2)       "Dennett stood firm on the principle that contraceptive information should be available to all - men and women, rich and poor. Generally uninterested in legislation, Sanger stepped into the Congressional arena only to block Dennett's work by presenting a "doctor's only" bill that would create an information monopoly among the male medical elite." page x

3)       " "Morals, not art or literature!" With this cry, Anthony Comstock carried Victorian sexual mores well into the twentieth century, giving them the full force of law." page xiv

4)       "Determined to seek out obscenity, he rarely failed to find it. His biographers would later quip, "But was not that a lucky break for Anthony Comstock that almost alone of all the world he could have his cake and suppress it, too!" " page xix

5)       "The new bill contained several new points. First, instead of limiting itself to books and pictures as in the 1865 law, it included "every lewd, lascivious, or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character . It also included "every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind." And it did not leave out "any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing." Now, virtually anything a diligent vice hunter might find offensive could be considered obscene. The penalty for obscenity was increased to a $5000 fine or five years in jail or both for a first-time culprit, with sentences up to $10,000 or ten years in prison or both for repeat offenders. In addition, the new bill added a special clause: it became a crime to advertise or mail any information "for preventing conception or producing abortion." " page xx

6)       "According to formula, the man fought for material sustenance while the woman provided the home with spiritual nourishment, guarding the family from the corruption of the outside world. In return for simple house work - cooking, sewing, etc. - the nineteenth-century wife could expect to receive food, shelter, and a clothing allowance. Theoretically, it was a relationship between two complementary equals. Yet if a wife failed to perform her duties, she was the legal chattel of her husband - he could beat her, rape her, or divorce her as he willed. If a husband failed to perform his duties, however, the wife had little recourse, for a married woman was almost entirely dependent upon the generosity of her husband.

      The notion of romantic love cushioned harder truths. Women were bound by laws but could not vote; they paid taxes but could elect no representative. A wife's property and earnings belonged to her husband, and her social status depended upon him as well. Affection between husband and wife was an ideal, but it was not always realized. In a state of total social, political, and economic inequality, the idea of "love" simply meant a woman might willingly and even eagerly acquiesce in the selection of her future master." page 6-7

7)       "Morality for women began to mean almost nothing else but chastity." page 13

8)       Regarding the suffrage organization, the NAWSA:

      "In 1904 Anna Howard Shaw became the fourth president after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Shaw had bitterly hoped to become president in 1900, when Susan B. Anthony had retired, but because of Carrie Chapman Catt's reputed genius for organization "Aunt Susan" had chosen Catt to succeed her instead. When Catt resigned in 1904, due to an illness in her family, the prize for Shaw came four years too late. Shaw inherited a period that would later be remembered in suffrage history as the doldrums. By 1910 the National organization had become mired in organizational infighting and was facing a deepening crisis that came from the absence of a clear-cut policy able to furnish direction and impetus to a growing number of suffragists clamoring for action.

      Critics increasingly blamed Anna Howard Shaw. Ordained as a protestant Methodist minister in 1880 (after her own church refused to ordain a woman), Shaw had given up her Cape Cod parish at age thirty-five to study medicine. Upon receiving her MD in 1885, she had worked with impoverished women in Boston slums in a dual role as preacher and physician. But her experiences convinced her that neither her religion nor medicine alone could solve the problems of women. She began to lecture for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, one of the country's largest women's organizations in the late 1800s, and became a close friend of its leader, Frances Willard. Liquor was an important issue for women, because drunken men beat women and children, gambled away earnings, and otherwise behaved in ways that caused the destruction of family and society. Many feminists felt very strongly that alcohol was the source of much societal evil. Before long, the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association engaged Shaw to speak about suffrage and, unmatched in eloquence and effectiveness, she decided to give up other causes to make winning woman suffrage her life's work.

