With: Stephanie Gorton and Sharon Spaulding

Event Fee: by donation

Event Size: 50 / family friendly

In the early 1900s two women battled for leadership of the emerging reproductive rights movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. In her new book, The Icon and the Idealist, Stephanie Gorton deftly recreates the world in which each woman struggled to bring the topic of sex out from the shadows of Victorian morality shift cultural norms, and pass legislation to provide access to contraceptive information. With Dennett's ties to Mill Hollow, and women's rights under attack today, this will be a lively discussion of Gorton's book.

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), a finalist for the Plutarch Award for biography, and Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (2020), a finalist for the Sperber Prize for journalism biography. Lebanese American by birth, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Sharon Spaulding curates the Mary Ware Dennett family archive and is at work on a novel about her life. Her essays about Dennett have been published in Smithsonian, Ms., and New Hampshire magazines. Sharon also publishes a newsletter, Women Make History: Stories we should have learned in school about mostly forgotten women who have achieved remarkable things. When not in Alstead during the summers, she lives outside Salt Lake City with her husband, Carl, and their dog, Hank.