Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of November.

I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest.

We are here to talk about the icon and the idealist by Stephanie Gordon.

Hey, Stephanie.

Hi, Emily.

Thanks for having me.

So glad you're here.

So your book tells the story of two women who helped bring

birth control to the United States. One of them you've probably heard of, Margaret Sanger,

who opened the first birth control clinics in the U.S. and started Planned Parenthood Federation of

America. And the second main character in your book, Stephanie, is Mary Ware

Dennett, whose trial in 1929 for writing a booklet about sex education was a landmark

victory for free speech and civil rights. And Dennett also very much for years worked on making

birth control legal.

So just to set this up a little bit more, you write that through the hands of Dennett and Sanger,

contraception went from radical fringe to the pages of the ladies' home journal and fortune.

From esoteric to mainstream, from the sawdust floor bars of Greenwich Village to the

tea tables of Connecticut and beyond.

Birth control became not just decent, but emblematic of safety, responsibility, and common sense.

And we should locate this in time.

The period in which this transition takes place is the first few decades of the 20th century.

So we're going back 100 years or more. Can you start us off by painting portraits of these two

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