Dirty Works
Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Gold Medal (tie) in the 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) - History (U.S.) Category.
A rich account of 1920s to 1950s New York City, starring an eclectic mix of icons like James Joyce, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey—all led by an unsung hero of free expression and reproductive rights: Morris L. Ernst.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was experiencing an awakening. Victorian-era morality was being challenged by the introduction of sexual modernism and women's rights into popular culture, the arts, and science. Set during this first sexual revolution, when civil libertarian-minded lawyers overthrew the yoke of obscenity laws, Dirty Works focuses on a series of significant courtroom cases that were all represented by the same lawyer: Morris L. Ernst.
Ernst's clients included a who's who of European and American literati and sexual activists, among them Margaret Sanger, James Joyce, and Alfred Kinsey. They, along with a colorful cast of burlesque-theater owners and bookstore clerks, had run afoul of stiff obscenity laws, and became actors in Ernst's legal theater that ultimately forced the law to recognize people's right to freely consume media. In this book, Brett Gary recovers the critically neglected Ernst as the most important legal defender of literary expression and reproductive rights by the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter centers on one or more key trials from Ernst's remarkable career battling censorship and obscenity laws, using them to tell a broader story of cultural changes and conflicts around sex, morality, and free speech ideals.
Dirty Works sets the stage, legally and culturally, for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and beyond. In the latter half of the century, the courts had a powerful body of precedents, many owing to Ernst's courtroom successes, that recognized adult interests in sexuality, women's needs for reproductive control, and the legitimacy of sexual inquiry. The legacy of this important, but largely unrecognized, moment in American history must be reckoned with in our contentious present, as many of the issues Ernst and his colleagues defended are still under attack eight decades later.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NYU media studies professor Gary (The Nervous Liberals) details the crusading work of early 20th-century civil liberties lawyer Morris L. Ernst (1888–1975) in this meticulous history. Born to Jewish immigrants in Alabama and raised in New York City, Ernst was a self-described "exhibitionist" with a wide altruistic streak who cofounded one of New York's top Jewish law firms and served as co–general counsel of the ACLU. Though Gary notes that Ernst's legacy was complicated by his "ardent anticommunism" and "dubious alliance" with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the focus here is on Ernst's involvement in "a series of censorship cases that transformed obscenity jurisprudence." These include defenses in 1929 of birth control activist Mary Ware Dennett against obscenity charges for mailing a sex education pamphlet, the Kinsey Institute in the 1950s for receiving imported erotica for research purposes, and Random House for planning to publish James Joyce's Ulysses in the 1930s (the case "where the courts caught up with the culture"). Giving a blow-by-blow account of each case, Gary delves deep into legal arguments about public harm versus public value, free speech, and the definition of obscenity, and persuasively argues that in "defending the first sexual revolution," Ernst helped "pav the way for the second." Readers will appreciate the thoroughness and accessibility of this deeply researched account.
