Books: The birth control battle waged during early women's suffrage

Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, Emily Bazelon talked with Stephanie Gorton about how two women, Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett revolutionized how the country thinks about birth control.

This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Emily Bazelon: I want to ask you how the agenda of the women working on birth control either differs or intersects with the suffragist movement, because we're about to get to 1919 and the moment when the 19th Amendment passes and women get the right to vote, and there is obviously suffragist activism going on with that regard. And one might imagine that these groups would be closely allied, but that's not really the case, right?

Stephanie Gorton: That's right. Dennett was at the center of the suffrage movement at that time, and one thing that really frustrated her about establishment suffragists was how conservative they were. They were unwilling to talk about fertility control as a plank in their agenda. They were very focused on excluding Black suffragists from their events and from their rallies. Beyond asking for the vote, they really did not want to ruffle any feathers. They were fine with prevailing ideas about feminine ignorance and submission in marriage.

So, because the suffrage movement so actively avoided acknowledging or supporting the birth control movement, they were sort of seen as very separate. But interestingly, I think Dennett always pitched birth control as something that women would turn to after suffrage had been won. I think she envisioned that, once women had the vote, a big united block of women would turn to birth control. That's not what ended up happening.

In the fall of 1915, Margaret Sanger comes back to New York. She's gone off to Europe because she is fearing prosecution for violating the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act makes it a crime to send, through the mail, any material on birth control or actually anything that's considered obscene, which is a broad category. So, she's in trouble; she leaves for Europe; she comes back and she goes to the National Birth Control League and to Dennett, particularly, expecting her support. But that's not what happens. Why does Dennett back away from Sanger at that point?

This is where the rift between them really begins, and it's a rift that is never fully repaired through their lifetimes. Dennett's response was that a close tie to Sanger—who had broken the law and fled the country to evade trial—would be detrimental to the birth control movement that Dennett had so painstakingly been trying to build. She was trying to build credibility in her lobbying work, and being closely allied to someone who is a firebrand and a lawbreaker, she thought, would reflect badly on her. And so, Dennett was always convinced that existing systems would eventually work in her favor if she made her case persuasively enough.

And Sanger understandably thought that was incredibly privileged and bourgeois as a point of view. She wanted to provoke a real crusade. And to her, breaking the law was a means to an end. It was a means to publicity, to provoke test cases where the legality of birth control could be argued in court. But Dennett and Sanger never agreed on that point, even though the effectiveness of Sanger's methods ended up being proven.

Sanger provokes these early legal confrontations, she goes on trial, she gets acquitted, there are these fiery protests. She's really using this to galvanize the public behind her and also educate people about birth control. And Dennett, as you say, has this more play-by-the-rules set of ideas. And yet, interestingly, in terms of what they are seeking in change in the law, it's Dennett who has the more radical view of what the law should be and Sanger who is being more incremental and piecemeal. Can you talk a little bit about their different approaches to legislation that would legalize birth control?

Absolutely. Sanger started out really allied with the radical socialists and anarchists like Emma Goldman in New York City. But in 1917, she changed tack pretty drastically, and she announced to her own birth control league that she had launched called the American Birth Control League. Their primary goal was to legalize birth control so that doctors and nurses could prescribe it. And that was quickly revised to doctors only or the "doctors-only path" or "doctors-only compromise" is what Dennett called it. And I think Sanger did this for a number of reasons. She was really pragmatic, and she saw that she would need men on her side, specifically men of science, in order to make birth control palatable to politicians.

Dennett hated this compromise because she thought that restricting birth control—which meant, at that time, diaphragms or douches to only be accessible via a doctor's prescription—would exclude poor and rural women entirely. She was against any kind of gatekeeping. Instead, she envisioned a kind of FDA-style approval process for birth control methods that came to market.

So over time, this was the issue that kept them apart, that kept them from uniting and joining forces. Even after Dennett retreated from Washington and Sanger's lobbying campaign began, Dennett persistently kind of needled Sanger with letters urging her to end the doctors-only compromise, arguing again and again that it would just perpetuate paternalism in medicine, and it'd be less equitable for poor and rural women.