Facts of Life

WHO'S OBSCENE?--Mary Ware Dennett --Vanguard ($2.50).

Says Section 211 of the U. S. Penal Code: "Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character ... is hereby declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails. . . ." In April, 1929, Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett was convicted in a Brooklyn Federal court under this statute. She had written and sent through the mails a pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life. Last month her conviction was reversed in the Appellate Division, U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In this book she gives the history of her case, reprints the offending pamphlet, with its diagrams, in full. Said the Court of Appeals: the pamphlet is "an accurate exposition of the relevant facts of the sex side of life in decent language and in manifestly serious and disinterested spirit. . . ."

Mrs. Dennett is the mother of two sons. When they were 10 and 14 she wanted to teach them the facts of sex but found no adequate, satisfactory book on the subject. She wrote a pamphlet herself. Friends heard of it,'read it, admired it; the Medical Review of Reviews published it (1918). In 1919 Author Dennett republished the article separately; in 1922 the Post Office declared it unmailable; in 1928 a Washington (D. C.) member of the D. A. R. found her daughter reading it. She complained to a Post Office inspector, one C. E. Dunbar, who wrote for a copy under an assumed name, received it by mail, instituted proceedings against the author. By then 25,000 copies had been sold.

The Pamphlet describes, simply but clearly, fairly completely the phenomena of adolescence, reproduction; minimizes the ill effects of masturbation; gives diagrams, with non-technical explanations, of the masculine, feminine, generative organs. The Sex Side of Life differs from other books on the subject in its brevity, clearness, completeness, lack of hokum.

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