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Episode 444: Stephanie Gorton Embraces the Messiness
449 Plays6 days ago
Stephanie Gorton once fretted over her not-neat process of writing books and soon came to embrace her messiness as a feature, not a bug, while she wrote The Icon & the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America (Ecco). (Photo credit Sasha Israel)
Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference. Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Promotions
00:00:00
Speaker
Oh, I guess I can say this now. The Front Runner, The Life of Steve Prefontaine, published by Mariner. Books is available for pre-order. Oh my gosh, and look at that book cover. You can visit the bookseller of your choice, palsbookshop.org, HarperCollins.
00:00:16
Speaker
Barnes and Noble, and yes, even Amazon, if that's your thing, and plunk down $32.99, or maybe $65.98, or $98.97, I can keep going. Everything helps. Every author you know under the sun begs for pre-orders.
00:00:33
Speaker
and And you only have so many dollars at your disposal, so I'll just say, consider it. Hell, if you order five or more, email the receipt to me and I'll be sure to do like a private book club meeting thing for you and your gang, okay?
00:00:48
Speaker
Okay, but listen, promotional support for this podcast brought to you by the power of narrative conference, celebrating its 26th year. On the last weekend of March, the 29th, 300 to 400 journalists from around the world descend on Boston, Massachusetts. Keynote speakers include Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, and Dan Zach, and they're coming to the deliver the knowledge and the inspiration If you like this kind of work, and I know you do, listeners of this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee by using the code CNF1515.
00:01:28
Speaker
To learn more, visit combeyond.bu.edu and use that CNF15 code. Looking at writing the book is not just the desk time. It's also the time when you're ah walking around, when you're reading, making appointments at archives.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:51
Speaker
Alright, this is the Creative Nonfiction Pocket, you knew that. But in case you didn't, it's a show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Mara, I knew him!
00:02:03
Speaker
Hope you had a nice holiday, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. It's a nice time to ruminate, to think of the past, to think of the future, to evaluate your path.
Stephanie Gordon's New Book
00:02:13
Speaker
Stephanie Gordon is here. Second time she's been on the show. This for her new book, The Icon and the Idealist. Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the rivalry that brought birth control to America. It's published by Echo.
00:02:30
Speaker
Stephanie is also the author of Citizen Reporters, and we talked about that back on episode 210. Amazing how the river of the podcast just flows. And before you know it, some two and a half years have gone by. Stephanie's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Paris Review Daily, The Boston Globe, and The New Republic.
00:02:51
Speaker
Her book has gotten a ton of great attention ah like a full giant review in the New Yorker The New York Times and I think the Washington Post and elsewhere well deserved attention on a topic that shouldn't feel as topical as does you know, basic bodily autonomy and a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to bear children should, I don't know, call me crazy, start and stop with her own agency. Stephanie's book tracks the world where women were mainly seen as childbearing vessels.
00:03:23
Speaker
and little else really, often delivering a baby once a year and just this thing of the severe physical, emotional, and financial burden and how hollowed out these husks of women became. it's ah She illustrates it brilliantly. Birth control was a revolutionary means of easing the burden, not just on the family, but on the communities that would inherit just child after child after child.
00:03:51
Speaker
The rivalry at the heart of this book is the driving force and you're just wondering how much faster things could have moved or how much stronger it could have been had Sanger and Dennett teamed up instead of cut each other down.
00:04:07
Speaker
And temperamentally, they were the perfect pair, like a figurehead and a chief of staff. But alas, that didn't happen. Showing us to this episode more at BrendanOmero.com, hey, my little piece of the internet, my little piece of property, my little garden. There you can sign up for the monthly rage against the algorithm newsletter, a little dispatch where I share cool rinks, cool links, book recommendations, book raffles, happy hour.
00:04:33
Speaker
It's a mini magazine, if you will, about living a more intentional life in the digital space. In this conversation, Stephanie shares lessons on what she learned from writing book one to book two, embracing the messiness, structure, world building, and how she curried favor with the Dennett family.
Writing Process and Research Insights
00:04:50
Speaker
Lots of rich stuff that I know you'll enjoy. I guarantee it. Or your money back. Here's Stephanie Gordon-Riff.
00:05:09
Speaker
At what point does like an idea hit you and you're like, oh wow, that seems like something. And then you know what's your what's your first move to see if this is something you want to spend several years with?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, it does have to have some key pieces. In this case, I'd finished a book about a group of journalists in the early 1900s. You know, it was about the muckrakers, Ida Tarbell at S.S. McClure. This was before Dobbs. I finished the book. It was 2019. But I'd started working with an abortion fund here in Rhode Island just as a volunteer.
00:05:45
Speaker
And I found myself really curious about how we got here. So many histories of the reproductive rights movement start with Roe or the few years before Roe. um And i I found myself wondering, what about birth control? Has that always just been a pillar of health? Has it always been the sign of like frugality and common sense and you know taking care of yourself? And of course it hasn't. It was this radical movement. And I had heard Margaret Sanger's name
00:06:16
Speaker
Quite a bit, you know in various contexts like she definitely was more notorious than famous ah Because of her association with the eugenics movement, but I never heard of Mary word then it And then finding out, I really like having this, you know, like a relationship at the center of the story. This isn't just like a kind of hero, a villain, you know, the progression of a movement or of events to like some culminating moment. It's a relationship that drove both of them because they had this, you know, what was what was a rivalry.
00:06:49
Speaker
And then you could see that Margaret Sanger's success was really in reaction to, I mean, not fully in reaction to her contest with Dennett, but that it was really shaped by it in some key ways. I thought that was so interesting. So it's a topic I care about, to answer your question. It's a topic I care deeply about personally. I was curious about the history. And then I saw that there was a character and a relationship, Mary Ware Dennett and her relationship with Margaret Sanger.
