In 1915, Mary Ware Dennett wrote a significant yet little known sex education manual for her two sons entitled The Sex Side of Life, an Explanation for Young People. In it, she defied convention by expressing her radical views about sexuality, first to her own two sons and later to the public. Dennett offered forthright and specific information about the physiological, scientific, moral and emotional aspects of sexuality at a time when sex education and sex educators, if they existed at all, typically attempted to repress or control sexuality, and education about it, rather than to inform.
Dennett’s manual for her sons was copied and passed along to her son’s friends and to the children of her friends and colleagues. It was published in The Medical Review of Reviews in 1918 and thousands of copies were distributed to institutions and individuals worldwide before she was arrested for sending obscenity through the mail in 1929. Fourteen years after publication, her arrest became a cause célèbre.
Dennett’s unequivocal conviction that all members of a truly democratic society have the right to know was quite radical in its time. It is still radical today because implicit in that viewpoint is the belief that with knowledge, ordinary people have the ability and the responsibility to chart their own course in life without control from those on top of the social hierarchy. Freire said, “A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust.” Dennett was a true humanist, trusting in the ability of ordinary people.
In her role as founder, leader and activist in many of the central reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dennett demonstrated her commitment to the diffusion of knowledge for all which she considered to be a democratic value that supported individual freedom, responsibility and personal fulfillment. Nearly a century after publication, the lessons that surfaced from Dennett’s transition from the private to the public side of life are still valid. The ability to actively engage with the world is critical for empowerment and active engagement can only occur with complete access to knowledge and information. Sexuality is part of the knowledge and comprehensive information that is necessary to experience The Dynamic Side of Life.
Dennett’s life story is particularly relevant today, as reproductive freedom and individual agency is again serving as a lightning rod for polarization, just as it did in the early twentieth century.