2024-09-27
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.
