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Forgotten Foremothers

Profiles of lesser-known heroines in the fight for women’s right

On Sept. 22, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services for the United States, stood behind a podium bearing the U.S. Presidential Seal to announce, “Today, the FDA will issue a physician’s notice about the risk of acetaminophen during pregnancy and begin the process to institute a safety label change.” 

 

As ever, President Donald Trump was blunter. “Don’t use Tylenol,” he advised pregnant women. If they experienced pain, they should “tough it out,” he said.

 

This announcement was a continuation of the secretary’s decades-long campaign against vaccines and medical science in general, under the entirely disproven theories that vaccines in childhood or acetaminophen taken during pregnancy leads to autism. 

 

Jerome Adams worked at Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie, Ind., before he began teaching at Indiana University, and then later served as the Indiana State Department of Health commissioner during the tenure of Governor Mike Pence. He was appointed as the Surgeon General during the first Trump administration and had this to say on social media about the press conference: “Yesterday 5 powerful men stood together in the W[hite] H[ouse] and shamed: Pregnant women, told to ‘tough it out’ through pain; Moms of autistic kids, blamed for their child’s condition; Autistic people, called broken & in need of fixing. Can we all be kinder and less stigmatizing?”

 

“[A]t an October Cabinet meeting, Trump nodded approvingly as Kennedy rambled on about a video he said he saw in which a woman was ‘gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta’ to spite the president. (A fetus grows in the uterus, not the placenta),” wrote Irin Carmon in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. “Opposition to Trump, Kennedy marveled, ‘could overwhelm millions of years of maternal instinct to put her baby at risk.’ He added that ‘anyone who takes this stuff during pregnancy unless they have to is irresponsible.’”

 

This announcement came just months after the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al., a ruling that argued there was no Constitutional “right to abortion,” and that states should decide for themselves. This ruling activated “trigger laws” in multiple states, whereby abortion—the deliberate termination of a pregnancy—was immediately banned, often with no exceptions for the life of the mother or viability of the fetus. 

 

The landscape of reproductive healthcare prior to the Roe v. Wade ruling is well-documented. We know, and the justices knew, too, the chaos into which they’d thrown women once again. From the experiences of the Army of Three and Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías, we have records of what happens to the lives of women whose bodies become the jurisdiction of the state. 

 

Examining cases where mothers in need of healthcare instead faced criminal charges, Irin wrote of the cruelty that occurs “when we treat pregnancy not as a human experience deserving of support, but as a crime scene; when we view the pregnant not as people but as vessels that must be monitored, controlled and punished. ... While offering women only prohibitions, both Trump and RFK have urged women to have more children; RFK called the birth rate a ‘national emergency.’ But who, given the choice—increasingly elusive—would rush to have more babies when you get treated as a vector for harm rather than a human being?”

____

 

Mary Coffin Ware was born in Massachusetts on April 4, 1872, to progressive-minded parents Livonia “Vonie” and George Ware. Vonie and George, unlike many of their contemporaries, married for sincere love and waited a full five years into their marriage before having children.

 

“The notion of romantic love cushioned harder truths,” wrote Constance M. Chen in her biography of Mary. “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.”

Mary was Vonie and George’s second child. She followed brother William Bradford, and was followed by younger brother Richard who died in infancy, and then little sister Clara

 

In 1882, when Mary was just 10 years old, her father George died of cancer. This threw mother Vonie into the unstable financial straits of single motherhood in an era when high-paying jobs for women were few. Far from observing a helpless mother trapped in a system, Mary had a mother well-versed in the societal structures that held her back. She had been advocating for independence for women long before she needed it for herself.

 

Widow and children moved to Boston to be nearer to helpful family, and Vonie soon struck upon a business venture: She would plan and escort young women on European vacations. Constance reported, “At $1,200 per student, plus $200 for an optional extra month, the European tours provided the fatherless family with a reasonable income.” Naturally, this also meant Vonie was frequently away from home, leaving her children in the care family such as Aunt Lucia Ames Mead, Vonie’s sister and herself a feminist and writer.