00:07:19
Speaker
and They hadn't been covered, like there's a great biography of Mary where Dennett came out about 25 years ago. And there are countless biographies of Margaret Sanger. But the story of the birth control movement through their relationship, I thought could be a really interesting book. It also an essential piece is that to write my characters, I love to be able to read through as many of their personal papers as possible. And Dennett had an established archive up at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe,
00:07:50
Speaker
So I first went there and I'd started this research in 2019. So I spent quite a bit of time in that archive and then institutions closed in 2020 with the start of the COVID pandemic. And I ended up making contact with Dennett's family, with her descendants and with the curator of the family papers, Sharon Spalding. That opened up a whole nother facet of the story, a whole dimension because they hold, Sharon holds,
00:08:18
Speaker
than its personal papers. There were diaries, notebooks, belongings, pieces of artwork. And that kind of, I was already invested in the project, but it became, you know, i I still feel very involved with this character, very involved with the book. I almost wish I was still writing it, because spending time in that archive was was so inspiring. So it's going to be hard to find something to live up to that, I think, in the future.
00:08:46
Speaker
What were your conversations like with Dennett's family and descendants to get that degree of access? And yeah, just what were those conversations like as you lobbied for that? It's interesting because it's it's never a guarantee that ah a family is going to welcome every writer that comes in. So I didn definitely didn't take that for granted. But I wrote to her kind of just a cold email and they happened to be really gracious people. And of course, they wanted to know who I was, what kind of work I'd already done. And we started having, we started talking, I drove up to visit them. There's a Dennett family homestead in New Hampshire. That's really a pretty magical place to visit. It's a, it's an old, old house. It's an 18th century house, has a little hidey hole under the stairs where they say it was a um
00:09:40
Speaker
a stop on the Underground Railroad, actually. And it has so many of Dennett's actual belongings and book collections that are still there. It never felt like I absolutely have to prove myself to them, but there was a it like a getting to know you period. I feel so fortunate that the person handling all this material happened to be Sharon Spalding. She's a writer herself. She's a feminist historian. She's brilliant and you know provided a lot of guidance and just so much generosity as I got further along with the research.
00:10:10
Speaker
terms of In terms of your your book writing from from Citizen Reporters to this one, I wanted to get a sense of maybe ah what what have you kind of learned from book one to book two, and in what ways have your skills sharpened as ah as a writer and a researcher?
00:10:25
Speaker
I think what got sharpened is that I kind of got to accept my own miss messiness and embrace that and work it and assume it and work it into the process. So the first time around i i didn't I didn't really make like a research document that was separate from my notes or my working draft. Everything was just in one big Scrivener file.
00:10:48
Speaker
Uh, and this time I, you know, I realized that I discover sources or I hear about things or I think things up often while I'm walking the dog. And I need to have a grid open all the time where I can just jot down and that thing that I intend to target in the future. So process wise, that helped a lot. You know, i I think there is a phenomenon.
00:11:11
Speaker
the women in their late 30s, early 40s being diagnosed with ADHD. And I haven't been through the process myself, but it's almost like seeing those traits and thinking, oh, I'm going to try to use them rather than you know scold myself when it turns out my research document is a mess or I miss a source because I haven't taken the time to jot it down or I jotted it down in the wrong place. It's sandwiched between two giant blocks of text.
00:11:39
Speaker
And I was never going to find it again after after writing it there. um That has helped a lot. For book one, I would try to sit and write for like four or five hours at a stretch and work for that long.
00:11:52
Speaker
And this time i have I never even tried. If I got one or two hours at a stretch, that was great. And I try to get a couple of those blocks each day. But just being more, looking at writing the book is not just the desk time. It's also the time when you're ah walking around, when you're reading, making appointments at archives, ah having interview conversations with people. I mean, talking about working with the family, once you have a positive connection with one person, it's not necessarily It doesn't necessarily open open everything up there or let you know what you have access to. For me, it took several conversations and then ultimately Sharon connected me with Dennett's granddaughter, Nancy Dennett, who was sent in her 90s and who has since passed away. But after interviewing her, Nancy on the Zoom screen kind of looked at Sharon and said, yeah, you know, I think you should show her the notebook.
00:12:46
Speaker
And this ended up being Dennett's diary of her love affair with a colleague in 1915, which was a huge year for her. It was the year that she wrote the sex ed manual, the sex side of life, which she wrote for her teenage sons, but ended up getting her incited under the Comstock Act 25 years later, I mean, 15 years later.
00:13:07
Speaker
It was also the year that she launched the National Birth Control League, just so much was going on in her life. And to get that personal take on what was going on, on their the cafes she ate at, the dresses she wore, what her apartment was like, never mind the romance that was going on, was just phenomenal, but it it just took putting in time. It wasn't obviously leading anywhere. So that I think was, was also something, it was lucky that it turned out that way. But that that is kind of my frame of mind now about putting a book together. Like you show up, you put time in, you like run processes down their logical line.
00:13:46
Speaker
And it's not always clear that you're going to have a really fruitful day's work, but just do things like one day at a top time and and focus in the best way you can, even if it's just for like 20 minutes at a time. What was your best organ organizational tool or method that that helped you with this ah your latest book?
00:14:06
Speaker
It's it's so boring, but it's probably just this spreadsheet where I had a I had like each kind of source that I was looking for, whether it was an archival source or documentary or scholarly book or you know so on and so forth.
00:14:20
Speaker
And I just had the whole list of everything that I was targeting. And after I finished reading each source, of course, I'd look in the bibliography and add a whole bunch more sources to target to that document, then I could just kind of like work my way through. And this was during the pandemic, so I was going down to my local public library and I shared my research document with a librarian there.
00:14:43
Speaker
And she helped me just kind of like batch them out. Everything they didn't have there, she got on interlibrary loan. So periodically, I would just go down there, get a huge, you know, crate of books, haul it home, go through it. They were amazing. This research library and just kind of like lifted the limits on interlibrary loan and helped me work my way through these hundreds and hundreds of sources.