      Anna Shaw's devotion was complete and her gifts were many, but administrative ability was, unfortunately, not among them. Her brilliant oratory was not matched by organizational skill. Throughout her tenure, the NAWSA was plagued with problems." pages 133-134

      "Although unrecognized today, Mary Ware Dennett was the turning point for the NAWSA. After her arrival, the reach at headquarters grew massively. She saw to it that an enormous amount of information was compiled and distributed "to the four points of the compass on almost every subject mentioned within the lids of Webster's unabridged." No-nonsense to the extreme, she felt no compunction about dismissing people whose work she found to be below par. Her intimate involvement with various local suffrage campaigns gave her a broad-based vision of what was possible. She deluged the country with propaganda: she fed the voracious media machine with suffrage news. The arrival of Mary Ware Dennett at National's headquarters signified the end of the "doldrums." In 1910, the Washington state suffrage campaign succeeded in enfranchising women " page 137

9)       After discussing English suffragists, Chen writes:

      "In the United States, the suffragists had been similarly brushed off by male legislators. Without the right to vote, women who peaceably presented their case were told that a "petition bearing the names of 20,000 women was of no more significance that one bearing the names of 20,000 mice." Looking to the Pankhurst group for answers, Dennett and Ashley soon realized one of the chief differences was not just the militancy, but the amount of money spent." page 138

10)       "For so long as one spouse remained wholly dependent upon the other, rhetoric about equality remained empty talk. Said Dennett, "I think that most informed and progressive people are agreed as to the necessity of economic independence for the married woman." Proposing a "five hours on, five hours off" working day, in which the mother and the father would alternate "five-hour periods of work with five hours in the company of their children," Dennett felt that the full development of each spouse in all spheres of life would greatly improve the raising of children." page 145

11)       "Despite the sentimental glorification of motherhood, childbirth was at that time a serious risk for women. In 1913 more women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four died in childbirth than from any other cause except tuberculosis, and the mortality was three times that of typhoid fever. In an age in which childbirth regularly threatened a mother's life and health - yet left the father physically untouched - it could be difficult for many husbands to understand the apprehension with which some wives approached sex and possible pregnancy. As the literature of the Twilight Sleep Association out it, "Childbirth with its attendant agonies, horrors, fears and possible blessings, has been the predominant thought of women for centuries. . . " " page 151

12)       "She well knew that without artificial contraceptives, women lived in fear of uncontrolled fecundity - a condition that could kill them, destroy their health, or leave them with more children than they could properly care for. She also believed true union between a husband and wife was dependent upon spirit and body; complete abstinence in marriage did nothing to further the bonds of love. Yet withholding of sexual favors put a wife in jeopardy of losing her husband, for it was not unusual for a man to seek physical fulfillment elsewhere when he was dissatisfied with his sex life at home. Given the circumstances of her divorce, these issues must have pierced the very soul of Mary Ware Dennett.

      Contraceptive information was relatively hard to obtain during Comstock's era. One had to know the channels. It took courage to give and even to tolerate the distribution of information about birth control. In an age when motherhood was considered to be a woman's only destiny, disseminating information about limiting births was a criminal offense. Folk remedies could be passed down from mother to daughter for those who were lucky. For the rich and well-educated, private doctors might be convinced to impart information at personal discretion. But the broadcasting of any such knowledge was strictly illegal - and violators could be and often were prosecuted under the Comstock Act of 1873. The subject itself was disreputable as it was felt to go against the very foundations of human civilization. Rebels were few and unorganized.

      As early as 1893, Emma Goldman, anarchist feminist, and champion of the poor, began the fight for birth control after her release from Blackwell's Island when she began using her prison training as a practical nurse to practice midwifery among the working classes. Jumping from theory to reality for the first time, she was shocked by the haggard, worn-out bodies of poor and ignorant women, who kept giving birth to sickly babies at near-yearly intervals. She noted, "It was incredible what fantastic methods despair could invent; jumping off tables, rolling on the floor, massaging the stomach, drinking nauseating concoctions, and using blunt instruments. In 1900 she attended a secret Neo-Mathusian Congress in Paris, returning to the United States with a stock of contraceptives literature and supplies. In 1908 she met her future lover Ben Reitman, a radical bohemian medical doctor, who helped her win new audiences beyond the foreign-born radicals, helping her share her views with a broader general audience of native-born Americans. By 1910, birth-contr9l had become a staple in Goldman's lecture tours as she determined to open up the issue among newspaper and magazine editors.