“A prominent social reformer, Lucia was Mary’s mentor,” Constance said. “Lucia planted in Mary the seed of civic consciousness; Mary would turn to her aunt for advice and support throughout her life.” Lucia praised and cultivated Mary’s passion and intelligence. In 1887, 15-year-old Mary left Boston and moved some 100 miles inland to Northampton to attend Miss Capen’s school for girls, a learning institution founded by Bessie Capen, a professor of Chemistry, who was only the second woman in history to have been admitted to MIT.

 

Constance wrote, “Mary developed what she would consider her life’s work: ‘a mixture of rebellion and beauty-hunger.’ Graduating from high school in 1891, Mary enrolled in the School of Art and Design at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.”

 

It was in college that Mary became involved in the Arts and Crafts Movement. In a push and pull that might sound familiar to readers in 2026, many people like Mary were critical of the mechanization of industry that was taking jobs from human beings and giving them to machines. According to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Arts and Crafts designers sought to improve standards of decorative design, believed to have been debased by mechanization, and to create environments in which beautiful and fine workmanship governed.”

 

Constance quoted some of Mary’s opinions on art and industry. “I would not have you think I undervalue the wonders of machinery, but machinery should be a servant to man, not make man its slave and attendant,” young Mary said.

 

After college in 1894, Mary became a teacher at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Art. She put this philosophy into practice into her classroom, including arranging trips to The Met so her students could see famous works with their own eyes. “All great art of the world has been the art of the people,” Mary said, “and the trouble with our time is that what art we have is confined to a very small class of people.” She, and the others of the Arts and Crafts Movement, endeavored to bring art to everyone.

In the following years, Mary left the Society and the small family moved from the farm to an attractive home elsewhere in Framingham. In 1904, Hartley, a designer and architect, began work on a long project. He’d been commissioned to design and build a home for Dr. Heman Lincoln Chase and his wife and Margaret Chase. In May of 1905, Mary gave birth to a third child, Devon, and again, “the mother emerged in gruesome shape.” Doctors told Mary and Hartley that they should stop having children. One more pregnancy, they asserted, would undoubtedly kill Mary. But as Constance pointed out, “not one doctor, however, offered the slightest information about birth control.”

 

This lack of birth control knowledge had already been burdening their marriage. “I was utterly ignorant of the control of conception, as was my husband also,” Mary said later. “We never had anything like normal relations, having approximated almost complete abstinence in the endeavor to space our babies.” Appleton and Devon had been “wanted, but both accidental.”

 

Both Mary and the law she would challenge were born around the same time. In 1872 and 1873, Congress enacted what is commonly known as the Comstock Act. It was a postal statute meant to limit the mailing of “obscene materials,” but its moralistic tone proved useful to opponents of reproductive health care. Section 148 reads, in part, “…no obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of indecent character or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion...shall be carried in the mail...”

 

While specifying the law pertained to mailing, arrests and sentencings on these grounds, called “Comstockery,” nevertheless had a chilling effect in the examination room—or perhaps just as likely, doctors who personally opposed contraception and abortion now had a law backing them up. “[D]ue to Comstock’s ceaseless crusade, large sectors of the medical profession were against artificial methods of limiting fertility,” Constance wrote. “Birth-control information had been driven virtually underground.”

 

Mary had kept at her professional artwork through much of her pregnancy and recovery for Carleton and Appleton. This time, after Devon’s birth, she couldn’t. She was simply too ill. “It was agonizing,” Constance said. “The nature of her symptoms was not discussed. It was considered ‘impolite’ in those days.”

 

In December of 1906, Mary was diagnosed with an internal laceration caused during Devon’s delivery and somehow missed by her local doctors. The cure would require surgery. 

 

Over the years, both Mary and Hartley had grown closer to the Chases, visiting with them socially in addition to the long hours required of designing and building a home. Margaret, especially, became infatuated with Hartley. Mary, after years of “agonizing” pain, went to New York City to have her surgery in May 1907. She was in the hospital for three weeks. During that time, Margaret Chase essentially, slowly, moved into the Dennett home. In June, when Mary was ready to return home, both Hartley and Margaret came to get her. And even though Mary was back, Margaret refused to move out. 