00:15:05
Speaker
Let's ah ah take a moment and sing the praises of librarians and how often very much unsung heroes for books of this nature. So what was that dynamic like as you were he were doing that kind of work?
00:15:18
Speaker
That was such a godsend. She was amazing. And she's somebody who's very um she's she's like, not, not emotional, not overly smiley. Someone I saw really regularly through the writing of this book and putting it together. And I would just sort of like fly into these like ecstasies and oh my god, I can't believe I have this. I can't believe I'm holding this.
00:15:41
Speaker
She got microfilmed from from the Library of Congress, which I guess is something Providence Public Library has not always been able to do, but she pulled it off. So she really made this possible in the most kind of like sensible, like, you know, just like she was doing her job, like it was no big deal at all. ah So yeah, the public library made this book possible.
00:16:04
Speaker
And when you've got enough research down, you know yeah yeah it almost feels like it never stops. Somehow you have to turn it off. I don't i don't know how, but sometimes you gotta to at some point or another. ah When did you know you were ready to write?
00:16:20
Speaker
That's a great question. I think I started I started pretty late in the process because I just I wanted to get the structure into slightly better shape first. And I also there's been so much written about the birth control movement. There's so much scholarship around it. I wanted to make sure I wasn't just I don't know, like focusing on Dennett.
Narrative Structure and Historical Context
00:16:44
Speaker
I think what helps is when you start finding the same story told in multiple other sources and you could see the discrepancies between those other retelling and you start to have an opinion of your own or see, oh, but this person has the most solid
00:16:59
Speaker
Sourcing or you know a citation that clearly shows that testimony was given on x day so these other interpretations you know seem to be a little looser so that started happening and that gave me confidence to think okay at least i have the beats of when things happened.
00:17:16
Speaker
And I can build up the kind of personal narrative around there, see what letters were sent when and what diary entries were set down when, in terms of like what was happening with the movement, what was going on with our lobbying meetings, and ah what was happening with the two characters personally.
00:17:33
Speaker
I like that idea of you know you you start to see where the where the blocks are starting to, and the beats are starting to reveal themselves. and In conversations I've had with other reporters, and and this came more from more contemporaneous biography, but they you know one one guy I spoke to, he said that the arc of the story revealed itself a lot through through a lot of his interviews. and you know For me, it was mainly the archives. I saw what was newspaper archives and just like, oh, here's a thing that's covered very much extensively. Okay, now can I zero in on the the principal characters and the principal people involved in those beats? Just for you in the course of your research, you know how does the the narrative structure start to reveal itself?
00:18:19
Speaker
That was really challenging. And i I worked with an editor who actually did a, he did like the first edit on Citizen Reporters also. And this one, he's someone I worked with in a publishing company like years ago, maybe like more than 10 years ago. and And he's just very gifted when it comes to structure. So he very kindly read my manuscript and said, oh, I can see why you're trying to put the story together this way. It was ah it was like a six or eight part book. I don't know why there were so many parts to it, but it was it wasn't especially long. It just had all these like the the themes. I decided there were six main themes and I needed to like contain them each.
00:19:04
Speaker
and put them in the sequence. And he said, I really think there should just be three. You give your background on your characters, essentially. You have the peak of their rivalry and of when the movement was most active. And then it kind of flames out in 1923. She leaves Congress.
00:19:23
Speaker
and No, it's 1924. She stops her lobbying campaign in Congress. She is fully burnt out. She's in so much debt. And she writes to Margaret Sanger and says, you know, the field is yours.
00:19:34
Speaker
ah She, she and on a gut level, she didn't absolutely mean it because she continued to send Sanger letters saying, I actually think you should do your work this way. You know, she was very kind of rigid and unyielding and had no sense that Sanger was getting increasingly riled up by ah this letter writing campaign. And her main point of contention was that Sanger wanted to legalize birth control only through doctor's prescription.
00:19:59
Speaker
Whereas Dennett wanted to fully delete the prohibition on birth control from the Comstock Act, which would have made it a more FDA style approval process for contraceptives.
00:20:13
Speaker
and it would have put them on the market for anybody to order by mail, for nurses and social workers to be able to fit diaphragms as well as doctors. um She had that kind of scenario in mind because she thought it would be more equitable to poor and rural women. But Sanger was, I think she was she was truly pragmatic and said the doctor's only provision was to create an alliance with the medical establishment to get them to support the bill.
00:20:41
Speaker
And sure enough, she really had a lot of them on her side by the time she was in Congress, in lobbying members of Congress in the early 30s. But Dennett never stopped sending her notes, saying, I know deep down you feel the same way I do. I know deep down you're the same old radical Margaret Singer. So the the last portion of the book is really after they go their separate ways.
00:21:04
Speaker
what happens when birth control actually is, when the doctor's only path is taken out of Congress, when Sanger quits lobbying and makes this incredibly faithful decision to take it into the courts. She orchestrates a test case where a bunch of diaphragms being shipped over from Japan were confiscated.
00:21:25
Speaker
And it's the case has a great title, it's US s versus one package of Japanese pessary. And that verdict essentially opened up a path for doctors to be able to legally prescribe birth control, really for for any reason. Beforehand, in some states, it had been possible only for the prevention or the cure of disease.
00:21:46
Speaker
But after 1936, after that point, doctors were able to just use their discretion and prescribe birth control whenever they thought it was possible. Now, it was another 30 years. yeah It was 1965 when all married Americans got access to birth control, regardless of whether a doctor thought it was appropriate or not. If somebody wanted it, then they could get it, and they were married. In 1972, the unmarried got access to that right as well. So it was the beginning of a long road to opening up access to birth control. um And i I did want to, I think that structure made it make a lot more sense, both to readers, but also to myself.
