"The Sex Side of Life": The Obscenity Case of Mary Ware Dennett

Abstract

In the late afternoon of April 23, 1929, Mary Ware Dennett sat in a Brooklyn, New York, courtroom awaiting the verdict in her celebrated obscenity trial. After deliberating for forty-two minutes, twelve middle-aged family men returned with their decision. As jury foreman Charles T. Cronin rose to speak, one of Dennett's sons, seated next to her, reached over and pressed her hand. Cronin announced that the jury had found the birth control and sex education advocate guilty of sending obscene material through the mail. Facing the possibility of a five-thousand-dollar fine, five years in jail, or both, a somewhat shaken Dennett faced newspaper reporters as she left the courtroom. is hard to go on with this sort of thing, she said. I never thought it would lead to this. But the next day, while still awaiting Judge Warren B. Burrows's sentence, Mary Dennett sounded defiant, proclaiming she would pay no fine, however small: If a few federal officials want to use their power to penalize me for my work for the young people of this country, they must bear the shame of a jail sentence. It is the government which is disgraced, not I.' The course of events that had brought Mary Dennett to the Federal District Court in Brooklyn commanded the attention of many Americans in the spring of 1929. Stories about the fifty-three-year-old grandmother appeared in most newspapers in the country. It seemed nearly everyone knew about the travail of Mary Ware Dennett. What they did not know at that point, however, was that United States v. Dennett would ultimately prove to be a landmark censorship case that paved the way for dramatic changes in the legal definition of obscenity2