As Amy Sohn writes in her colourful new book, “The Man Who Hated Women”, Comstock put his righteous indignation to use. He harnessed the state’s obscenity law to personally seize offensive books, assist in arrests and shut down saloons, often while brandishing a revolver.
“As one of the most powerful and single-minded men of his time, Comstock dealt a near-century-long blow to women’s health,” Ms Sohn writes. In his efforts to protect women, he arrested many of the midwives and homeopaths who provided essential reproductive care. His federal advocacy spawned various “little Comstock laws” across the states, which often made it a crime to own advice on preventing conception.
But it is not quite right to say Comstock hated women, at least not all of them. He revered his mother, who died in childbirth when he was young, and loved his wife, a prim, tiny woman he called “Wifey”. He just didn’t trust women to think for themselves. His rise coincided with a “rich period of radical publishing”, when activists increasingly argued that marriages should be based on love and respect, with a fair division of labour and pleasurable, consensual, recreational sex.
Ms Sohn devotes much of her book to the lives of some “sex radicals” who riled Comstock with their big ideas about marital harmony and bodily autonomy. Besides Woodhull, she includes Emma Goldman, an anarchist and labour organiser, Margaret Sanger, a birth-control activist, Ann Lohman, a “notorious” abortionist known as “Madame Restell”, and Ida Craddock, a sexologist whose thoughts on mutual sexual pleasure were somewhat complicated by her claim that her lover was a ghost.
A bestselling novelist, Ms Sohn makes clear the depth of her research for her first non-fiction book, occasionally overdoing the details . She sometimes veers into hyperbole and, at the close, casts off her historian’s mantle to give a feminist pep-talk. Yet she is right to highlight the work these women did to define reproductive liberty as an American right, which paved the way for the birth-control pill and.
good
The 19th century was an extraordinarily puritanical time in western society. Just look at the bizarre history of Kellogg's corn flakes.
He was the main force behind opposition to birth control ... believing it promoted promiscuity.
Who would touch him!!!!
He masturbated 'ALOT!'
thanks
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