 

Mary initially responded to this with remarkable politeness. She didn’t want to seem like a jealous wife. Hartley spent more and more time with Margaret, all the while trying to convince Mary to accept a situation that could, in today’s language, be considered an open marriage or even polyamory. However, such relationships demand honest communication and sincere consent—and certainly not to be sprung upon one of the members upon her return from life-saving surgery.

 

Mary tried to talk to him. Her friends, her mother Vonie, her Aunt Lucia, and even her lawyer tried talking to him, but Hartley remained devoted to his “spiritual” love of Margaret and insisted Mary was being intractable. (Margaret’s husband seems to have been more easily persuaded.)

 

Mary “refused to pine away at home for a wandering husband,” Constance wrote. “Turning to her women friends, she began to cultivate an interest in feminism to take her mind off her marital troubles.” 

 

Of feminism Mary said, “Women are people. That is perhaps the shortest possible explanation of what feminism stands for. ... Feminism is for women the same idea and the same program that men would surely adopt, if it so happened that men for centuries had been recognized by the world for the most part as someone’s husband, someone’s father, someone’s son, or someone’s lover... they would also insist most emphatically that these interests and obligations are not the whole of life, and should not represent man’s only claim to recognition.”

 

Mary’s patience finally ran out when Hartley’s parenting and Margaret’s influence began to upset 9-year-old Carleton and 4-year-old Devon. In 1909, Mary sought custody. Questioned on the stand, Hartley insisted no one could judge him, but the court did anyway. Mary was given full custody. 

 

To pay her bills, Mary took a job with the Massachusetts Suffrage Association. In August of 1909, she “organized a ‘Votes for Women’ trip to gather signatures for a statewide petition,” Constance said. “The suffragists reached an average of seven hundred people a day, garnering a great deal of newspaper publicity.” Her work also garnered the attention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. They offered her a job. When single-mother Mary hesitated, they told her to think of the cause. 

 

In April 1910, she moved to New York City to work full time for NAWSA. Carleton and Devon lived with her close friend Kate and visited their mother’s tiny apartment in New York as often as they could. “Although unrecognized today, Mary Ware Dennett was the turning point for NAWSA,” Constance argued. “After her arrival, the reach at headquarters grew massively.” Mary also analyzed the organization for inefficiency and ineffectiveness, solidly making her case for both firings and fundings. Like any progressive coalition, there was internal debate and disagreement. Alignment on a goal did not mean agreement on how to get there.

 

By 1912, Mary felt disillusioned with NAWSA and was considering resignation. “She wanted suffragists to ‘branch out...into all the forms of radicalism which have any connection with citizenship and personal freedom,’” Constance wrote. But the suffragists, in Mary’s words, were “conservative and unconstructive and they have successfully suppressed anything that wasn’t.”

 

When the more strident Alice Paul became chair of the congressional committee of NAWSA, Mary saw some hope. She accepted the position of executive secretary. This did not end her internal criticisms and frustrations with the organization, but she remained working for the cause of suffrage from within its ranks. 

As the divorce with Hartley was finalized in Mary’s favor, she also finally, for good, resigned from NAWSA as her disagreements with their methods remained unresolvable. “Blind to her own faults and shortcomings, her entire attitude was reminiscent of Hartley’s tone toward her,” Constance said. “It would take the return of Carrie Catt, the campaigns of Alice Paul, and the leadership of other notable women to make full woman suffrage a reality. Now, however, Mary Ware Dennett was on her own. A divorced mother of two without alimony or child support, she was out of a job.”

 

Mary found refuge in the radical and bohemian community of Greenwich Village. She began freelance work with a variety of organizations in line with her values, including the Twilight Sleep Association, a group she helped found that promoted the use of anesthesia to ease the pain of childbirth; and the Women’s Peace Party, a response to U.S. involvement in World War I. Mary also found herself in social circles with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and other advocates for birth control. With her own difficult pregnancies, Mary was an eager participant in these movements.

 

She spent hours in libraries reading all the existing sex education books written for children and was appalled at the authors’ views on women and sex. One, she noted, “talks as if women were made to be taken care of, and not as if they were partners in life with men.” All of them, too, spoke as if the sex act itself was “wrong,” or something “to be ashamed of.” Mary disagreed. 