00:22:30
Speaker
and And backing up a little bit with um yeah just the the world building around around this book, I think you're kind of rewinding the tape back to what the Comstock Act is. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that and how that that sets the the world building in motion that you have here.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yes, the Comstock Act ah is being talked about in the news today, of course, because it's still in the books. It just hasn't been enforced for many years. And it is part of Project 2025 to revise it revive it and begin enforcing it. So what is the Comstock Act? In 1873, a fanatical social purity crusader named Anthony Comstock went to Washington with a bill that forbade the circulation through the US mail if anything having to do with sex, with nudity, birth control, abortion. He said his main intention was to stem the tide of pornography that he that that was going through the mail. He was a vice agent in New York City. And according to him, these fast quantities of pornography were just flooding the mail system. At that time,
00:23:44
Speaker
his legislation was not, it wasn't like universally popular, but Congress had a few scandals going on and it was convenient for the members of Congress to have a way to look very morally upstanding, to pass something that showed they cared about children, they cared about right and wrong, and were upright Christian citizens.
00:24:05
Speaker
So the Comstock Act is signed into law in 1873. And of course, abortion has been happening as long as the family itself has been around, same with birth control. And the market had to find a way to navigate the Comstock Act. So people start using very euphemistic terms when they're selling contraceptives, where they they might have said like a shield or a protector.
00:24:30
Speaker
Now they call them, you know, a ah uterine elevator, ah maybe a diaphragm or a pessary would be pitched as something to help a woman with prolapse, which is a very common condition after childbirth. um And the same with condoms, they would just be billed as rubber goods.
00:24:47
Speaker
although Comstock knew enough to come down on that pretty hard. He ended up with extensive powers over the US mail, ah and because of his crusade, it was impossible for people to just send around anything having to do with birth control,
00:25:06
Speaker
abortion information or devices relating to birth control and abortion were forbidden from from going through the mail. And the same with sex education, where there had been a steady industry of marriage guides, these occasionally fell under Comstock's eye. ah Even just basic diagrams or drawings of the human body were considered overly informative, inappropriate,
00:25:31
Speaker
a bad influence. um He was mocked during his time for ah censoring artwork and for thinking that museums ought to cover up various parts of paintings and sculptures. And so as the birth control movement was coming into being, Sanger was much more comfortable with violating the Comstock Act and going to court because she saw each of these appearances as an opportunity for publicity. Dennett was much more convinced that the way to change the law was to work within it.
00:26:00
Speaker
was to argue, to persuade. That's why she is the idealist of the title because she very much um thought that systems would work for her if she behaved well enough within them. The other part of the world building I got really into was just the effects of this time on culture generally, on what was happening in fiction and the theater.
00:26:25
Speaker
and and popular culture and youth culture. you know what How did it change sex? How did it change the use of birth control when young people were unchaperoned in movie theaters and cars for the first time? And when society was increasingly urbanized, ah when the world were, when when the the Deaths of World War I kind of became evident across the world when the ravages of STIs during World War I of gonorrhea and syphilis became common knowledge in the US. There were just a range of
00:27:04
Speaker
factors of things happening in health and in culture that I think enabled the birth control to to kind of flame up to become this uprising in the um early 1920s. But they also had to strain against this tide of tradition of an all-male government and just this taboo against sex and reproduction.
00:27:26
Speaker
It was considered so wildly inappropriate for reproduction to be talked about in the halls of power. And to know that it was Mary Wird Dennett who raised it for the first time. It's something we haven't really stopped talking about in politics since then. It was just so remarkable to me that her her story isn't more widely known.
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah they're it to the point of world building too, and just this idea of just trying, yeah ah of reducing family size and the burden of that. And again, the chapter women rebels, I believe Sanger wrote this. She was like, but it's far more sorted to find yourself several years later burdened down with half a dozen unwish for children, helpless, starved, shoddily clothed, dragging at your skirt, yourself a dragged out shadow of the woman you once were.
00:28:15
Speaker
And it was just like, it that really paints paints a picture of the the desperation so many women were living under at that time. Yes, yeah. I think there you know she published an entire book of letters that women had written to her asking for help in explaining their personal situations. And it is heartbreaking. their Their own fertility was so far out of their hands um that they you know many women would be having a baby on a near annual basis. And Sanger saw this with her own mother, which must have had a really powerful influence on her. Her mother was gave birth to 11 children. Sanger was the sixth of these 11 surviving children, but she had at least seven miscarriages as well. So she was either pregnant or breastfeeding for the majority of her roughly 30 years of marriage. Through all of that, she had tuberculosis.
00:29:12
Speaker
And Sanger has a really poignant memory of her not being able to stand up because her coughing fits were so violent. She would start coughing and find a wall to lean herself against till it was over. And then she died when she was 50. Sanger came home to nurse her when she was just out of school and then had to stay on to help her father and raise her younger siblings.
Rivalry Origins and Strategies
00:29:33
Speaker
At what point does the rivalry really start to take root?
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's I think that there are there are two big factors. There's the difference in their personalities and how they got under each other's skin just on a personal level. And then therere their total disagreement when it came to policy. So Tangerin Dennett met probably at the secretive feminist club called Heterodoxy. Dennett was a member of this club in Greenwich Village in the early 1910s, just after she moved to New York.
00:30:08
Speaker
And Sanger came in 1914 to give a lecture on birth control. And from Sanger's perspective, the lecture had not gone well. She didn't think these kind of elite feminists were all that sympathetic to the impact that birth control could have on working class women. um She thought they were probably more concerned with whether they should keep their last name after marriage and you know kind of out of touch issues like that.
00:30:36
Speaker
ah But then it was fascinated and she went and she approached Sanger. They went and lunged together at Dennett's apartment and this, you know, they they had a friendship and a meeting of the minds. Dennett really felt a sense of belonging in the birth control movement after being introduced to it by Sanger. Just after this Super promising beginning, Sanger had to flee the country because a magazine that she had released was ah held up by vice agents and she was being arrested. and and She needed to be tried under the Comstock Act for circulating obscene material. Instead of standing trial, Sanger decided to leave and try to do her work from overseas.
