text: The Sex Side of Life:
  Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education
  By Constance Chen
  New Press, 374 pages, $25
  In 1929, Dr. Howard Kelly, a professor of gynecology at John Hopkins University, denounced Mary Ware Dennett as a contaminator of youth and accused her of inspiring "illicit pleasures which rob the marriage bed of its sanctity and . . . (corrupt) the whole life." Dennett had written a dry little essay, quaint by today's standards, titled "The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People." The essay was judged obscene, and Dennett was convicted in a sensational New York trial of sending indecent material through the mail.
  After she died in 1947, this Boston-bred feminist slipped into obscurity, popping up only occasionally in footnotes on American censorship, often cast as the archrival of Margaret Sanger, the flamboyant head of the birth-control movement.
  Now, nearly a half-century later, Dennett has been rediscovered by Constance Chen in a new biography, "The Sex Side of Life: Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education." The book offers an insightful history of the conflict between law and sexuality, still timely because of the national abortion debate. It's also a lively story--a late-Victorian soap opera that touched on some of the most controversial aspects of American life.
  Born in 1872 into the old-fashioned comfort of New England's educated middle class, Mary Ware grew up with a sense of moral duty and a deep faith in the transforming power of love. Her parents' idyllic marriage ended with her father's death from cancer when Mary was 10. Afterward, her mother earned a living organizing grand tours of Europe for genteel ladies and impressed on her daughter the importance of economic independence for women.
  At design school in Boston, Mary was swept into the Arts and Crafts Movement and became devoted to its utopian ideas of uplifting the masses through beauty. In January 1900 she married a dashing, though weak, architect, William Hartley Dennett. Eleven months later her first son was born, following a horrific pregnancy. Two more quickly followed. The second baby lived only a week. The third survived, but his birth left Mary so weakened that she underwent an operation to restore her health.
  Meanwhile, Hartley began an affair with Margaret Chase, a physician's wife. As so-called Platonic "soul-mates," they joined a group of flaky Victorians, the spirit-fruiters, who advocated free love and farming as a way to spiritual truth.
  For years, Mary endured Hartley's long absences from home and believed his claims of a chaste friendship with the scheming Margaret. Finally, in 1912, she sued him for divorce, and after a bitter trial that captured tabloid headlines for months, she won sole custody of her children.
  The split plunged her into poverty. Hartley, who had given up architecture and was being supported by Margaret's husband, refused to help. Mary moved to New York to work for women's suffrage, an involvement that led to an interest in the growing birth-control movement. In 1915 she founded the nation's first birth-control organization, the National Birth Control League. But her battle to make contraception available to all caused her to clash with the ambitious Sanger, who pushed Congress to pass a "doctors only" bill that would limit birth-control information to the medical profession.
  Meanwhile, Mary was becoming known as an expert on sex education. "The Sex Side of Life," the 21-page pamphlet she'd first written for her sons, was endorsed by the YWCA and reprinted in a journal, the Medical Review of Reviews. ("The sex attraction is the deepest feeling human beings know, and unlike (for) animals, it is far more than a mere sensation of the body," reads one typically tame passage.) For years Dennett sent copies to friends, and she never gave up hope it would someday be published as a book. But America wasn't ready for the subject matter, and after someone who'd read her essay complained to the U.S. attorney in New York, Dennett was indicted.
  Chen's book is as much about the history of birth control as it is about Dennett. Chen writes with energy and passion, but the book has several unfortunate errors. To note a few: The president of Bryn Mawr College was M. Carey Thomas, not M. Thomas Carey; Ida Tarbell was a muckraking journalist, not an economist; when referring to the era of Mary's early relationship with Hartley, the author means the 19th Century, not the 18th.
  A more serious problem is the prologue, an essay on Anthony Comstock (a religious fanatic who led the Victorian crusade for moral purity) and the history of censorship in the U.S. This is an odd way to begin a biography of Mary Ware Dennett. The Comstock information is integral to the story, but it should have been folded into a later chapter.
  These objections aside, "The Sex Side of Life" does an admirable job of explaining how Dennett (like Sanger) grasped birth control as the key to women's emancipation. Today, at a time of great confusion over abortion rights, Dennett's story has deep resonance. To a remarkable extent, many of her dreams were the same as our own.