The Sex Side of Life: Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education

by Toly Chen and Constance M. Chen

Book Overview

The publication of Constance M. Chen's "The Sex Side of Life" rescued from obscurity the life and accomplishments of an extraordinary woman: Mary Ware Dennett, suffragette, leader of the American Arts and Crafts movement, peace activist, and crusader for the right to obtain and distribute information about contraception.

In her battle to make birth control information accessible to all, Dennett tangled both with reluctant Congressmen...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565841336
• ISBN13: 9781565841338
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A great resource apart from the author's biases

I really enjoyed reading this book and would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the not-that-long-ago struggle to make birth control and information about sexuality legal and respectable. Mary Ware Dennett was a feminist, a pacifist, a suffragist, an artist, and a pioneer in the fields of sex ed and family planning; it's a shame that most people today don't even know who she was. Prior to reading this book, I had only known about her sex ed pamphlet she had originally written for her two sons Carleton and Devon, and was happily surprised to discover that she did a lot more than just that. In addition to all of her abovementioned achievements, she was also involved in radical politics, defied the prevailing "wisdom" of the time by being granted full and exclusive custody of her children after her divorce (caused by her husband's intense friendship with another woman, a friendship that went far beyond the usual bounds of a man and woman being close friends), and was involved in the new movement for twilight sleep. Today twilight sleep seems like a welcome relic of the past, but one can understand why so many women, Mrs. Dennett among them, embraced it, since she'd had three very painful deliveries in this era when women still put their lives on the line every time they gave birth, and had no way to prevent it other than celibacy. It both saddened and shocked me to read, once again, just how severely people were in the Dark Ages about birth control and sexuality not that long ago in human history. The sexual double standard might still be around, sadly, but in Mrs. Dennett's day, it was the stuff of nightmares. And the Comstock Act made even providing information about birth control illegal. She had so much to go up against when she wrote her pamphlet for young people, like the prevailing attitude that any information about anatomy or sexuality was considered automatically dirty, obscene, not for polite company, and bound to lead children astray. Fear and ignorance were considered bliss. Happily, though, she did become politically active at a time when society was starting to loosen its bonds of Victorian morality, and there was a large market for her pamphlet. It was odd, to say the least, that she wasn't taken to court on account of it until ten years after it was professionally published. This book probably would have been close to perfect had it not been weighed down by Ms. Chen's frequent biased and opinionated language, which seems really unprofessional in a scholarly biography. Her attacks on Margaret Sanger in particular come across as childish and mean-spirited. After reading this book, I'd agree it is true that Mrs. Sanger probably does get too much of the credit for the birth control movement, but Ms. Chen could have voiced her criticism of her methods and compared them to Mrs. Dennett's methods without sounding like an attack dog. Some of the language she uses when talking about how her husband Hartley was carry