The National Birth Control League (NBCL) was a short-lived organization founded by Mary Ware Dennett, Clara Gruening Stillman, and Jessie Ashley. Though she never held the post of president, Dennett was the driving force behind the league, defining its tactics and legislative focus. The NBCL was formed in New York City in March 1915. At its founding, birth control was considered immoral by many, and individuals who associated with it took risks with their reputations. With the NBCL, Dennett tried to carve out a respectable forum for men and women to support contraceptive reform. Her organization focused on legislative lobbying for the removal of the term “prevention of conception” from the obscenity act.
The NBCL staked out its territory in October 1915, when it refused to aid Margaret Sanger’s defense on obscenity charges related to the publication of the Woman Rebel. The NBCL held itself as a law-abiding organization and would not support Sanger’s direct-action challenges to the Comstock Act. Though its members later asked Sanger to join the NBCL, the rift had already been formed and she refused. Drawing from free speech advocates, suffrage supporters, and society women, the NBCL rejected all associations with sex reform. Instead it framed its discussion of the topic in terms of the right to free speech.
Despite its claims of being a national organization, the NBCL actually operated in a very small geographic area, centered around New York City. Although Dennett drafted legislative amendments to correct both the federal and New York State censorship codes, the NBCL’s only practical campaign centered on Albany. In 1917 the NBCL circularized NewYork State legislators, held meetings around the state, and unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a bill to amend Section 1142 of the State Penal Code. The NBCL concluded that much more educational work was needed among legislators before another bill would be successful.
After Margaret Sanger’s return to the United States in October 1915, the NBCL had to vie with her and her often adversarial campaign for birth control. With superior flair for publicity, Sanger’s efforts were more widely known. She opposed the NBCL’s efforts in Albany in 1917 and succeeded in having a bill introduced that exempted physicians from existing obscenity laws. Though the bill never made it through committee, it offered an alternative that many found more palatable than the “clean repeal” that Dennett and the NBCL sought.
In 1918, Dennett took on full-time work as the paid executive secretary of the NBCL. The league, never financially sound, had a difficult time raising sufficient funds, despite numerous appeals to members. By 1919 Dennett had determined that the focus should be on federal legislation and wanted to embark on a Washington-based campaign. Instead the board voted to cut back the work of the league, eliminating Dennett’s full-time position in favor of a voluntary one. Dennett resigned in March 1919, founding the Voluntary Parenthood League shortly afterward to take up the federal work.
The NBCL did not survive the loss of its most active member and leader and closed shortly afterward.
Mary Ware Dennett’s papers, Papers of Mary Ware Dennett and the Voluntary Parenthood League, including a small amount of NBCL material, are at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, and available on microfilm: Sexuality, Sex Education, and Reproductive Rights (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994).
