Mary Dennett

Mary Coffin Ware Dennett was born April 4, 1872, in her hometown Worcester, Massachusetts.[4] Dennett was the second child of four born to George and Vonie Ware. Dennett was a precocious, talkative, and assertive child, "scolding [her older brother] for striking her, often quoting the Bible." [5] At age 10, her father died of cancer. Her mother supported the family by organizing European tours for young women. While her mother was absent on tours, Dennett and her siblings often lived with their Aunt Lucia Ames Mead, a prominent social reformer. [6] Dennett enrolled in the School of Art and Design in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1891 and graduated with first honors, then took a teaching position at the Drexel Institute of Art in Philadelphia in 1894. [7] She also had a position at Drexel Institute teaching design and decoration from 1894 to 1897.[8]

Dennett married William Hartley Dennett, an architect, in 1900. They shared the ideal of the Arts and Crafts movement and soon bought a farmhouse in Framingham, Massachusetts. They founded an architectural and interior design firm. In addition to her work as an interior designer and guadamacile[9] maker, Dennett continued to lecture and write about the Arts and Crafts movement.[10]

The Dennetts’ first child a son named Carlton was born in December 1900, after a difficult labor that nearly killed the mother. After another difficult labor, their second child a son named Appleton was born in 1903. However the baby was frail and died 3 weeks later. A third child was born in 1905 another boy named Devon, again after a difficult labor. Following this labor Dennett became ill and had to give up her professional work in order to recover. This time the doctor told the Dennetts that they should not have any more children, due to a laceration in her uterus that required corrective surgery.[11] However her doctor did not give them any information on birth control.[12] Later Dennett wrote of their lack of information on birth control:

I was utterly ignorant of the control of conception, as was my husband also. We had never had anything like normal relations, having approximated almost complete abstinence in the endeavor to space our babies." [13]

In 1904, Dennett's husband William Hartley Dennett began work on a house for Dr. Heman Lincoln Chase and his wife Margaret.[14] Hartley Dennett and Margaret Chase eventually developed an extremely close relationship, culminating in William Hartley Dennett moving out of his and Mary's house in 1909.[15] Concerned about the effect that Hartley was having on their children, Dennett filed for divorce in 1912, at the time an unusual and scandalous action. The courts finalized Dennett's divorce and granted her full custody of her children in 1913.[11] The divorce proceedings were a popular topic in the local newspapers, to Mary Dennett's great discomfort.[16]

Motivated by both a desire to escape the unpleasant realities of her life as well as William Hartley Dennett's refusal to financially support his children, Mary Dennett returned to working outside the home, but not in her previous career as an artist and interior designer. In 1908 she accepted the position of field secretary of the Massachusetts Women's Suffrage Association, beginning a long career in public advocacy for women's rights.[17]

Dennett worked for the cause of women's suffrage from 1910 to 1914, a period that marked the revival of the women's suffrage movement, which had stagnated during the previous decade. After several years of work for the National American Women's Suffrage Association, she became disillusioned with the organization and resigned from her position.[18]

Dennett co-founded the Twilight Sleep Association (1913), which advocated the use of scopolamine and morphine to ease the pain of childbirth. Statistics showed that twilight sleep reduced infant mortality and the risk of injury and infection, due to reduced use of forceps. She served as acting president until 1914, then as vice president.[19]

When the European war broke out in 1914, Dennett joined the Women's Peace Party,[20] an anti-war movement.[21] In 1916, she served as field secretary for the American Union against Militarism, organizing meetings in several large cities.[22] Dennett's work to re-elect Woodrow Wilson (under the belief that he would not declare war) led to a respected job as executive secretary for the League for Progressive Democracy. She resigned after Wilson did enter the United States into the war in 1917.[23] She next co-founded and was employed by the People's Council of America, a socialist peace movement inspired by the Bolsheviks.[24]

In 1915, Dennett's name was again in the newspapers, against her wishes. Her ex-husband Hartley Dennett, his partner Margaret Chase, and her husband Dr. Chase extended a public invitation to Mary Dennett to, as one newspaper put it, "adopt the creed of harmonious love and form a quadrangle" with the three of them. Dennett feared the negative effect that her involuntary notoriety might have on the organizations she worked with and considered resigning from the Twilight Sleep Association.[25]

In 1914, Dennett met Margaret Sanger, a birth control advocate. Dennett was intrigued, but did not feel financially secure enough to join the birth control movement at the time.[26] In 1915, Dennett wrote a sex education pamphlet for her children, as the result of the lack of any existing educational material that met her standards, which included scientific correctness, sex-positivity, and discussion of the emotional side of sexual relationships.[27] The arrest of William Sanger in 1915 for distributing Margaret Sanger's birth control pamphlet catalyzed the birth control movement in the United States, and this time Dennett decided to get involved.[28]

Dennett co-founded The National Birth Control League in 1915 with Jesse Ashley and Clara Gruening Stillman.[29] In 1918, she became the NBCL's executive secretary and started a campaign to make birth control information legal, giving lectures and lobbying state legislatures to change the laws. During this time, her pamphlet on sex education, "The Sex Side of Life," was published. Later, as the NBCL faltered, she resigned as executive secretary and founded a new organization, the Voluntary Parenthood League, which focused on repealing anti-birth control information laws at the federal level. [30]

In 1929, Dennett was arrested for her work with sex education, women's rights, and birth control. Many people felt that her work was obscene and she should be imprisoned or fined. "Mary Dennett sounded defiant, proclaiming she would pay no fine, however small: 'If a few federal officials want to use their power to penalize me for my work for the young people of this country, they must bear the shame of a jail sentence. It is government which is disgraced, not I." Dennet was proud of her work in sexual education and wanted it to last.[31]

Beginning in 1919, Dennett focused on a "straight repeal" of the birth control provisions of the Comstock Act at the federal level, rather than state-by-state efforts. She lobbied Congress to simply remove the words "prevention of conception" from federal obscenity statutes.[35] Dennett repeatedly lobbied individual senators in person for a year before she found one willing to sponsor the bill, Senator H. Heisler Ball, a former practicing physician. However, he never introduced the bill.[36]

In 1921, Dennett changed her approach and decided to work directly with the postmaster general, whose responsibility it was to enforce the laws banning distribution of birth control information through the mails (although in practice this was not enforced).[37] Postmaster General William Hayes seemed sympathetic, but resigned before taking any action.[38] His replacement, Dr. Hubert Work, was adamantly opposed to birth control information, earlier stating that his opinions on birth control could be summarized as "sterilize all boys and girls who are unfit to become parents, and then let nature take its course unhindered."[39]

Dennett returned to lobbying Congress in 1922, pointing out that private opinion of members of congress must be in favor of birth control since the average number of children of a member of congress was 2.7. She continued to have difficulty finding sponsors for the bill, but succeeded in 1923 when Senator Albert B. Cummins introduced the straight repeal bill in the Senate.[40] However, the bill made no further progress during that session, since Cummins was unable to succeed in getting the rest of the Senate to vote on it due to mass absenteeism when it came up for a vote.[41]

In the next session of Congress, Representative William N. Vaile sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives. However, it was also stalled continually and never came to a vote.[41] In addition, Margaret Sanger and her organization lobbied in favor of a version of the bill that would allow birth control information to doctors only, and lobbied against the "straight repeal" bill.[42] In 1925, Dennett gave up on passing the "straight repeal" bill and retired from her position at the VPL.[43]

Dennett achieved her goal in an entirely different manner in 1930, by winning an appeal of her conviction for distribution of birth control information under the Comstock Act.[44]