      At the same time, Dr. William J. Robinson, a rather eccentric physician "remarkably free of anxiety about his own respectability" began his own pioneer work for birth control from the medical standpoint. A medical journalist and muckraker, he published his ideas about sex in his journal Medico-Pharmaceutical Critic and Guide, which was "a compendium of the main sexual attitudes in the liberal parts of the medical profession." " page 160 - 161

13)       "Outside of Heterodoxy, Emma Goldman and Dr. William J. Robinson, who had been fighting for birth control for over a decade before Sanger, were already leery of the new woman [Sanger]. Robinson would later write a book review of Sanger's autobiography, My Fight for Birth Control, in which he criticized "Margaret's expertness in beating the drums and blowing her own horn," saying that 'from the very beginning, Mrs. Sanger wanted to the whole pooh-pah." Calling her account "unfair, false, and lopsided," he pointed out, "It was not she who went on the hunger strike, and it was not she who spent years in prison for her birth control and radical activities. On the contrary, her B.C. activity paid her very well, very well indeed." " page 163

14)       To Dennett, "In human beings, then, sex had a purpose in addition to reproduction. While the primary purpose of sex was unquestionably the perpetuation of the species, it was elevated and even ennobling when accompanied by "love." Without love, the sex act was stripped to an unmindful action befitting an animal." page 174

15)       ". . . venereal disease was a serious problem at the time. In 1914, one expert estimated that over half of all American men had been infected with gonorrhea. The double sexual standard had led many innocent women to be infected by their husbands - a favorite topic of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in several of her short stories." page 175

16)       Regarding the pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life which Dennett wrote for her sons: "Ultimately, Dennett's goal was to eliminate fear and shame about sex. Recognizing the dehabilitating effects that prudery could have on a marital relationship that was ideal in every other way, she hoped to protect her sons from the pain that she had once suffered." page 176

17)       "[Emma] Goldman called marriage "a vicious institution which made women into sex-slaves just a capitalism made men into wage-slaves." page 179

18)       "Before birth control could become a popular movement, it was necessary to overcome fundamental problems of fear and embarrassment about sexuality." page 181

19)       "Under the Comstock Act, the distribution of birth-control information was a state and federal crime punishable by a $5000 fine or five years in prison or both - for a first time offender. No mere misdemeanor, the crime could theoretically subject the guilty to a loss of citizenship rights." page 182

20)       According to Dennett: " "Equal pay can come only when public opinion and economic considerations demand it, when women come to be considered stable factors in the industrial world, when a woman's marriage does not almost always mean that she quit her job, when women are organized as well as men, and one might better say when they are organized along with men." page 185

21)       "While Margaret [Sanger] had been away, public consciousness had shifted dramatically. Instead of wiping out the small pockets of birth-control activity among the radical elements of society, as Comstock officials had hoped, the arrest of William Sanger had spawned a new movement. Spearheaded by Mary Ware Dennett, a cause that had previously been supported only by scattered anarchists, socialists, and eccentric physicians was now quietly but deliberately being translated to arouse the mainstream conscience." page 186

22)       Regarding an article Dennett had written for Sanger's "The Century", a birth control newsletter:
      "Mary's article was revolutionary. Defining a new set of family values, she argued that it was necessary for a mother to be economically independent, "for the sake of the soundness of family life." Rejecting the notion of a male breadwinner and a female housekeeper, she felt it was not enough for the man to simply provide materially for the family. "Men have been apt to assume that their responsibility to women and children were wholly discharged by merely paying over cash, without much personal services. Both men and women have meant well, but the men have been rather stupidly selfish, and the women stupidly unselfish." Dennett was far ahead of her time; it would take decades for feminists to come to a similar conclusion." page 192

23)       "The motto of the NBCL [National Birth Control League] was "The first right a child should have is that of being wanted." " page 194

24)       "Counseling moderation, she did not propose a new generation "brazenly shouting from the housetops that human beings are animals just like any other, and that sex expression should be taken as a matter of course when wanted." She did not wish to see young people "yelping noisily about freedom . . . ostentatiously showing the world that they dare all sorts of exhibitionism." She differentiated knowledge from license: "[Young people] will come to see the wide difference between the attitude of the girl who goes hipping along the street with her coat held tightly around the most purposefully jiggling part of her anatomy, and the open-air girl who plays with gayety and bare-legged freedom in her swimming suit, - or, as time goes on, without it. Both girls may feel equally sex conscious, but one feels wicked and the other feels happy." " page 248

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