Way back when, I married one of Mary Ware Dennett’s great-grandsons.

“Mary who?” you might ask, as I did. Mary Ware Dennett. One of the most pivotal
and unsung leaders of the early women’s rights movement.

Mary was born in 1872 and died in 1947, more than thirty years before I met her son, my husband’s grandfather. Carl Dennett was in his early 80s, and he and his wife lived beside a small New Hampshire lake in a white, colonial house built in 1788. Her presence loomed large. Her drawings hung on the walls. Her books, both those she had owned and those she had authored, lined the shelves. In the evening, after one too many gin martinis, Mary’s son would sit at the old, out-of-tune, upright piano and play honky tonk music. His white, wispy hair seemed to dance along, and he still had the charming, bad-boy mystique of an early flyboy who would land planes in the winter on the frozen lake beyond the back door. When his fingers grew tired, he’d flop into a delapidated wing-back chair and tell stories. No matter how those stories began, they always meandered back to his mother—what she had done to help win the vote for women, and how she had taken on the U.S. government in the early 20th century to legalize birth control.

In the attic of this ancient house, brown bats hung from hand-hewn rafters during the day directly above old steamer trunks filled with Mary’s papers and journals. Every time we visited, I’d risk irritating the bats to dip my hands into those trunks to read her letters. Fragile papers, yellowed with time, recorded her many achievements, sacrifices, and unrelenting courage. Yet, beyond the Dennett clan, no one knew her name. Some day, I thought, I’ll return to those trunks and share her story. Life, however, took me in different directions, until years later, I found I had meandered back to Mary.

I began researching Mary’s life and gathering up her papers from other Dennett descendants. Many of those papers were donated to the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, but not all. The most private letters are still in the family’s possession.

Along the way, I came across mentions of other women whose names and stories were a mystery to me. I’d scribble them down on note pads and stash them in drawers or pin them to my bulletin board, figuring that one day, I’d search for their stories, too.

In 2020, I was working on a manuscript about Mary when my book coach, Joey Garcia, suggested I write a newsletter about women like Mary­­—unsung heroes who had achieved so much, and yet, were mostly forgotten. I began researching the names I had saved and soon had amassed a second treasure trove of history-making, life-changing, ground-breaking, courageous women—role models—whose stories deserved to be shared and passed down.

The first issue of my newsletter, Women Make History: Stories We Should Have Learned in School, was published in November 2020, and my first book, a compilation of these stories, is available February 28, 2026.

As for Mary, I’m working on a manuscript about this amazing woman who continues to inspire me to keep going.  Stay tuned…

— Sharon