00:31:19
Speaker
ah She didn't want to be silenced in prison. And during that time, Dennett, with a group of others, launched the first national advocacy organization for birth control, the National Birth Control League. I think it probably had irked Singer that this league got started in her absence. Although, you know, I think she had also assumed that they were her partisans, that they were theirs, her allies.
00:31:45
Speaker
And they were, they were all friends of Margaret Sanger. But when Sanger returned to face the music, she decided to stand trial after all, and that her work was too valuable. She couldn't, she wasn't effectively doing it overseas. So she might as well come back and see what, what was going to happen to her.
00:32:03
Speaker
She came to Dennett and asked for the League's support. And I really think this meeting is where things went wrong for the two of them. Because Dennett, I'm not sure what her exact words were, but in Sanger's report told her that she had not approved of the way Sanger went about her work, of her readiness to break the law. She said, this League intends to work within the law.
00:32:26
Speaker
And we can't support you if if you continue working in the way you are. They didn't offer her any money to help with her legal defense. And instead, then it kind of ushered her to the door while saying, by the way, if you can share any lists of donors or people who might be useful to this birth control league, I'd really appreciate it. So this moment of deep offense, of deep hurt against Sanger was something that Sanger kept close to her for a long time.
00:32:56
Speaker
Then, of course, there's their policy difference in that then it really thought the prohibition on birth control ought to just be stripped from the Comstock Act and free up that information. It was very much a freedom of speech argument, ah free up the ability of information and devices relating to birth control so that anyone in the US would be able to get it via mail order at their local health clinic.
00:33:20
Speaker
at their drug store. Sanger, who had initially been on the kind in in the same had the same vision, very much shifted in 1918 to this doctor's only strategy. She thought it had a better chance of success because they wouldn't be alienating the medical establishment. And they needed they needed something on their side. Already the whole political, legal, medical establishment was set against the idea of birth control.
00:33:50
Speaker
So I really see this, you know, Dennett was more educated than Sanger. Sanger never finished her education. She just had a few few years of nursing school. Dennett had been a professor of art and design and really had lived in the realm of ideas and art and craft ah before her own embrace of activism after her divorce. So I think there was a this personal incompatibility And then it was just compounded by the fact that their policies could not be brought together at all either.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment where Dennett writes that, but oh, of Sanger, like but oh, her English and her facts that aren't facts and her logic that isn't logic and her amazing faculty for being the whole moment. You get a sense of the ah just the degree to which she viewed Sanger as kind of a kind of less than in that regard.
00:34:48
Speaker
Exactly. And she really looked down on Sanger's Sanger had this gift for turning herself into the central martyr heroine of the movements. She saw she saw I think she was really savvy. She knew people needed a leader to believe in a person to be their surrogate, and to kind of be the one they could root for. Then it very much wanted to take herself out of it. She wanted the policies and the ideas to speak for themselves.
00:35:17
Speaker
and She was so persnickety you know and almost pedantic in the way she looked at Sanger and said, well, that's not quite right. That's not quite right. you know she you know she There she is, grandstanding again, letting her ambition run away with her. But actually, Sanger, I think she found a lot more success because she was so much better funded, but also because she could be a hero for people.
00:35:42
Speaker
Yeah, it just goes to show how much, how you need like a charismatic figurehead to move the levers forward, and that or at least to have levers pulled, and that could move things backwards or forwards, but it's like people need that ah kind of cult of personality as much as you would like to think that the content will carry the day. It usually needs someone, yeah, a charismatic megafauna at the head of anything. No, that was very, and that was was so much that it's,
00:36:12
Speaker
mistake. She really thought the content should carry the day. when When her colleague suggested, you know, putting her name on her League letter letterhead saying, you know, directed by Mary Ware Dennett, she vetoed the idea. She said, I don't mind me. I don't have anything to do with it.
00:36:30
Speaker
My name shouldn't be on there. You know, they should they should support us because they believe in these principles and these ideas. But the the fact is that movements need a hero. They need a they need a charismatic personality ah that people can root for. As they split and Sanger grows more influential and Dennett kind of falls off. You know, you write later you know later in the book ah that why Dennett wondered was it so necessary for Sanger not only to ignore her efforts but torpedo them too.
00:36:58
Speaker
hit And, you know, just it give us a sense of like that moment of, you know, the rivalry is such that, you know, Sanger would, and you know, as you're right, like torpedo Dennett's efforts as well. Yeah. it was So, you know, there is this there are unsavory elements to Sanger's career and there's her embrace of eugenics, of course, but this, you know, to see how consistently she was i think I honestly think she had been so irked by Dennett's disloyalty early on when Sanger was freshly back from her exile in Europe and looking for support. ah In that sense of disloyalty that this is somebody who was critical of her, ah who had not kind of pledged fealty to her, that made her a permanent enemy.
00:37:46
Speaker
And eventually Sanger was in a position of much more power. she Her second husband was hugely wealthy and he helped Sanger run national birth control conferences and lead a propaganda campaign and eventually a lobbying campaign as well. And Sanger turned those resources to the work of expanding birth control access and information and and stirring up support for a lobbying campaign. But she would also, if somebody came along who crossed her, ah she also did what she could to alienate them and make them feel it.
00:38:26
Speaker
And early on in the book too, and this kind of piggybacks on the idea of of eugenics and how you know Sanger kind of really kind of glommed onto that idea is, let's see, where is it in my notes? Oh yeah, like in Naughty Pamphlet's chapter, or earlier on it's like, and in all this talk of about fitness, social burdens, and preservation of the race, the birth control movement began to see an opportunity.
00:38:49
Speaker
and is it take Take us to that moment in how yeah the this idea of yeah fitness and race and eugenics feed into the early part of this movement. That was important because up till then right birth control was it was part of feminism. and Feminism really didn't have any traction at all in Congress or you know even really in the press. It was kind of the sideshow. Eugenics gave people a way to talk about sex and birth control.
