Mary Dennett - Sex Education Pamphlet and Trial Under The Comstock Act

Sex Education Pamphlet and Trial Under The Comstock Act

Mary Ware Dennett captured the attention of the public and media for her sex education pamphlet, “The Sex Side of Life.” Dennett wrote it in 1915 to educate her sons, because she was unable to find any adequate books on the subject. Many of the books on sex either contained inaccurate information or used fear and shame tactics to dissuade the youth from having sex. Therefore, she decided to write her own explanation using research and interviews with doctors. She passed the writing on to her friends with adolescent children. In 1918, it was published in Medical Review of Reviews, and a year later it was published as a pamphlet.

The pamphlet was twenty-four pages long. Dennett used scientific discussion of sex while also including the emotion side of sex relations. The pamphlet covered controversial topics including masturbation, sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and support for the use of birth control. Her views were considered radical for this time, because she was not promoting abstinence.

After fours years of being in circulation, the Post Office informed Dennett that the pamphlet was obscene, and therefore it was banned from being mailed under the Comstock Act. She continued to mail out the pamphlet after the Post Office ignored her inquiries of what parts of the pamphlet were obscene.

In 1928, she was indicted under the Comstock law for distributing her pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life, which explained human reproduction to adolescents. H. L. Mencken observed the proceedings. He had briefly praised Mrs. Dennett’s book in the May 1926 issue of The American Mercury, and took a sympathetic interest in her legal troubles:

There is, of course, nothing indecent in that pamphlet; on the contrary, it is notably prudent and clean. The author wrote it for the instruction of her own young sons, and its superiority to most other such literature was so apparent that it was reprinted at length in a medical journal, and circulated in great numbers by clergymen, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, social workers, and other such chemically pure persons. This went on for four and a half years. Then Mrs. Dennett, who is engaged in birth-control propaganda, began annoying the wowsers of the U.S. Post Office by exposing their gross stupidity and disingenuousness in the enforcement of the Comstock Act, and they retorted by barring her pamphlet from the mails. No plainer case of the use of an idiotic law to punish an inconvenient critic could be imagined.

Eventually a safe jury was empanelled by the prosecution “and Mrs. Dennett was quickly convicted, and Judge Burrows fined her $300. . . . Six months later the Circuit Court of Appeals, consisting of Swan, Augustus Noble Hand and Chase, JJ, set aside the verdict, decided that the pamphlet was so obviously ‘not’ obscene that ‘no case was made for submission to the jury,’ and ordered Mrs. Dennett released from her bond.”

When the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned her conviction in 1930, the Court set a legal precedent that took intent into account in the evaluation of obscenity. Dennett's trial was part of a series of rulings that culminated in the 1936 ruling in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, which exempted birth control information and materials used by physicians from obscenity laws.