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Pleas and sees apply.

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

I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political Gab Fest. We are here to talk

about the icon and the idealist by Stephanie Gorton. 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-D 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.

...