00:39:18
Speaker
with this quasi-scientific gloss. So it made a drawing room conversation and it made birth control kind of manly, something that you know men could talk about as mattering to society at large and not just to individual women who were not really seen as you know as important at that time um and arguably still are not. So I i think that you know one thing that came out again and again as I was writing the book is that the feminist humanitarian and argument for birth control really didn't hold any water and it's still kind of hard to use as a persuasive tool ah when it comes to arguments that have succeeded in in the government and Congress.
00:40:07
Speaker
ah But when there's an economic or eugenics-based argument, and people seem to get a lot more excited about that if they were a congressman or if they were the president. Yeah, it was like this Trojan horse. That's why birth control and eugenics. Yes, it was a Trojan horse. Exactly. So they' den the but the dynamic was very much that Sanger and Dennett would approach leaders in the eugenics movement saying, Hey, you know, we can work together here. And eugenicists were very wary of them because feminism really didn't have a place in their agenda at all. It was more of an Arianization.
00:40:44
Speaker
ah you know, ah eradication of disability. And part of the way that Sanger and Zenit could package and almost sell birth control to eugenic supporters was that it could be a tool for that.
00:40:57
Speaker
um But it was never as popular an idea with them as straight out sterilization, compulsory sterilization of any population deemed unfit. I should also add that Dennett was always much less excited about eugenics, and I think she had a i think she saw earlier on that this was not a movement that was friendly to feminists. So after you know a few kind of casual or less direct approaches to movements in the eugenics to leaders in the eugenics movement, she dropped it.
00:41:27
Speaker
ah Sanger kind of kept on becoming more implicated and more involved. And she almost made herself, she did make herself a pro eugenics mouthpiece, speaking about how birth control could help eradicate disability ah from the population.
00:41:44
Speaker
It's also been said a lot about her that she was a white supremacist and that she had an anti-Black agenda. And I never found any evidence of that when I was actually in her papers. Her focus was fully on disability when she was on her her eugenics bandstand.
00:42:01
Speaker
yeah Yeah, and then she wrote you know just there her idea of just really a more – really progressive and a more civilized way of talking about things. like Just for a fair society, she wrote that you know she wanted economic independence for women, the end of every type of privilege and safe, reliable contraception. and i don't think anybody of would well there are plenty of people nowadays who would disagree with that ah probably on all three things but I look at that and be like wow that is so forward-thinking and I guess sadly idealistic even today unfortunately
00:42:40
Speaker
There's something so timeless about it, about this concept of what it is to have full citizenship. And, you know, her, her she she had that that feminist manifesto, I think, from 1916, where she just wrote, women are people, and that's, you know, that's really as simple as it is. It should have the same, you know, her the early part of her career was so focused on suffrage.
00:43:02
Speaker
So first, what what should a person, what should a citizen who's an American, what should they be able to do? Well, to vote, you know, they and they shouldn't enter into this world feeling like they're there are others who are privileged above them for totally arbitrary reasons.
00:43:18
Speaker
of wealth or race or sex. So there's that. And then there's what happens within your own body, you know this concept of bodily autonomy. But that also was so new when she was starting her work. And that was really interesting to parse, just that transition from even judges in some of Margaret Sanger's earliest ah cases, ah saying, no, women don't have the right to enjoy sex or intercourse.
00:43:48
Speaker
uncoupled from the risk of conception. That's not a thing. Sex is for the intention of conception only, especially for women, they should not be having sex without the express intent to conceive. And then 20 years later, that in in pop culture,
00:44:07
Speaker
Sex is absolutely its own thing. The pre-code films and the roaring 20s and you know the heyday of Mae West, that transition absolutely happens over the course of the timeline in the book. That was so interesting to read through. To what extent would you say their rivalry ah stunted or me held the movement back?
00:44:32
Speaker
It definitely did. Yeah, because who you know who wins when there's there's a movement that's so divided and the leaders are preoccupied with the critique of the other person. It really depletes valuable energy for that could be supporting the movement that could be moving it forward.
00:44:53
Speaker
It was such a distraction because people would write in and ask, you know why are there two birth control leagues? Why do I need to choose? you know And you know I don't know where to send my money. there There really could have been an advantage to them, even if they couldn't work together, find ways to work in complementary ways to each other. I know Dennett had had a vision of that earlier on, where she would be in charge of the political lobbying.
00:45:19
Speaker
and Sanger would build out a network of birth control clinics across the nation. But that seemed, you know, finding out what I discovered about their personalities really made me think that was a little upside down. That if anyone should be lobbying and be the public figure for the movement, it was going to be Sanger. And Dennett had this incredible practical ability and like incredible wells of energy also. She just kept going back.
00:45:48
Speaker
She kept going back to Congress even when it was so hostile and when she had very few resources of her own. And, you know, she also could have found a way to maybe not to badger our singer quite so relentlessly to find some other way to support the movement. Eventually, later on, even Dennett's colleagues and the people who worked for her suggested you know you you could build a bridge. like Maybe we could find a way so that there is just one unified movement. And we could pass this. you know Maybe you could accept the doctor's only clause if we managed to work something in about nurses or social workers.
00:46:28
Speaker
uh you know if it maybe it maybe it wouldn't be so narrow but maybe we could at least talk about this and see if see about making it happen. Dennett was incredibly uncompromising and rejected anyone else's version of her original her original vision so I think if she had been just a little less rigid if Singer hadn't been so focused on loyalty and clung so tight to the grudge that she held against Dennett it would have it would have really been advantageous to the movement. I don't know if it would have changed the culture any faster, but at least there wouldn't have been a distraction and a division that stayed with it through both of their careers. yeah They strike me as the perfect pairing. One was okay being the figurehead, one wanted to be behind the scenes, and if they could have just found some you know some common ground to move it forward, they seem like the the perfect combo.
00:47:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think Sanger from early on was aware that she could be the mouthpiece for this movement. So, you know, there were a couple of occasions, even really early on, like, like when they're, you know, she opened the the first birth control clinic in the US.
