Review by Booklist Review
With access to contraception in the U.S. as relevant a topic as ever, Gorton's impressive history of Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the struggle to legalize access to birth control is an essential read. Sanger is well known for her role in founding Planned Parenthood, while less famous is Dennett, an artist, free-speech advocate, and lobbyist who devoted her career to the dissemination of accurate information on sexuality and birth control. From the early twentieth century well through WWII, Sanger's and Dennett's advocacy work overlapped, though their differing approaches led to an antagonistic relationship. Both were motivated by compassion for women who, lacking the knowledge or tools to prevent multiple pregnancies, suffered from physical exhaustion while parenting large families they could not afford to support. Through her subjects' own extensive writings, Gorton captures each woman's distinct voice and personality. Weaving Sanger's and Dennett's personal histories within the context of the time period, Gorton creates a rich text that both illustrates how far women's rights have come and highlights their tenuous state today.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two defiant women. Drawing on considerable archival sources, journalist Gorton creates an informative history of the fight for women's reproductive rights in her dual biography of activists Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) and Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947). Dennett came to the cause from her personal experience of accidental pregnancies and birth trauma; Sanger, from work as a visiting nurse among the poor of New York City, where she saw women die after illegal abortions. The two first met in 1902, but although they shared goals, they fell out over the means to attain them. Dennett, Gorton reveals, shunned publicity and preferred to put her efforts into lobbying politicians and physicians; Sanger, a charismatic public speaker and successful fundraiser, relished being in the public eye. They differed, too, over who should hold prescribing privileges for contraceptives, with Sanger insisting that only physicians and nurses should. The women's most stalwart adversary was Anthony Comstock, U.S. Postal Inspector and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Comstock Act of 1873 had made dissemination of information about contraception illegal, punishable by imprisonment. Both women suffered the brunt of that legislation. As Gorton points out, Project 2025, produced by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a future Trump administration, "explicitly states the Comstock Act should be revived and enforced" a dismal prospect at a time when the legal right to contraception is codified in only 13 states. "A woman's body belongs to herself alone," Sanger proclaimed in 1914. "It does not belong to the United States of America or to any other government on the face of the earth.…Enforced motherhood is the most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty." A timely contribution to a virulent debate. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
