Judging by how commonly birth control is practiced in the United States, it ought to rank among the least controversial of subjects. In surveys, ninety-nine per cent of women of reproductive age report having used contraception in their lifetimes. Catholics avail themselves of it at about the same rate as other Americans. Evangelicals do, too. Given the fact that heterosexual Americans, like humans in general, tend to be fans of non-procreative sex, this is not so surprising. Nor is it new. In the nineteenth century, lots of people tried to game their gametes, especially anyone lucky or wealthy enough to have a discreet private physician; or who could read between the lines of newspaper ads slyly offering “rubber goods for men” or “married women’s friends” or “French periodical pills”; or who knew a midwife able to whip up an herbal concoction that might or might not work. Between 1800 and 1900, the average number of children for white married couples (the group most studied) dropped from just over seven to less than four—a decline marked enough to suggest the purposeful wrangling of fertility, whether through abstinence or intervention.
And yet birth control is contested: condemned, still, by the Catholic Church; regularly undermined by attacks on reproductive rights that are aimed at abortion but take access to contraception as collateral damage; and scrambled into weird fulminations about female sexuality from right-wing talk-show hosts and Trumpian influencers. In Stephanie Gorton’s timely and well-researched new book, “The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America” (Ecco), you can read a number of quotes from champions of reproductive rights which seem bracingly relevant and even radical today.
But the quote that best captures the maddening persistence of this conflict comes from the other side—the judge who, in 1917, presided over the trial of Margaret Sanger for the crime of opening a birth-control clinic. Women, he said, simply did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” For all that women’s roles have changed, for all the new contraceptive products that have appeared since, this attitude seems never to have been entirely vanquished.
“The Icon and the Idealist” is a dual biography of two twentieth-century birth-control crusaders—one (Sanger) famous, the other (Dennett) far less so. It’s also a closeup portrait of their rivalry—tactical, temperamental, and at times political.