‘Women Should Have Children Instead of Poodles’—When Birth Control Came to Washington
The idea of birth control entered the national conversation in 1919, when an artist, activist, and single mother named Mary Ware Dennett brought the (quite shocking!) idea to Congress.
It’s almost 2025, and still the push and pull over women’s reproductive rights continues. With Donald Trump primed and ready to begin his second presidential term on Jan. 20, 2025, many are worried that even contraception may come under fire.
It’s a debate that’s not quite as old as time, but it sure has been around a while.
The idea of birth control entered the national conversation in 1919, when an artist, activist, and single mother named Mary Ware Dennett brought the (quite shocking!) idea to Congress. Suddenly, elected leaders found themselves weighing reproductive rights for the first time.
Dennett’s is not a glamorous story, indeed it’s not even much of a success story, but it’s a story that illustrates poignantly how activism works. It explains why Congress has struggled to shake its twofold legacies of patriarchy and eugenics, and provides insight into the historical tensions shaping one of America’s most divisive social issues. As debates over birth control rights reach fever pitch in the U.S., it’s worth taking a look back at how it all began.
An Ideal Training Ground for Activism
Born in Massachusetts in 1872, Mary Ware trained as an artist. She married the architect William Hartley Dennett and quickly—too quickly—had three children. Each birth left the young mother with serious medical concerns, including, very likely, a fistula—a serious birth injury that can only be repaired surgically. Dennett was unable to breastfeed her second son, who died of malnutrition at three weeks old.
Doctors told the Dennetts that another pregnancy was inadvisable, and lacking any effective birth control, they ended their physical relationship. Within two years Hartley had left the family.
Newly divorced, Dennett found herself with sole custody of two boys, aged 12 and 8, and no income. She found a job working for the national women’s suffrage (NAWSA) headquarters in New York City. She did many things while at NAWSA: She coordinated the propaganda desk (known formally as the Literature Department) and wrote outreach letters to grow the association’s membership. She organized events, and answered the correspondence that poured steadily into the New York office. She also supported local branch offices, which introduced her to clubwomen across the country. It was an ideal training ground for activism.
But it was at the secret, feminist, social club, Heterodoxy, in 1914 that she first learned about the birth control movement. Dennett had attended a lecture by the controversial birth control activist, Margaret Sanger who argued that birth control was paramount in women’s struggle for equal rights. And from that moment on, everything in Dennett’s life changed.
Sanger was a key player in the fight for birth control, and her name is still widely recognized today—she’s both lionized as the founding mother of Planned Parenthood and decried as a eugenicist.
Dennett, by contrast, turned out to be an eccentric activist, shunning publicity and spending much of her energy—and all of her personal savings—on direct lobbying for contraception.
The two initially collaborated, but before long a rift started to form. Sanger saw Dennett as a stubborn dreamer; Dennett viewed Sanger as too hungry for fame, and too willing to compromise with the medical establishment. Ultimately, Sanger branched off, becoming the birth control movement’s figurehead.
Not long after their split, Dennett began working on two quite radical projects. Her elder son, now a teenager, had questions about sex, which spurred Dennett to the first project—a booklet titled “The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People.” It was sex-positive which was unusual at the time—a corrective to the older generation of sex-ed books, which focused on shame and syphilis. Sex was “a vivifying joy . . . a vital art,” Dennett wrote. Dennett’s booklet was aimed at teenagers, both girls and boys. At first she had it privately printed and gave it only to a few friends, but within a few years it was reprinted in a medical journal, and steady mail-order sales became a valuable side hustle.
The second project was the formation of the National Birth Control League (NBCL)—established by Dennett and a few close associates. The League’s primary goal was to revise certain New York State laws to decriminalize the circulation via mail of birth control information and methods. It “is no more indecent to discuss the anatomy, physiology and hygiene of reproduction in a scientific spirit,” Dennett and her fellow activists wrote in their founding documents, “than it is to discuss the functions of the brains, the heart or the lungs.”
Mrs. Dennett Goes to Washington
Birth control, like abortion, has been around as long as the family itself.
Through the 19th Century, the rise in fertility control (mainly withdrawal, condoms, and abortion, plus the more recently invented diaphragm) cut the average white U.S. birth rate nearly in half. (Non-white populations weren’t studied as carefully over that period; however, later surveys show family size universally trending downward.)
But in 1873, the fanatical purity crusader Anthony Comstock succeeded in passing a federal mail-censorship law—the Comstock Act—that substantially chilled the market for contraceptives. The Act penalized anyone who distributed printed matter or devices relating to sex education, contraception, and abortion. Breaking the law risked a $5,000 penalty (around $120,000 in today’s dollars) or five years’ imprisonment for first-time offenders. (In practice, wrongdoers were often fined less, or imprisoned for 30 days only, but the new law still had a drastic chilling effect on the market for contraceptives.)
