A book review on someone time should not forget, after-the-jump ….
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With yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing on the latest attempt to ban abortion, recently several books have focused on a largely forgotten figure in women’s reproductive rights, as noted in a Reason essay earlier this month:
Things have turned around for Anthony Comstock of late. The old anti-smut crusader, who defined the role of the professional censor, and whose obsessions blotted out the law of free speech for more than 40 years beginning in the 1870s, was all but forgotten by the mid-twentieth century. Now however, more than a century after his death, a bumper crop of books have appeared attesting to the old crusader's pivotal role in the history of freedom of speech and women's rights.
And one of those books is the subject of tonight’s effort — although a review in the NY Times accurately states that Amy Sohn’s The Man Who Hated Women is more about the eight women he targeted. Often gripping (albeit at times a bit dense) it still paints a photo of someone who claimed to “revere” women, yet as The Economist reviewer noted, “just didn’t trust women to think for themselves”.
Moving from rural Connecticut to NYC after his service in the Civil War (upset at the language he heard from other soldiers) he was reviled at the debauchery he claimed to see (which included everything from lottery tickets to medical books). A devout Congregationalist, he thought that a booklet about marital relations or an abortifacient powder was as indecent as an advertisement for a brothel. A pivotal moment was told by the author to Fresh Air host Terry Gross:
The real precipitant to his becoming an anti-smut, anti-vice activist was he had a co-worker at his dry goods store who told him that he had visited a prostitute and become diseased and corrupted. He became convinced that the reason this guy had gone to a prostitute was because he read dirty books. So he went to the store where the books were sold and called the police. And that was the beginning of his career as a vice hunter.
1873 was a critical year for him: as he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV) and also got Congress to pass the Comstock Law (signed by president Ulysses S. Grant) which made illegal the delivery or transportation of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material, as well as the distribution of any methods of birth control, or any information about venereal disease. Even more importantly, Comstock received a commission as a Special Agent of the U.S. Post Office, giving him the power to enforce his law.
And did he ever — so much so that late in life he impressed a young law student named J. Edgar Hoover with his determination and methods. Comstock also had a thing for literature he considered indecent: arresting one publisher for mailing a collection of poems by Walt Whitman, including To a Common Prostitute and Comstock worked to remove George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman from the New York Public Library. He courted allies, such as the Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker who became postmaster in Washington, D.C. who banned Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Kreutzer on obscenity grounds … although it was later revealed that another reason was Wanamaker’s department store “had not secured the discount he wanted in order to stock it”.
Over time, his bullying tactics lost him support from even his admirers, with this cartoon appearing in a 1915 socialist newspaper The Masses summing-it-up:
The eight women he prosecuted — with two committing suicide, being elderly and afraid of a long prison sentence — are detailed in detail by Amy Sohn whose meticulous detail includes their love lives and more. One of them is Margaret Sanger, whom I noted in a previous T/C essay on her efforts leading to the development of the birth control pill. Another is Emma Goldman — the anarchist who was quoted as saying, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution" — whose work in birth control was not well-known to me; glad I learned it here.
Easily the most fascinating story the author related was that of Ida Craddock— an outspoken sex educator and scholar who during the late 1800s advocated for sexual pleasure and enjoyment at a time when sex for any other reason than procreation was damnable. She had one adversary in …. her mother … and was a mystic, believing she was married to an other-world angel named Soph (vividly describing their sex life) and was among the targets of Comstock. Alas, she and another woman (Ann Lohman) — certain they would be convicted — committed suicide rather feel they surrendered to Comstock.
In time, there was considerable push-back against Comstock — with many editorials, and one particularly embarrassing moment. He had prosecuted a homeopath named Sara Blakeslee Chase for providing contraception yet the case was dismissed in court in 1878. In a act of bold defiance: she sued him for false arrest and on a judge’s order he was arrested and brought to the sheriff’s office (although nothing became of it).
Over the years, his influence waned — the word comstockery came to define his morality crusade — and after his death in 1915: the NYSSV soldiered-on (under a far more low-key successor) until 1950. The Supreme Court in 1965 finally struck down the prohibition on contraception in Griswold vs. Connecticut— although only for married women: it took another seven years (in Eisenstadt v. Baird) for any restrictions on unmarried women to be lifted. Although void today, the Comstock Laws … are still on the books.
The book is meticulously documented (with fifty-two pages of footnotes and bibliography) and as noted is very animated about not just the legal issues of sexuality but at times the sex lives of the women.
Two drawbacks: she discusses the many groups of women, with “sex radicals”, “free love” (which at that time is not promiscuity but instead equal love), “social purists” — it would have helped if there was a glossary of these terms (and who supported them). Also, there is an Epilogue of the six women who died a natural death and what happened to them later in life — I would have liked having an opening glossary of the eight, rather than having to thumb-through the pages to recall what their early background was. This reminds me of reading the Vince Bugliosi-written story of the Manson murders, Helter Skelter — despite some glossaries, it still took several readings to fully-grasp the story. (This one may just need a second reading).
The author finishes with her desire to publicize the lesser-known women, noting “They were born too late to be at Seneca Falls and (most of them) too early to chain themselves to Woodrow Wilson’s White House gate” — when ten suffragettes were arrested in 1917, seeking Wilson to support the right to vote.
Still, the target of this book deserves to be held in contempt … especially as we wade into the uncharted waters none of us ever wanted to encounter.
Let’s close with Jack Bruce’s song Running Through Our Hands— which seems to sum-up our uncertain times.
Now, on to Top Comments:
Nothing from the field this evening
And from Ed Tracey, your faithful correspondent this evening ........
In the diary by News Corpse about the latest shellacking that Peter Doocy received from Jen Psaki— first, HangingByThread makes an analogy, then 86Mets hits it out-of-the-park (pun intended).
Next - enjoy jotter's wonderful (and now eternal) *PictureQuilt™* below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment featuring that photo.
TOP PHOTOSDecember 1st, 2021
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And lastly: yesterday's Top Mojo - mega-mojo to the intrepid mik ...... who rescued this feature from oblivion: