Today’s New York Times has an interesting article on Civil War veteran Anthony Comstock‘s post-war career as a national scold. While I was raised on stories of “St. Anthony” Comstock’s almost comical Puritanical excess, no dirty novel escaped his attention, he was also a dangerous crusader against birth control. In the article, Annalee Newitz describes Comstock as a 19th Century troll who specialized in the “take down” of emerging feminist leaders. From the article:
Supported by wealthy men including J. Pierpont Morgan and Samuel Colgate (yes, the founder of the soap and toothpaste company), Comstock became a full-time activist. But he remained mostly a local nuisance until he found a target famous enough to get him national attention. He decided to take down Victoria Woodhull, who was running for president in the 1872 election. She and her sister Tennessee Claflin had opened the first woman-run brokerage firm on Wall Street and ran a newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, dedicated to women’s suffrage, socialism and “free love,” a term she popularized to describe sex outside the strictures of marriage.
To call attention to her campaign, Woodhull decided to publish an article about the celebrity minister Henry Ward Beecher. Though Beecher came from a liberal family — he was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” — he was opposed to free love. And yet he had been having affairs for years, an open secret in New York society. When Woodhull published her tell-all, complete with salacious details about Beecher impregnating his best friend’s wife, the minister was ruined. But the papers sold like crazy.
That’s when Comstock stepped in. He ordered a copy of the newspaper through the postal system, then took the evidence to federal marshals so they could arrest Woodhull for mailing “obscene” depictions of Beecher’s sex life. The charges didn’t stick, but the trial turned Comstock into a national figure, beloved by conservatives who thought women’s rights had gone too far.
A year later, buoyed by donations to his cause, Comstock arrived in Washington to lobby politicians to strengthen federal obscenity laws. The postal system in the 1870s was something like the internet, bringing people into contact with ideas and people they never would have found otherwise. It was also a channel for pornography. Comstock wanted to expand the nation’s laws criminalizing the act of mailing obscene material over state lines. He met privately with policymakers, indulging their prurience by displaying a steamer trunk full of sex toys and erotica that he had ordered by post.
He capitalized on a wave of anti-feminist sentiment directed at activists like Woodhull, who had already irritated Congress by appearing before them years earlier to demand the vote.
“the Man Who Hated Women”: Sex, Censorship and Civil Liberties in Gilded Age” by Amy Sohn – Race, birth-control – among other issues in contention with nativists,,,