In our first event of 2025, we’ll host authors Stephanie Gorton and Carrie Hagen as they discuss Gorton’s book The Icon and The Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly called this book “a brilliant account [...] a fine-grained and propulsive examination of the rivals’ careers." Click here to register for this riveting discussion on Eventbrite and read on for more details.
About the Event: In the United States in the 1910s, the birth control movement was born, and two leaders emerged: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. Sanger would go on to found Planned Parenthood, while Dennett’s name has largely faded from public awareness. Each held a radically different vision for what reproductive autonomy and birth control access should look like in America. Few are aware of the fierce personal and political rivalry that played out between Sanger and Dennett over decades—a battle that had a profound impact on the lives of American women.
In this conversation, reading, and Q&A, Stephanie Gorton and Carrie Hagen will time-travel back to the era of these two fascinating women and a country rocked by changing social norms, the Great Depression, and a fervor for eugenics. They'll explore how and why Sanger and Dennett came to activism, the origins of the clash between them, and the ways in which their missteps and breakthroughs have reverberated across American society for generations.
You can order The Icon and the Idealist here. We will have copies for sale at the event, too, where Stephanie will sign. $10 from each copy of The Icon and the Idealist sold at the event will go to the Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania (AFL-PA).
Stephanie Gorton is the author of The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America (2024) and Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (2020), which was a finalist for the Sperber Prize for journalism biography. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily, among other publications. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute for Global Good and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Lebanese-American by birth, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island. You can find her on Instagram at @sdgorton.
Carrie Hagen is a writer based in Philadelphia. She is a contributor to Smithsonian magazine’s digital publication and an award-winning feature and business writer for the regional magazine Mountain Home. Kirkus Reviews called We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping that Changed America, Hagen’s first book of narrative nonfiction, “a slice of American crime history both instructive and tragically entertaining.” Hagen’s other books include the memoir The Other Side of This Life, for which she served as ghostwriter, and The Muralist Of Matter Deep and Dangerous, a new crime thriller. Her current project is The Vigilance Network, the true story of Philadelphia’s interracial antebellum abolitionists, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press later in 2025. She is on Instagram at @carriehagencopy.