Photo by Sasha Israel
Stephanie Gorton is the author of the new book The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America. She also has written the book Citizen Reporters. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Q: What inspired you to write The Icon and the Idealist, and how was the book’s title chosen?
A: Two forces pulled me into the story: the fascinating central relationship between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett, and my consuming interest in reproductive rights activism.
Sanger and Dennett essentially launched the very first movement for reproductive rights in America. Questions of faith, the law, ethics, medical protocols, and beliefs about gender roles flared up in the battle for birth control, just as they now do in arguments over abortion.
We tend to think of the reproductive rights movement as starting in the ‘60s or with Roe v. Wade in 1973. It actually goes back a full century earlier, from when Sanger and Dennett formed the birth control movement in the mid-1910s and carried it to its first legal victory in 1936.
I’ve long supported reproductive justice, and becoming a parent only solidified that. Around five years ago, early in my second pregnancy, I was reading a lot about early 20th century feminists and I landed on the story of Mary Ware Dennett. She quickly became the emotional center of my narrative.
Sanger enjoyed fame, she was good at self-mythologizing, and her skills and passion both served the movement well. However, she pursued a narrower goal than Dennett: Sanger’s campaign would ultimately put birth control access in the hands of doctors, who would dispense contraceptives according to their own judgment and preferences, while Dennett wanted birth control access to be free of any gatekeeping, even by the medical establishment.
It was remarkable to go through Dennett’s archives and realize how fiercely private she was in contrast to Sanger, how she shunned publicity when she was working on this very bold campaign for birth control and revolutionizing sex education on the side.
Dennett had a powerful and deeply American vision for taking birth control from a place of silence, of taboo and restriction, to a place of open, affordable access. She was driven by events in her own life, and by an abiding belief in the full citizenship of women.
Learning about her, and how influential she was on Sanger, made me want to push back against the Famous Person format of retelling history. Too often, conspicuous leadership and well-resourced charisma are valued at the expense of more impactful forces, of relationships and rivalries and efforts that failed, but were nevertheless, visionary.
The title was surprisingly easy! For my first book, Citizen Reporters, there was much more back and forth with the publishing team. For The Icon and the Idealist, my publisher suggested I come up with something along the lines of “The X and the Y,” and very quickly it fell into place.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The guiding hand for my research was my curiosity about what cultural factors affected the rise of the birth control movement, and a basic human nosiness about what Sanger and Dennett may have been like as people.
Early on, I spent a great deal of time in institutional archives like the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Sophia Smith Library at Smith College, trawling through papers and artifacts left by my two main characters.
In 2020, that pleasant routine was disrupted by the pandemic. Institutional archives shut down to non-affiliates. That prompted me to reach out to Dennett’s descendants, and I began a series of visits to Dennett family archives in New Hampshire and Utah.
Making contact with the curator of the Dennett Family Archives, Sharon Spaulding, was a spectacular stroke of luck. Through her, I was even able to interview one of Dennett’s grandchildren, Nancy Dennett. Sharon’s generosity and wisdom truly made the book possible.
Another heroic resource was a research librarian at the Providence Public Library. She waived the typical limits on interlibrary loans and helped me get hold of boxes of microfilm and hundreds of secondary sources, from articles to dissertations to books of all stripes.
We tend to think of research as a solitary undertaking, and I do enjoy being alone with a box of old letters, but researching this book was a real joy because of the collaborations with experts, descendants, and librarians along the way.
Q: The writer Megan Marshall said of the book, “There is no time like the present for Stephanie Gorton’s brilliantly conceived dual biography of the fiercely formidable women, Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger, who brought the fight for reproductive rights to the American public in the early twentieth century.” What do you think of that description?
A: That description means a lot to me because of the person who wrote it. Megan Marshall’s books have not only taught me so much, but kept me spellbound at the same time.
Recently I found a fan email I sent her after reading The Peabody Sisters 10 years ago. I wrote something along the lines of How did you do that? And she wrote, “Find out what happened when, in a very precise way, and then set the story going!” I still tell myself that all the time.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Sanger and Dennett, and what do you see as their legacies today?
A: The best single-word descriptor for their dynamic is probably “fraught.” But to expand on that, it’s important to note that early on, they had a warm and sympathetic relationship.
They most likely first met in 1914 when Sanger gave a lecture to members of the Heterodoxy club, a secretive feminist collective in Greenwich Village; Dennett was part of the crowd.
Sanger was frustrated and disappointed with most of the women she met that day–she criticized them as being obliviously privileged, and not engaging with issues that affected the working class–but Dennett was an exception. She and Sanger had lunch together and discovered there was much common ground between their values and ambitions.
Later on, the differences between their personalities and their methods made it impossible for them to keep working together.
Dennett had a somewhat rigid idea of how activism ought to be done: she opposed breaking law to drum up publicity and test cases in the courts, for example.
Sanger, meanwhile, thought Dennett was a bourgeois rule-follower. It stung her that Dennett made headway in trying to change the federal law in the years she lobbied in Washington, though otherwise Sanger, who was much better funded and had great natural charisma, occupied the predominant position in the birth control movement.
Both Dennett and Sanger launched very ambitious, very flawed campaigns. They took detours into the eugenics movement, presented birth control as a remedy for Depression-era poverty, and tried to bend pop-culture trends to muster momentum for the cause.
Today their legacies can be felt not only in current efforts to legislate reproductive rights, both in the courts and in Congress, but also in how we talk about fertility control. Particularly with Dennett, I see her legacy in current arguments for reproductive freedom as a prerequisite for women to have full and equal citizenship.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next project is still very much in the playing-with-ideas phase. As it develops, I’m doing some freelance editorial work. I used to be a full-time editor, and I loved it; it’s the kind of job that sparks ideas all the time, while also being rigorous and taking you into subject areas you might never have explored unbidden.
Being an editor is what first made me curious about whether I could write, and now, as an author, having gone through the editorial process has given me a new respect for the craft that goes into editing. It’s such a privilege to be trusted with someone’s manuscript.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I love hearing from readers, and I hope anyone with interest in the book will come say hi at an event! My website is stephaniegorton.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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