Mary Coffin Ware Dennett (April 4, 1872 – July 25, 1947) was an American women's rights activist, pacifist, homeopathic advocate, and pioneer in the areas of birth control, sex education, and women's suffrage. She co-founded the National Birth Control League in 1915 together with Jessie Ashley and Clara Gruening Stillman. She founded the Voluntary Parenthood League, served in the National American Women's Suffrage Association, and co-founded the Twilight Sleep Association with Margaret Sanger. She also wrote The Sex Side of Life, a famous pamphlet on sex education and birth control. A legal case against her, United States v. Dennett, became the catalyst for overturning the Comstock laws.
Biography
Early life Mary Coffin Ware Dennett was born April 4, 1872, in her hometown Worcester, Massachusetts. Dennett was the second child of four born to George and Vonie Ware. 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. Dennett came from a family of social reformers.
Education 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. She also held a position at Drexel Institute teaching design and decoration from 1894 to 1897.
Marriage and children 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 maker, Dennett continued to lecture and write about the Arts and Crafts movement.
The Dennetts’ first child a son named Carlton was born in December 1900, after a difficult labor that nearly killed Dennett. 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 Mary Dennett that she should not have any more children, due to a laceration in her uterus that required corrective surgery. However, her doctor did not give them any information or guidance on birth control, rather he suggested she practice abstinence. This experience profoundly influenced Dennett's later advocacy for improved maternal health and women's bodily autonomy. Later Dennett wrote of their lack of information on birth control:
Divorce and notoriety In 1904, Dennett's husband, William Hartley Dennett, began work on a house for Dr. Heman Lincoln Chase and his wife Margaret. 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 and abandoning their two children. Dennett filed for divorce in 1912, which was a rare and socially scandalous thing to do at that time. The courts finalized Dennett's divorce and granted her full custody of her children in 1913.
Motivated by both a desire to escape the unpleasant realities of her life and 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.
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.
Women's suffrage Dennett did not become active in the women's suffrage movement until her marriage began to break up. Later, she wrote, "I went into suffrage work, as perhaps you know, because I needed an anesthetic at the time, and suffrage was the nearest thing at hand that was unconnected with my previous work." She began as field secretary of the Massachusetts Suffrage Association, organizing lectures, rallies, sermons, cheap meals, speaking tours to gather signatures for petitions, and similar outreach efforts. Dennett's opinion on why women deserved the vote was simple: "Our basic principles that 'governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed' [...] undeniably imply the right of women to direct representation by the vote, since women are governed and women are people."
In 1910, Dennett's success in Massachusetts led the National American Woman Suffrage Association to aggressively recruit her for the position of Corresponding Secretary, reporting to Dr. Anna Howard Shaw. At the time, the NAWSA was riven by factional conflict. Taking the job required Dennett to move from Boston to New York City, a hardship for her since she couldn't afford to move her children with her. Dennett successfully resolved much of the internal conflict in NAWSA within a few months Many prominent NAWSA members credited Dennett with reuniting the NAWSA membership and turning the organization around. In 1910, Washington State granted women the right to vote, the first state to do so in 14 years.
Dennett worked for NAWSA from 1910 to 1914, a period which marked the revival of the women's suffrage movement, which had stagnated during the previous decade. After several years of work and an unsuccessful attempt to reorganize the association to be more effective after seeing wasteful decisions which were overly influenced by wealth donors, she resigned.
Peace activism and anti-war work During the 1910s, Dennett became active in the peace movement, helping to organize the Women's Peace Party and later working with the World Peace Foundation. Her anti-war advocacy was grounded in the belief that education and social welfare were essential to preventing future conflicts. She lectured widely and produced pamphlets connecting peace activism with women's civic responsibility.
When the European war broke out in 1914, Dennett joined the Women's Peace Party, an anti-war movement. In 1916, she served as field secretary for the American Union against Militarism, founded by small group in New York in 1915, opposing the growing war mentality in the U.S., military preparedness, and U.S. entry into World War I, she helped to organize meetings in several large cities. 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 decided to enter the United States into the war in 1917.
She next co-founded and was employed by the People's Council of America, a radical, socialist-influenced anti-war organization inspired by the Bolsheviks. She participated in organizing drives, and grassroots outreach aimed at linking peace, social reform, and civic education. She also worked to elect Morris Hillquit, the Socialist, for mayor of New York City in 1917.
After working in anti-war movement for years, she shifted some of her energies back to reproductive-rights and sex-education work.
'Twilight sleep' and the Twilight Sleep Association The term 'twilight sleep' references the use of a scopolamine-morphine mixture to anaesthetise women in labor; reducing the pains for the mother during the birthing process. Suffragists and women's rights advocates started the Twilight Sleep Association to urge doctors and female patients to embrace the practice of its use to encourage childbirth reform and challenge traditional medical and gender norms.
Activists argued that using 'twilight sleep' revolutionizes childbirth. This process allows for the birthing to become less dangerous and painful, thus allowing women to more control over their birth experience especially during a time when maternal mortality was high despite advancements in medical obstetrics.
However, many physicians opposed the practice, arguing that it was dangerous for patients and their children and not on par the expectations for proper womanhood and motherly duty.
The Twilight Sleep Association was co-founded in 1913 by Mary Dennett and Margret Sanger, Dennett served as acting president until 1914, then as vice president. Its goal was to encourage the use of 'twilight sleep' in standard practice. The association promoted twilight sleep using pamphlets, lectures, and appeals to hospitals to standardize the procedure, under the argument that that birth should and must become safer, more sanitary, and less traumatic for women.
Advocates of twilight sleep argued that pain relief during childbirth is not merely just a much needed medical improvement, but as a means to normalize women's autonomy, bodily control, and dignity. The movement to encourage twilight sleep was fundamentally a part of the women's rights, reproductive justice, and childbirth reform.
Birth control movement Dennett's first delivery was long and almost fatal. With no birth control available to her, she became pregnant for the final time in 1904. Three doctors cautioned Mary and her husband not to have any more children by practicing abstinence, but none of them provided the slightest bit of information about birth control. During this time, the distribution of birth control information and devices was illegal under state and federal law, and information about ovulation, fertility, and other reproductive facts was essentially unknown.
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. In 1915, Dennett wrote a sex education pamphlet for her children, The Sex Side of Life, 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. In 1915, William Sanger was arrested for distributing Margaret Sanger's birth control pamphlet catalyzed the birth control movement in the United States.
After William Sanger's arrest for distributing birth control information inspired a resurgence in the American birth control movement, Dennett co-founded The National Birth Control League in 1915 with Jesse Ashley and Clara Gruening Stillman. Dennett decided to start by rallying public support to strike down laws restricting birth control information. Later, as the NBCL faltered, she resigned as executive secretary and founded a new organization, the Voluntary Parenthood League. She used lobbying and lectures to promote the cause.