Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, Emily Bazelon spoke with Stephanie Gorton about how two women, Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett, revolutionized the way the country thinks about birth control.

This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Emily Bazelon: I want to ask you how the agenda of women working on birth control differs or overlaps with the suffragist movement, because we’re about to get to 1919 and the time when the 19th Amendment was passed and the women will have the right to vote. vote, and there is obviously some suffrage activism going on in this regard. And you would imagine that these groups would be closely allied, but that’s not really the case, is it?

Stephanie Gorton: That’s right. Dennett was at the center of the suffragist movement at this time, and one thing that really frustrated her about the establishment suffragists was their conservative character. They were not prepared to consider fertility control as part of their program. They were very focused on excluding black suffragists from their events and rallies. Beyond asking for the vote, they really didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. They agreed with prevailing ideas about female ignorance and submission in marriage.

So because the suffrage movement so actively avoided recognizing or supporting the birth control movement, they were somehow seen as very distinct. But what’s interesting is that I think Dennett always presented birth control as something that women would turn to once they had suffrage. I think she imagined that once women had the right to vote, a large, united group of women would turn to birth control. That’s not what ultimately happened.

In the fall of 1915, Margaret Sanger returned to New York. She left for Europe because she fears being prosecuted for violating the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act makes it a crime to mail any birth control material or anything considered obscene, which is a broad category. So she’s in trouble; she leaves for Europe; she returns and goes to the National Birth Control League and Dennett in particular, expecting their support. But that’s not what’s happening. Why is Dennett distancing himself from Sanger at this point?

This is where the rift between them really begins, and it’s a rift that is never fully mended over the course of their lives. Dennett’s response was that a close connection to Sanger—who had broken the law and fled the country to escape trial—would be detrimental to the birth control movement that Dennett had so painfully tried to build. She was trying to build credibility in her lobbying work and, she thought, being closely allied with someone who was a firebrand and a lawbreaker would reflect poorly on her. Thus, Dennett was always convinced that existing systems would ultimately work in her favor if she presented her arguments convincingly enough.

And Sanger naturally thought that was an incredibly privileged and bourgeois view. She wanted to provoke a real crusade. And for her, breaking the law was a means to an end. It was a way to gain publicity, to provoke test cases where the legality of birth control could be argued in court. But Dennett and Sanger never agreed on this point, even though Sanger’s methods were eventually proven effective.

Sanger provokes these first legal confrontations, she is tried, she is acquitted, there are these fiery protests. She really uses this to galvanize the public behind her and also to raise awareness about birth control. And Dennett, as you say, has this more rule-abiding set of ideas. And yet, interestingly, in terms of what they’re looking for in terms of change in the law, it’s Dennett who has the more radical vision of what the law should be and Sanger who is more progressive and piecemeal. Can you talk a little about their different approaches to legislation that would legalize birth control?

Absolutely. Sanger started out really allied with radical socialists and anarchists like Emma Goldman in New York. But in 1917, she dramatically changed tactics and announced to her own birth control league that she had started the American Birth Control League. Their main goal was to legalize birth control so that doctors and nurses could prescribe it. And that was quickly revised in favor of doctors only or the “doctors only lane” or the “doctors only compromise,” which is what Dennett called it. And I think Sanger did this for several reasons. She was truly pragmatic and she saw that she would need men on her side, especially men of science, to make birth control acceptable to politicians.

Dennett hated this compromise because she believed that restricting birth control – which meant, at the time, that diaphragms or douching were only available with a doctor’s prescription – would completely exclude poor and rural. She was against any form of control. Instead, she envisioned some sort of FDA-style approval process for contraceptive methods brought to market.

Over time, it was this problem that separated them, that prevented them from coming together and joining forces. Even after Dennett withdrew from Washington and Sanger’s lobbying campaign began, Dennett constantly pestered Sanger with letters urging him to end the doctors-only compromise, arguing again and again that it would only perpetuate paternalism in medicine and that it would be less equitable. for poor and rural women.