A review by sunfishcakes
The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America by Stephanie Gorton

4.5

Really great. What I most appreciated was the contextualizing of the birth control movement in American history as a fundamentally feminist movement concerned with the welfare and agency of women*, especially working class women, but also undeniably enmeshed with the then popular and explicit movement of eugenics. Neither aspects cancel each other out but provide complexity to the historical moment that's still entrenched in current cultural attitudes and debates around birth control (and abortion).

Also, while the topics are handled with the necessary care, thought, and severity, there's a strain of gossip and petty intrigue (on the part of the figures involved, not the author) that I found compelling and humanizing

*By this I mainly mean cisgender women, but as Gorton points out (citing Donna Drucker), this is more to do with the historical category of women which conflates the ability to birth children with gender.