00:47:36
Speaker
in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and it was open for maybe like nine days um before it was shut down. ah And in the try she worked on it. She worked there with her sister. And her sister, when she was in prison, decided to go on a hunger strike and won an incredible amount of publicity.
00:47:59
Speaker
for that. Sanger had very mixed feelings about her sister's sudden fame. ah And their relationship took a really long time to go back to a familial close relationship because of that because, you know, she had she she briefly eclipsed Sanger as the most famous person or the person who had the headlines in the birth control movement.
00:48:22
Speaker
And then there was, you know, even that around the same time, Sanger produced this pamphlet called Family Limitation, and she printed an incredible number of these pamphlets herself to kind of flood the market with them. This became the booklet, the resource about birth control that neighbors passed to each other, that was circulated by any business that worked in the space. And as it turned out, Sanger had scooped some of the
00:48:53
Speaker
information in that booklet from another activist, Caroline Nelson, Danish American birth control activist. And Nelson, who had been friendly with Singer, was just crestfallen and felt betrayed and, you know, became very close to Dennett later on because of that.
00:49:12
Speaker
yeah it's a Yeah, it's one of those things where no one having the that notion of a rising tide floats all boats. It was it seemed very much like, well, to the the torpeding tour torpedoing metaphors just like saying her it's just like she just needed to fucking go nuclear on everyone around her.
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah, and she had such a platform to her, her magazine, the birth control review, had a wide circulation. And she was also, her name was recognizable pretty early on. And so she could write op-eds and publish them. And by night when 1930 came along and birth control was, was kind of much more publishable, debatable, popular topic.
00:50:00
Speaker
She managed to get a whole issue of The Nation magazine devoted to birth control. And when the editor accepted an article by Dennett, Sanger just quietly went along and had it mixed, just had it thrown out right before publication because she did not want to give anybody else the platform. It was hers. ah My god, I know. Oh my gosh. It's just you almost see so much of just even those that that degree of Platforming and politicking you just see it kind of today with social media and podcasting and everything like who's verified who gets who gets more voice over the others is just the The ethos of it the is the same but you know the technology has changed Yeah
00:50:45
Speaker
Well, Stephanie, as I bring these conversations down for a landing, i ah I've long asked people, I kind of got away from it, but I want to come back to it, of ah asking the guests for a recommendation of
Gordon's Fiction Reading and Writing Reflections
00:50:55
Speaker
some kind. And if it gets you a little flat-footed, I'm sorry. um No, no. But I love asking guests for the just whatever is kind of exciting you and these days. ah Yeah, something that's really exciting me is I've started reading fiction again. And fiction, you know, maybe like older novels plus new releases.
00:51:15
Speaker
Right now I'm reading Other People's Houses by Lori Siegel, which is her map based on her life. It is a novel, but it's based on her experiences starting when she was 10 years old and it being transplanted from Austria to England just before the start of the Second World War. And and it's this this voice from another time.
00:51:38
Speaker
that after you've been immersed in non-fiction for so long, you you kind of forget how fiction can sweep you away and just the possibilities that are there. I love writing non-fiction myself and I think there's an incredible creativity that's possible when you have that restriction of not making things up. But to lose yourself in a novel especially, you know, I wake up in the wee hours. And instead of looking at the news, actually open the book and get something out of the night. It's so rewarding. It's, it's amazing, because I could never write that kind of book myself. And it's a connection to just, I don't know, these, these people, these people who are from a different country, or from ah a culture that maybe doesn't make so much sense to me. But you have that like, oh, we we are truly
00:52:28
Speaker
you know It's so cheesy to say, but so much more connected than not. Fiction does that in a way that I had lost touch with and have really been loving rediscovering. Why do you think you would be incapable of writing fiction? I don't think I'd be incapable of writing fiction. Just you know good fiction. right There's a distinction. that Yes.
00:52:53
Speaker
It is that world building and that full kind of being able to put yourself in the voice of another person. I don't know. What do you think? Have you ever done it? Any but kind of like kind of kind of like you. I've dabbled and any time.
00:53:08
Speaker
I feel like i just I like outsourcing a lot of the dialogue and the the world building to things that have actually happened. And I'm just like kind of aggregating all this stuff from stuff that has actually happened. I have no faith in my imagination when it comes to that stuff and making like real cracking dialogue. and stuff like that. like yeah you know what it like that's That's kind of how I feel. and And often when I've written some fiction, especially if it starts to get close to who close to me, I'm like, well why don't I just make this nonfiction? And right you know i just I will start fiction, and it just i it starts slouching towards nonfiction. And I'm just like, OK, well, here we are. like I tried to novelize this um ah this baseball memoir that i that I wrote that's in the drawer.
00:53:57
Speaker
And as I was retyping the entire manuscript, it just basically just stayed it stayed nonfiction. it just it As much as I tried to fictionalize it, it would just remain nonfiction. Like, ah, all right, well, this is the lane I'm in. I might as well not. not ah Yeah, exactly. you know I think there's also such a motivation with nonfiction. like I'll find a story or I'll find a person or a relationship, a movement, and think,
00:54:23
Speaker
Oh, I really want to talk to people about this. I would love it like a book about this. So I'm going to try and write one, you know, for myself and other interested people. And nothing from my imagination has come close to making me think that like all people need to know about. Yeah. I really don't. Yeah. And another thing ah too is, and this is sounds this is sound really weird, but like when I write fiction it just feels too fake. i I want it to be grounded in things that are verifiably true because that really lights me up. and like When I read a really great magazine story or a great essay that, like a like maybe a personal or reported essay that has first person narration but it really looks more outward.
00:55:02
Speaker
And I'm like, oh wow, this the fact that this happened and it's being filtered through like a real, I don't know, just grounded in actual reality, in fact, to me, that just lights me up in a way. and But I love fiction because I'll read fiction and be like, oh, I see what they're doing there. In what ways might might I be able to pull that off?
