Unsung History19 Sep 2022

Mary Ware Dennett & the Birth Control Movement

For birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, the personal was political. After a difficult labor and delivery with her third child, a physician told Mary Ware Dennett she should not have any more children, but he told her nothing about how to prevent pregnancy. Dennett’s husband began an affair with a client of his architectural firm, destroying their marriage, and Dennett devoted her work to ensuring that other couples could receive information about birth control. A 1930 federal court case against her, United States v. Dennett, opened the door to widespread distribution of birth control information in the US.

Joining me in this episode is Dr. Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Assistant Professor of History at Kennesaw State University and faculty research fellow at the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health & Society. She is writing a book called Battle for Birth Control: Mary Dennett, Margaret Sanger, and the Rivalry That Shaped a Movement, that will be published by Rutgers University Press.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode image is a photo of Mary Ware Dennett from the New York Journal-American Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University Of Texas.

Sources:

“The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People,” by Mary Ware Dennett, 1919. Available via Project Gutenberg.
“Papers of Mary Ware Dennett,” Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute
“The Sex Education Pamphlet That Sparked a Landmark Censorship Case,” by Sharon Spaulding, Smithsonian Magazine, September 30, 2021.
“A Birth-Control Crusader,” by Marjorie Heins, The Atlantic, October 1996.
“Mary Coffin Ware Dennett,” by Lakshmeeramya Malladi,Embryo Project Encyclopedia, June 22, 2016.
“Unsentimental Education: Mary Ware Dennett’s quest to make contraception—and knowledge about sex—available to all,” by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, The American Scholar, March 4, 2021.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(230)

Jane Addams, Hull House, and Chicago's Nineteenth Ward

In the fall of 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side, full of good intentions to help the poor people of the neighborhood. They were a force for good, p...

10 Aug 46min

Buddy Bradley

Buddy Bradley, born in the Jim Crow South in 1905, made his way to Harlem at age 16 where he learned to tap dance and became a chorus boy. He was sought out on Broadway as both teacher and choreograph...

27 Juli 50min

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

During World War II, afraid that major league baseball would need to pause while men were overseas fighting, Philip K. Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, spearheaded a new profe...

13 Juli 54min

The Declaration of Independence

The Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but it took weeks for the news to spread throughout the ...

29 Juni 48min

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building loom large in the American imagination, symbolizing the conflicting ideas of liberty and empire; their meanings and characters have shifted over tim...

15 Juni 38min

An American History of Purses

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of wo...

1 Juni 40min

The Lady Bird Special

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special, a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed...

18 Maj 41min

Policing Slavery & Black Rebellion in the American South

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white e...

4 Maj 50min