The man who hated women Sex, censorship, and civil liberties in the Gilded Age

Amy Sohn, 1973-

Book - 2021

A narrative history about Anthony Comstock, US Postal Inspector and vice hunter, and the remarkable women who opposed him. Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. The Comstock law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. Between 1873 and Comstock's death in 1915, eight women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. Sohn tells the overlooked story of the valiant attempts by these publishers, writers, and doctors to fight Comst...ock in court and in the press. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. -- adapted from jacket

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2nd Floor 305.4209/Sohn Due Apr 7, 2024
Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Amy Sohn, 1973- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xii, 386 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-363) and index.
ISBN
9781250174819
  • List of Illustrations
  • 1. The Danse Du Ventre
  • 2. Viceland
  • 3. The Bewitching Brokers
  • 4. The Sensational Comedy of Free Love
  • 5. Mr. Comstock Goes to Washington
  • 6. The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life
  • 7. The Wickedest Woman in New York
  • 8. The Physiologist
  • 9. The Comstock Syringe
  • 10. A New Secretary
  • 11. Helps to Happy Wedlock
  • 12. The Church of Yoga
  • 13. Comstock Versus Craddock
  • 14. The Femininity of the Universe
  • 15. What Every Girl Should Know
  • 16. Why and How the Poor Should Not Have Many Children
  • 17. I Am Glad and Proud to be a Criminal
  • 18. Breach in the Enemy's Lines
  • Epilogue
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Sohn (The Actress) delivers an engrossing account of U.S. post office special agent Anthony Comstock's anti-vice crusade and the women who opposed it. The secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock lobbied Congress to pass the 1873 Comstock Act, which outlawed the distribution, advertisement, possession, or mailing of "obscene material," including contraception and sexual health information. Sohn documents how Comstock used "deceptive tactics," such as sending decoy letters to solicit pamphlets and books through the mail and making disguised visits to physicians' offices, to bully the era's "sex radicals," including abortionist Madame Restell; free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin; and homeopath Sarah Chase, who sold spermicidal syringes and countersued Comstock for false arrest. Noting the widespread popularity of publications by these and other women, Sohn links their work to rising demands for free speech, gender equality, and a better quality of life for women, and portrays Comstock and his supporters as desperately clinging to an outdated, prudish misogyny. Blending colorful details of life at the turn of the 20th century with sharp insights into just how revolutionary these new ideas were, this fascinating history deserves a wide readership. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Award-winning Stanford professor Daughton's In The Forest of No Joy covers new territory in the brutal history of colonialism by chronicling the construction of the Congo-Océan railroad across the Republic of Congo. In New Women in the Old West, Gallagher (How the Post Office Created America) portrays the settling of the American West from the women's perspective, including the stories of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American women. Former Wall Street Journal staffer Hagedorn's Sleeper Agent is George Koval, born in America and taken back to the Soviet Union by his idealistic Russian Jewish parents in the 1930s; he returned later after being recruited by the Red army and became the only Soviet military spy with security clearances for the Manhattan project (40,000-copy first printing). In Checkmate in Berlin, best-selling author Milton (Soldier, Sailor, Frogman, Spy, Airman, Gangster, Kill or Die) chronicles the Allies' post-World War II division of Germany and especially Berlin and the tensions that resulted (40,000-copy first printing). A New York Times best-selling novelist, Sohn turns to nonfiction with The Man Who Hated Women, an account of anti-vice activist and U.S. Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock and the restrictive Comstock Law. In The Verge, Wyman, whose Tides of History podcast boasts 600,000 subscribers, looks at the crucial impact of Europe's Reformation/Renaissance era (50,000-copy first printing).

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

How the reactionary Christian ideology of one government official contributed to the suppression of women's reproductive freedom for decades. In this important work of biographical history, novelist Sohn traces the career of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), special agent to the U.S. Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. For more than 40 years, Comstock, a deeply Christian dry goods seller from Connecticut, harassed and imprisoned many of the important pioneers in the birth control movement. "He became convinced that obscenity, which he called a 'hydra-headed monster,' led to prostitution, illness, death, abortions, and venereal disease," writes the author. In 1873, with the aid of well-heeled YMCA leaders, he was able to pass the Comstock Act, which "made the distribution, selling, possession, and mailing of obscene material and contraception punishable with extreme fines and prison sentences." Wielding this law, he doggedly pursued freethinking, activist women and their supporters as they attempted to speak and write about women's bodies, sexual matters, and abortion. These activists included the sisters Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, stockbrokers, spiritualists, and "free lovers"; Angela and Ezra Heywood, printers and writers; abortionist Ann "Madam Restell" Lohman, who committed suicide rather than be prosecuted; Dr. Sara B. Chase, who, in defiance, named her popular birth control device the "Comstock Syringe"; Ida Craddock, a spiritual consultant and writer on happy marital sex, who also killed herself when prosecuted; Emma Goldman, anarchist and birth control activist; and Margaret Sanger, who took on Comstock in court and prevailed in starting the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Throughout this immensely readable history, Sohn fashions sympathetic narratives of these women's lives and underscores their invaluable sacrifices for a vital cause. Many readers will be appalled to learn that literature about birth control was once considered obscene. Stellar research in women's history, especially crucial due to recent threats to abortion rights across the country. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.