By January 1919, NBCL was faltering owing to an increasingly disengaged executive committee, and Dennett reconfigured it into a nimble lobbying organization, under a new name: the Voluntary Parenthood League (VPL). Off she went to Washington with a new strategy, she hoped, would be elegant and uncontroversial. She would pitch what she called a “clean repeal” of just part of the Comstock Act. She wanted to delete the prohibition on birth control.
Her petite, unglamorous demeanor seemed to serve her well in Congress–at first. She kept her blondish-gray waves tucked under a practical hat, her eyes beaming conviction behind her spectacles. But she soon found that, after the novelty of hearing about birth control in the halls of power had worn off, most congressmen met her proposals with scorn.
Once she managed to get a legislator to agree to a meeting, it was rare for her to get a friendly reception. Sen. Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas’s sarcastic response was typical: “If you want to make everybody prostitutes, then go ahead.”
Most legislators went blank-faced as Dennett presented data on maternal and infant death, reacting only to ask if she was married and a mother herself before shaking their heads and showing her out. Rep. William Boies, a Republican out of Iowa, was aghast at her talk of birth control. He scolded Dennett out of his office, saying women should “have children instead of poodles,” foreshadowing J.D. Vance’s dismissal of “childless cat ladies.”
Hostility to birth control transcended party lines, though Dennett had better luck among Republicans (at the time the more liberal party), than Democrats. And although she eventually found sponsors in both the House and Senate, it was never enough to effect the changes she was hoping to make in Comstock.
Dennett continued her lobbying campaign until she had depleted all her savings.
By 1924, deep in debt, and having failed repeatedly in Congress, Dennett retreated to her small apartment in Astoria, Queens.
The Rise of Eugenics
Meanwhile, as the notion of population control went mainstream in the 1920s, eugenics was becoming a dominant theme in the birth control movement. To politicians, eugenics offered a way to protect WASP interests under the guise of science.
Accordingly, eugenics ideology was popular with lawmakers: Two eugenics-inspired immigration restriction laws had passed easily in 1921 and 1924, and in 1927, the Supreme Court’s decision on Buck v. Bell gave the government the right to sterilize its citizens.
Dennett and Sanger both tried to different degrees to ally themselves with eugenicists hoping to gain political traction.
Dennett, however, never courted eugenicists as persistently as Sanger did. Dennett perceived early on that eugenicists would sooner embrace forced sterilization of the “unfit” over any movement that granted women true agency over their own fertility. Immigration restriction and sterilization kept authority firmly in the hands of the government (and the patriarchy), while birth control would give individual women greater autonomy.
With Dennett back in her modest Queens apartment, Sanger quickly launched her own national lobbying campaign for a “doctors-only” bill that would legalize birth control via prescription.
But the notion of medical gatekeeping on birth control access appalled Dennett. Preoccupied with scraping together a living, she also continued to fire off letters to congressmen, the media, as well as Sanger herself, in the hopes that Sanger would change course and support Dennett’s strategy of revising Comstock instead.
'A Hint of Flame In Her Steel-Blue Eyes'
As professional and general interest in sex education ramped up in the 1920s, so did customers requesting “The Sex Side of Life.” Those customers now included physicians, clergy, educators, YMCA staff, and parents.
So it was a bitter surprise when Dennett received an envelope holding a federal indictment on Jan. 2, 1929. She had responded to a request for “The Sex Side of Life” from a customer who turned out to be a vice agent, and had been caught in a classic Comstockian trap.
Dennett’s obscenity trial began on April 23, 1929, and lasted three days. The judge was openly appalled by “The Sex Side of Life” from the start. He “told [Dennett’s attorney, Morris Ernst of the ACLU] privately that he had never in his life before seen the term vagina in print and was inexpressibly shocked by my pamphlet,” Dennett wrote. Forty-two minutes after starting deliberations, the all-male jury found Dennett guilty.
At her sentencing Dennett announced to the court, “If I have corrupted the youth of America, a year in jail is not enough for me. And I will not pay the fine!” The Herald Tribune newspaper noted the “hint of flame in her steel-blue eyes.”
When her appeal came to court in March 1930, she was acquitted.
Dennett may have been in retreat, but Sanger was still in the national spotlight scoring her victory: In 1936, a court case that Sanger had helped orchestrate successfully legalized birth control via a doctor’s prescription. Two later cases legalized it for all married Americans in 1965 and unmarried Americans in 1972. But still, even today, there is no federal law affirming Americans’ right to birth control.
Dennett vehemently disagreed that victory in court was a lasting solution, pointing out that court decisions were vulnerable to the biases of future judges, and that the best-case scenario would be a new federal law. She wasn’t wrong. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
Dennett died in 1947, after a series of strokes. She was 75. She never lived to appear on television as Sanger—who died in 1966—did, or to witness the innovation of the birth control pill.
But Dennett’s beliefs—which came at great cost to her own wellbeing—that individuals should know and control their own bodies feel just as true today as they did when she was relentlessly pacing the halls of Congress.
Josie Cox
Josie Cox
Emma Haslett