 

In 1915, she wrote “The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People,” specifically for the audience of her own boys, 15-year-old Carleton and 10-year-old Devon. Using plain language and proper scientific terminology, she described reproductive organs, intercourse, and menstruation. 

“You will notice that the woman has separate tubes for the urine (waste water) and the sex function,” Mary wrote, referencing one of the pamphlet’s medical diagrams, “but the man uses the same tube for both; that is, in the woman the bladder which holds the urine is emptied by a separate tube, the urethra, while in the man the urethra not only empties the bladder, but also carries the semen.”

 

She was not without her own moralizing, of course. Masturbation was “self-abuse.” She insisted that love was a necessary element of intercourse, and she therefore condemned any form of sex work. Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, did she allow space for asexuality or aromanticism. Her opinions were not unusual at the time, but sharing them in print certainly was.

 

That same year, Mary and like-minded friends founded the National Birth Control League. At their inaugural meeting, she acknowledged that, like the suffrage movement, this movement, too, had its disagreements, yet they had “marked unanimity on one point, that is, the absolute conviction of each individual that covert information about birth control should be freely available.” 

 

In her book “The Sex Side of Life:” Mary Ware Dennett’s Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education, Constance highlighted how Mary’s approach differed from her contemporary, the more famous Margaret Sanger:

She had, despite her intentions, become a leader in the birth-control movement. Letters poured in from those desperate for her help. “Mostly coming from poor uneducated women, the letters begged for the ‘secret’ to smaller families. Sick and weakened from a lifetime of serial pregnancies, these women were desperate to stem the unrelenting tide of births. Some of these women had ten, eleven, twelve children—and little means of financial support,” Constance wrote. 

 

Unlike the Army of Three, who would receive similarly desperate letters 40 years later, Mary was unwilling to run afoul of the existing laws. “It is absolutely illegal to mail any contraceptive information anywhere in the country,” she would reply. “Of course the laws are broken all the time. That is why it is time to repeal it. I hope you will help us accomplish it.” Privately, she would lament her organization’s failure to change those laws and leaving “those worried souls dangling.”

 

Since she’d first written “The Sex Side of Life,” some of Mary’s opinions had softened. Masturbation’s primary harm was the shame placed on it, not the act itself, she said. Also, when asked, she cast little shame upon homosexuality, or at least lesbianism, so long as it wasn’t permanent. She still viewed heterosexual intercourse with a partner to be the highest form of physical pleasure, and that all sex should be “purposeful.”

 

On Jan. 2, 1929, Mary, now 56, received notification that she had been indicted for “an alleged violation of the United States Criminal Code.” Fully 14 years later, someone had complained about the subject matter of “The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People.”

 

She appeared at the courthouse when summoned and sat alongside the poor, the starving, and the still sobering up. She noted that the “adjoining toilet facilities were unspeakably horrid—no sex discrimination there—and conditions of ancient dirt were so bad that a description of them would be, in the language of the indictment, ‘unfit to be spread on the records of the Honorable Court.” She noted, too, the “irony of being held on the charge of being ‘filthy,’ in a place that was positively nasty.”

 

Months of postponements, courtroom appearances, witness gathering, and jury selection followed. On April 23, 1929, the trial began and Mary’s name was once again in the newspapers.

 

U.S. District Attorney James E. Wilkinson presented the case of a Mrs. Carl A. Miles, who had made the complaint about “The Sex Side of Life,” while Morris Ernst, a lawyer with the ACLU, volunteered to represent Mary. James’s entire argument would proceed without witnesses, not even Mrs. Miles. Instead, he claimed the pamphlet itself would be his only evidence. As Constance described, he gave a “dramatic reading of his ‘evidence,’ in a ‘droning low tone, except in those portions which he considered most “filthy.”’” Mary, he insisted, was a “corruptor of young minds!” He objected continuously, interrupting any witness testimony, including Mary’s, and frequently monologued to the jury with the judge’s consent. 

 

“And the author of this pamphlet even suggests that birth control will eventually be practiced,” he said. “Birth control!—hitting at the very foundation of government!...What will happen if our national standard falls so low, I ask? Where will our soldiers come from in our hour of need?”

