The Man Who Hated Women
Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery.
Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty.
The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
