Mary Coffin Ware Dennett

• Mary Coffin Ware Dennett
• Born: April 4, 1872
• Died: July 25, 1947

Suffragist, pacifist, and leader in the birth-control movement, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the second of four children and eldest daughter of George White-field Ware, a wool merchant, and Livonia Coffin (Ames) Ware. Her ancestors had settled in New England in the latter part of the seventeenth century. After her father died in 1882, her mother moved the family to Boston.

Mary Ware was educated in the public schools of Boston, at Miss Capen’s School for Girls in Northampton, Massachusetts, and at the school of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where she studied art and interior design. She taught at the School of Design and Decoration of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia from 1894 to 1897. In 1898, after a visit to southern Europe, she and her sister returned to Boston to open a handcrafts cooperative similar to those started by William Morris in Great Britain. Their gilded leather, modeled on antiques they had purchased in Spain, gained the attention of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, of which Mary Ware was elected director.

Mary Ware married William Hartley Dennett, an architect, in January 1900. The Dennetts had three sons: Carleton (born in 1900); Appleton (born in 1903), who died a few weeks after birth; and Devon (born in 1905). In the early years of her marriage Dennett worked as an interior decorator, often acting as a consultant to her husband’s firm. Gradually she found herself drawn into the woman-suffrage movement. In 1908 she became the field secretary of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1910 she was elected corresponding secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), a post she held for four years. Her new position required that she live in New York City, and the move led to a formal separation from her husband. They were divorced in 1913, Mary Dennett receiving custody of their children.

In New York City Dennett’s main responsibility was organizing NAWSA’s literature department, which made massive bulk mailings of suffrage propaganda. She also became interested in socialism, joining the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and working for the single-tax movement. Opposed to World War I on pacifist grounds, in 1916 she became field secretary of the American Union against Militarism and campaigned for President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection as secretary of the woman’s section of the Democratic National Committee. She resigned from the Democratic party when Wilson broke his campaign promise to keep the United States out of the war. She was among the founders of the People’s Council, a radical antiwar group, and worked for the candidacy of Morris Hillquit, the Socialist, for mayor of New York City in 1917.

Convinced that one of the main causes of the war was territorial expansion necessitated by excessive population demands, Dennett joined the movement to legalize birth control, which was widely considered a threat to the virtue of women and the sanctity of the family, as well as a contravention of divine law. The prime objective of the movement at the time was to repeal the Comstock Law of 1873, which prohibited as obscene the sending of contraceptives or printed materials on birth control through the mails. In 1915 Dennett and two other women took over and reorganized the National Birth Control League after the departure of its founder, Margaret Sanger, who had gone to Europe to escape prosecution under the Comstock Law. In 1918 the National Birth Control League was absorbed by the Voluntary Parenthood League, and Mary Dennett became its new director, displacing Sanger, who organized the rival American Birth Control League.

The differences between Dennett and Sanger increased as the movement developed during the 1920s. Sanger had come to the position that the obscenity laws should not be repealed, but should be amended to allow medical professionals to provide contraceptive information. Dennett, on the other hand, wanted to remove all legal restrictions on dissemination of birth control materials. Her proposal, however, stood no chance of passage; it was opposed by a confederation of Christian denominations and by physicians who did not wish to see information about birth-control techniques given out by laymen.

From 1922 to 1925 Dennett edited the Birth Control Herald and lobbied Congress for legislative action. In 1925 she resigned from the Voluntary Parenthood League after it merged with Sanger’s organization. The following year she published Birth Control Laws, which analyzed the situation from the standpoint of civil liberties.

An outgrowth of her work on birth control was her interest in sex education. In February 1918 the Medical Review of Reviews published her essay “The Sex Side of Life,” originally written for her adolescent sons. It received the endorsement of prominent physicians, clergymen, and state health officials. Dennett filled thousands of requests for copies and continued to do so after the pamphlet was ruled obscene in 1922. In 1928 the government moved to stop her. When the case went to trial two years later, Dennett was convicted, fined $300, and sentenced to three years in prison. The American Civil Liberties Union took up the appeal and in March 1930 obtained a reversal. The ruling excluded “serious instruction regarding sex matters” from the definition of obscenity, setting a major legal precedent. Dennett’s account of the case, Who’s Obscene?, was published in 1930. Her book The Sex Education of Children appeared in 1931.

The last years of Dennett’s life were spent working for peace. She headed the World Federalists peace organization from 1941 to 1944. She suffered from arteriosclerosis and died in Valatie, New York, of myocarditis at the age of seventy-five. Her remains were cremated.

The papers of Mary Ware Dennett can be found in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, and at the American Civil Liberties Union Archives, Princeton University. There is no full-length biography. The best modern sketch is in Notable American Women (1971). See also Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914-15) and Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women, vol. 2 (1925). On her birthcontrol work, useful references are H. I. Clarke, Social Legislation (1940); D. M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970); P. Fryer, The Birth Controllers (1966); and E. T. Douglas, Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future (1970). For her suffrage work see I. H. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 5 and 6 (1922). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 26, 1947.