Mary Ware Dennett

When women won the right to vote in the United States, Mary Ware Dennett moved on to champion another of her favorite causes: the right to educate people (and even adolescents) about their sexuality. Her arrest in 1928 for sending obscenity through the mail in the form of a pamphlet describing sex as a joyful and natural part of life disregarded the fact that the essay it contained was originally printed in a medical periodical. Nevertheless, her subsequent conviction roused great public outrage and the ACLU got her conviction overturned on appeal. So we can thank an in-your-face woman for access to sex education. Hardly surprising.