914. She followed other interests, including the Twilight Sleep and single-tax movements and regularly attended the meetings of the feminist group Heterodoxy. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Dennett and many of her colleagues devoted themselves to campaigning for peace. Dennett worked with the newly formed Women’s Peace Party, the American Union Against Militarism, the People’s Council of America, and other groups that fought against U.S. involvement in the war.

MaryWare Dennett celebrated at home after the U.S. Circuit Court reversed the jury decision that found her guilty of sending obscene matter (sex education pamphlets) through the mail.

MaryWare Dennett celebrated at home after the U.S. Circuit Court reversed the jury decision that found her guilty of sending obscene matter (sex education pamphlets) through the mail.

During this time, Dennett also became interested in birth control. She met Margaret Sanger, at the time the radical editor of The Woman Rebel, at a Heterodoxy meeting in the late spring or summer of 1914. Sanger’s calls for broader access to contraceptive information struck a chord with Dennett, but she deplored the use of law-defying and confrontational tactics. Sanger fled the United States in October 1914 to avoid prosecution. In her absence, Dennett helped organize the National Birth Control League (NBCL) (March 1915), using subscriber lists obtained from The Woman Rebel to gather members. Dennett’s group argued for removing the term “prevention of conception” from the acts defined as obscene in the Comstock Law. Although her goals were similar to Sanger’s at the time, Dennett used the traditional tactics she learned with the suffrage movement to accomplish them. She launched a lobbying campaign aimed at New York state politicians and circularized supporters and policy makers with propaganda and news updates.

With Sanger’s return to the United States in October 1915, a rivalry was born that divided the birth control movement for the next fifteen years. Sanger resented Dennett’s lack of support for her and Dennett’s failure to cede leadership of the birth control movement to her upon her return. Dennett failed to understand why Sanger would not join the NBCL and work under a broader leadership. Adding to their personal differences, Sanger began to alter her views on birth control while in Europe. She began arguing for birth control in a medical setting to ensure the most effective and safe contraception using scientific methods.This brought her into conflict with Dennett, who sought to make it legal for anyone to distribute contraceptive information, not just doctors.

Dennett’s economic position and her personality hampered her effectiveness in getting public support. On the surface, she and Sanger had similar histories—both had divorced and were raising sons on their own financial ability. Yet Sanger thrived on publicity and renown, undertaking combative lecture tours, writing a series of books, and dealing capably with the media. Dennett shunned public attention. She found the attention of the press uncomfortable, no doubt after the experience of her well-documented divorce. She also feared that the notoriety that came with radical ideas could jeopardize her continued custody of her sons. Rather than compete publicly with Sanger for leadership of the movement, Dennett worked quietly, focusing on attracting the support of “influential” leaders to win passage of a birth control bill. Unlike her coworkers, most of whom were upper- or middle-class society women, Dennett had to make her livelihood from reform work. The need to raise sufficient money to cover both her salary and the work of the NBCL took its toll; upon taking the full-time position of executive secretary in 1918, Dennett’s salary was often in arrears and she found herself in the position of urging the NBCL toward more concentrated action.

The NBCL began its work in New York State, urging a bill that would remove contraception from a list of obscenities. Dennett orchestrated a campaign of education through literature, much as she had run with NAWSA. The NBCL worked to get a birth control bill introduced in 1917, but without the support of Republican leaders in the assembly, it failed. For a few years, Dennett’s organization was the only organized birth control league in the United States. Despite that, Margaret Sanger’s campaign overshadowed it. Sanger garnered headlines and fame with birth control clinics, legal challenges, and arrests. Financial woes continued to plague the NBCL, and in March 1919 the executive committee voted to cut back their work and eliminate Dennett’s paid position. Dennett resigned and began a new organization, the Voluntary Parenthood League (VPL) that would focus its lobbying on a federal bill.

Dennett shifted from a state to federal focus out of practicality. Twenty-seven states had no specific laws prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives, and removing the federal obscenity ban would legalize birth control in over half the country. Dennett believed that many of the remaining states would follow the federal example and the movement could then continue where restrictions remained. She based her legislative campaign on the right to free speech, claiming that all people should have the right to decide whether they would be parents. Increasingly, Margaret Sanger challenged Dennett’s theory, emphasizing clinical services and doctor-controlled contraception as the best means to get reliable information to the public. Neither woman would admit any merit in the ideas of the other and their battle polarized birth control supporters into two camps for much of the 1920s. Dennett argued that Sanger’s policies were undemocratic and would create a medical monopoly on information; Dennett also claimed that Sanger herself had written birth control books that would remain obscene under her new plan. Sanger argued that Dennett’s bill was unattainable—legislators would not support it. She also claimed that it would allow quacks to distribute dangerous and ineffective methods to the public.

Once Sanger formed the American Birth Control League in 1921, competition between the two women intensified. Sanger initially agreed to leave the field of federal legislation to Dennett, but by 1926 her league had representatives in Washington, lobbying her competing idea for birth control legislation. When faced with direct competition, Dennett could not muster the finances that Sanger could, and by 1925 the VPL’s finances were in serious trouble. Dennett’s salary was once again in arrears. She resigned her paid position as executive director and the VPL scaled back to an all-volunteer organization that never mounted another legislative campaign.

Dennett worked as an administrator for a homeopathic organization and an organic food school in the mid- and late 1920s. In the 1930s she returned to her arts and crafts work. She continued to volunteer her time as chair of VPL board of directors, but the VPL accomplished little. In 1926, Dennett published Birth Control Laws, which offered a detailed discussion of her birth control arguments and attacked both opponents of birth control and Margaret Sanger’s doctors-only bill. Dennett refused to close the VPL for she was unwilling to leave the field to Sanger. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Dennett served as a thorn in Sanger’s side. Unable to mount a federal campaign of their own, Dennett and the VPL used publicity generated by Sanger’s repeated legislative campaigns to publicize their alternative plan. Ultimately, neither woman succeeded in Congress. It was not until a 1936 judicial decision that Sanger won her exception for physician-controlled birth control.

In 1929, Dennett herself faced charges of obscenity, based upon a 1915 sex education essay she had written for her sons. She had reprinted the Sex Side of Life in pamphlet form, and in 1922, the postal authorities informed her that the topic was unmailable.In 1929 she was indicted and was convicted. Dennett appealed and her case attracted widespread press coverage and the support of the American Civil Liberties Union. In March 1930, she won an appellate ruling. Judge Augustus Hand held that the context within which a work was written determined whether it violated the Comstock Act. Because Dennett did not aim “to arouse lust” when she wrote the pamphlet, it was not obscene. This decision was influential in setting a new standard for censorship and it vindicated Dennett. Her name splashed on newspaper headlines across the country, but Dennett eschewed publicity, refusing interviews with reporters. She published her own account of her trial, Who’s Obscene? (1930), to get her story out in her own words. A year later, she wrote a more detailed guide, The Sex Education of Children (1931).

Shortly after her brief moment in the limelight, Dennett withdrew from active reform work, retiring to live with her son, and only occasionally involving herself in birth control activities. With the threat of war again on the horizon, she helped to found the pacifist World Federalists, which sought international peace through law. Dennett served as chair from 1941 until her retirement in 1944. She died in 1947.

Dennett’s papers are at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, and available on the microfilm: Sexuality, Sex Education, and Reproductive Rights, Papers of MaryWare Dennett and the Voluntary Parenthood League (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994). Dennett’s quotes about her family come from Dennett to Marie Stopes, October 31, 1921 (Reel 14: 495-497.)

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