Excerpt from The Man Who Hated Women by Amy Sohn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Anthony Comstock

Comstock learned about the belly dance while in Wisconsin for the Monona Lake Assembly, a religious revival. On July 27, Comstock delivered a talk called "The Foes of Society." Three activities, he said, were crime-breeders: intemperance, gambling, and evil reading. Each degraded people, wrecked homes, impoverished women and children, and created and fostered crimes. A foul story or tainted picture was a stain on children, at first imperceptible but soon filling their imaginations with corrupt influences as dreaded as smallpox or scarlet fever. He concluded by telling of his good work at the NYSSV.

After a lawyer at the revival told Comstock that he and his family had visited the fair's Cairo Street Theatre, only to discover the obscene show, Comstock took action, deciding to make a detour to Chicago on his way back to his summer home in New Jersey. He was a moral scold wherever he went; in the sleeping car, a man accused a Black porter of stealing his wife's watch after he made the bunk bed, but Comstock intervened, finding it in the pillowcase lining. "That's one of the cases where I'm sorry I got the property back," Comstock said later, "for the man hadn't the decency to apologize to the porter." Comstock arrived at the fair on August 1, but did not announce his plans; as he wrote in the NYSSV Annual Report for that year, "It was thought by the agent best not to be known until the blow was struck." Insofar as a nationally famous, two-hundred-pound man with red muttonchops could be incognito, Comstock was going to try.

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Anthony Comstock was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women, a product of his upbringing, religion, and time. Growing up before the Civil War on a farm in New Canaan, Connecticut, he was raised to believe in the Victorian ideal of womanhood—a saintly, pure wife and mother whose domain was the home. When he arrived in New York as a young veteran in search of a dry goods job, he was shocked by the sounds, smells, and mores of the new American city, with its streetwalking, gambling, saloons, and brothels, and pornography peddled openly on the street. He became convinced that obscenity, which he called a "hydra-headed monster," led to prostitution, illness, death, abortions, and venereal disease.

After he joined the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), then a nascent group in the United States, he befriended the Anglo-Saxon scions of New York. They had last names such as Morgan (finance) and Colgate (soap), and with their support he went to Washington and passed the 1873 Comstock Act, which made the distribution, sale, possession, and mailing of obscene material and contraception punishable with extreme fines and prison sentences. It was the first federal obscenity law to link obscenity and contraception, the latter of which was defined as "any drug or medicine, or any article whatever for the prevention of conception or for causing unlawful abortion." After the law's passage, state legislatures enacted "little Comstock laws" modeled on the federal legislation. Connecticut's was more restrictive than the federal law: it criminalized the act of trying to prevent pregnancy, which could even include withdrawal (coitus interruptus).

In the twenty years between the 1873 passage of the Comstock law and the World's Fair, nearly two thousand people had been arrested under the law, more than half of whom had been convicted, and a hundred thousand dollars in fines had been imposed. Eight hundred thousand obscene pictures and photos had been seized, as had one hundred thousand "articles for immoral use," meaning sex toys and contraceptives, plus more than four thousand boxes of abortifacients—pills and powders purporting to induce miscarriage.

Comstock altered American reproductive rights for nearly a hundred years, until long after his death. Though today his name is not widely known, in his tenure he was feared and reviled. Comstockery and Comstockism came to connote prudishness, control, censoriousness, and repression of thought. The NYSSV was nicknamed "Mr. Comstock's Society." Even those who agreed with him questioned his nefarious methods. Though he was an extremely pious Congregationalist, he frequently brandished his revolver in his work. Many of his victims were impoverished, uneducated, or old. And though he pursued far more men than women, he delighted in punishing those radical, intellectual women whose views on contraception stemmed from liberal ideas about women's rights.

Excerpted from The Man Who Hated Women by Amy Sohn. Copyright © 2021 by Amy Sohn. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.