 

For his part, Morris argued that the information in “The Sex Side of Life” was apparently not considered obscene by its vocal champions, which “ranged from conservative groups such as the YMCA and Union Theological Seminary to avant-garde intellectuals such as John Dewey and Havelock Ellis.” But despite this, the jury took only 42 minutes to return a guilty verdict.

 

“Sons See Mother Convicted for Work to Help The[m],” read a subhead in South Carolina’s Florence Morning News, a sample of the tone of much of the coverage. “Churches, Social and Child Welfare Heads Find No Harm.” The public outcry was immediate and widespread at seeing this “grandmother” convicted. The influential and powerful in Mary’s social circle spoke in her defense. (Ex-husband Hartley was in contact with his sons, primarily Devon, but had little to say about their mother’s situation).

 

Morris noted, as Constance said, “that never before had a pamphlet or book been accepted by a community for ten years, and then been attacked and suppressed by the courts.” He also did some investigating into the elusive Mrs. Carl A. Miles, who had brought the complaint. James had said she was actually herself representing a branch of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Members of DAR refuted the claim, and the story began to unravel. Investigative reporters hunted down the truth: There was no Mrs. Carl A. Miles. 

 

“Apparently,” Constance wrote, “the post office, in an effort to rid themselves of Dennett’s persistent activism, had completely fabricated a non-existent opponent.”

 

At this news, Mary became even more of a cause célèbre, and public opinion was fully on her side. Congressmen who had refused to take meetings, or reneged on support years earlier, now rushed to praise her in the media. The Mary Ware Dennett Defense Committee formed, and the appeal trial began on Jan. 15, 1930. Meanwhile, “The Sex Side of Life” had never been more in demand. Mary mailed them out, and sold them in bookstores. On March 30, a new decision was handed down: The guilty verdict was reversed. As the only evidence had been the content of pamphlet itself, the content was examined and determined to not be obscene. 

 

“‘The Sex Side of Life’ was eventually translated into fifteen languages,” Constance said, “and it went into twenty-three printings.” Mary would write more books and articles on sex education, and on birth control, though Margaret Sanger continued to target her for any of her work related to contraceptives. In 1931, Mary sent Margaret a letter that would receive no response. “Forget, please, that you have not liked me any too well,” she wrote. “I have never had any ambition or bent toward being a public character. You are that by force of personality and the course of events. I shall only be too glad to help you if you will rise to your present chance to be both big and true, and my help will be quiet in proportion as your stand is forthright and steadfast.” 

 

In her later years, Mary spent more time with her first love, Arts and Crafts, speaking on the topic in her radical feminist circles. As she entered her 60s, she moved in with son Devon. She was involved with as many activist organizations as ever—which kept her “a thorn in the side of Margaret Sanger,” Constance said. 

 

In 1945, 73-year-old Mary relocated again, this time to “a home for the elderly” in Valatie, two hours north of New York City. She and Hartley never reconciled, though both, privately, expressed regrets toward one another. She died on July 25, 1947, at age 75.

 

Sources:

“The Sex Side of Life:” Mary Ware Dennett’s Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education by Constance M. Chen

Wikipedia: Mary Dennett

AP News: “Trump’s ‘tough it out’ advice to expectant moms is the latest example of men opining on women’s pain” by Laurie Kellman

SupremeCourt.gov: Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al.

Los Angeles Times: The sinister message behind Trump telling pregnant women to ‘tough it out’ by Irin Carmon

Johns Hopkins University: Understanding the Evidence on Pregnancy, Tylenol, and Autism

Journal of the American Medical Association: 

Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children’s Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability

NIH: Expertise and the “new science” of eugenics; National Library of Medicine: Acetaminophen’s Role in Autism and ADHD: A Mitochondrial Perspective

Daily Gleaner – Feb. 18, 1913: Divorces Man Who “Loved All Women”

The Evening World – Oct. 7, 1912: American Parenthood From the Viewpoint of a Suffragette Mother

Williston Northampton School: Northampton School of Girls – And After

Five Colleges Compass: Bessie Capen, Professor of Chemistry, 1877-1880

The MET: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America

Medical Review of Reviews