00:55:22
Speaker
by interviewing the right people, finding the right people, intersecting with them at a moment of action and conflict. to yeah i just It lights me up in a way that it doesn't feel contrived. like I'm like, oh, wow, that that happened, and that's part of the juice for me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, now I agree. I like it. Awesome, Stephanie. this is This is great. I'm so glad we got to talk again on the mics about ah your wonderful new book. And ah yeah, just thanks for carving out the time and for coming back on the show.
00:55:52
Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. I really, I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
00:55:59
Speaker
Sweet. Awesome. Thanks to Stephanie and thanks to you kind listener. Name of the book again is the icon and the idealist Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the rivalry that brought birth control to America. Thanks also to the power of narrative conference for promotional support.
00:56:17
Speaker
visit calmbeyond.bu.edu, you know, find the Power of Narrative Conference tab. You know how to use the internet, a mouse, a cursor, and use the CNF 15 code for 15% off your registration fee. And hey, maybe consider ordering a copy or two or three or four or five of The Front Runner.
00:56:41
Speaker
Which brings us to the end of the year. This is the final podcast of 2024, which is crazy. It's fucking crazy. I don't know what can be said about 2024. The year started with a really a mad dash toward finishing the front runner.
00:56:57
Speaker
initial deadline being April 15th. Then it took the better part of seven months to shape it into its current final form. It went from a draft of 160,000 words to 105,000. That was six for six with people I want to blurb the book. I got a couple Paltzer prize winners, you know, all of them bestsellers, just titans of the genre.
00:57:19
Speaker
All of them previous guests on the show, a part of this growing community of brilliant non-fiction writers, past, present, and future, all riff about asking for blurbs another time and how I think I was effective in doing it. So what were some of the key lessons from the Prefontaine book? Like, you know, what's the game tape?
00:57:41
Speaker
telling telling me about this book so I can be better prepared for the next one, to make the process better, to write a better book, subjective as that is. And I'm not sure to what extent this is wholly fleshed out, this is just something that kind of came to the top of my mind, but I imagine there will be other threads or lessons to to pull on. But in writing this little script, this is what kind of came to mind. I think I could have been a little more rigorous with making phone calls. I conducted hundreds of interviews and placed many more calls, but I can't shake the feeling I could have done more. I'm still confused about how best to find the shape of the thing. yeah Ian O'Connor said on the show, you know he finds the shape of his book through the interviewing process.
00:58:29
Speaker
you know I found the shape of this pre-Fontaine book through the archives as the most rigorously covered material proved to be the most significant tentpole moments of the book. you know And then I drilled down on the people involved in those moments, ancillary people, not just the big names, to bring more detail to the forefront.
00:58:49
Speaker
yeah How do you find the arc? What is the story you're hoping to tell? it it you know Is that the starting point, or does that reveal itself through the reporting? and I learned you need to make assertions. You need to be confident in pointing out what matters. howard him you in Even not necessarily using the first person, but having the assertion of a first person narrator, even though that pronoun doesn't come in. You very much know what I'm telling you is important.
00:59:20
Speaker
You need to be confident in pointing out what matters, how it informs the biography you're looking to tell. That's not speculating or putting thoughts into their head, but you can call out a figure if they're being a dick, or and know if you've read thousands of articles and conducted hundreds of interview interviews, you can be certain You're somewhat of an expert. but You might even know the person better than many because you've triangulated it from so many sources. Everyone has a slice of that person. And the biographer, by speaking with so many people, you know, assembles the deconstructed life into something cogent.
00:59:56
Speaker
You know, something I regret, and i I knew it was happening in the moment, but was powerless to steer the cruise ship of my mind, man, was this idea of not having enough time to to do it. You know, I desperately wanted six more months or a year. I just didn't have the time.
01:00:12
Speaker
you know Sure, I had plenty. ah you know Sure, like I did have a contracted timeline. and But had I not fretted about it, just kind of like, okay, you're dealing with a shorter runway than you, than's ideal, what are you gonna do about it? I think I could've accomplished more. I could've bought access to an extra newspaper archive that I just neglected. i just It just missed my attention. i just I'm upset that I missed this one particular Oregonian archive.
01:00:42
Speaker
And I could have maybe found that extra bit of seasoning that elevates the entire dish. you know I wish I had done a bit more in-person things. yeah I made only one like true reporting trip to kuise bay though i've been to kuise bay a bunch of times i just but want only one true reporting trip to to meet with a oh a woman, Fran Worthen, who drove me around town, drove me around the running routes. um but you know And I did stand on the track and I tried to imagine the scene.
01:01:11
Speaker
you know Above all, I wish I had a clearer sense of the story I wanted to tell from the start. To this day, I'm not entirely sure I nailed it. you know What's the lens through which we're reexamining his life? These were questions that were posed at the very outset of the book proposal process, and I didn't have an answer that was, um let's lay out a detailed view of his life and let the reader feel the vibrancy of this life shortchanged by one bad decision.
01:01:38
Speaker
So much of his life and his appeal can't be articulated. So many people have tried and they just can't. It just was. He looms over track and field the way Michael Jordan looms over the NBA or Tiger Woods looms over golf.
01:01:52
Speaker
you know It's timing, it's luck, and it can never be rebottled. Every sport tries to recapture the magic of those figures who fundamentally change the course of the sport. Fact is, there will never be another Michael Jordan or Woods or Prefontaine. The sport was ready to change, and they came of age at ah at a time of change that was more cosmic than contrived.
01:02:18
Speaker
yeah know These are some of my talking points that I didn't necessarily like thread into the epilogue. well Well, they kind of did, but a sport will drive itself insane trying to find the next thing. And all that does is devalue everyone who comes after. So all we can do is celebrate what was through rigor and ri research and showing, not telling just why it is they tower so tall.
01:02:43
Speaker
So, man, 2025 is gonna be fucking insane. Like, truly insane. And ah you're along the ride. You're coming along the ride, man, whether you like it or not. So stay wild, see ya in efforts. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.