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

The Cairo Street Theatre was the first place where the marriage reformer and the post office inspector would cross paths, but not the last. Their confrontations would span another nine years. The Quaker-educated, Philadelphia-born Craddock and the Congregationalist, Connecticut-born Comstock, only thirteen years apart in age, represented two poles of the rapidly changing American identity: woman and man, modernist and traditionalist, urban and rural, feminist and guardian of the family. That summer in the White City—the nickname given to the fairgrounds for the color of its buildings—they may have sat in the Cairo Street Theatre for the same performance and not known it. He would go on to circle her in three other states. Their dance would end in bloodshed, and only one would survive.

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Craddock was one of many women who challenged the Comstock laws in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. New ideas about money, class, gender, and sex were circulating after the Civil War. Women, who were disproportionately harmed by poverty, unwanted parenthood, lack of employment, and low wages, could only stand to gain by challenging the status quo. Could, and should, motherhood be chosen? Was a wife obligated to have sex whenever her husband wanted? Were women to accept serial infidelity on the part of their men, including infidelity with prostitutes? Could they decide when to make love, and when not to? Could they work outside of the home? And if they did, should they be paid the same as men?

The women who fought the Comstock laws could be categorized as sex reformers, though this book will use the term sex radicals to avoid confusion with more Puritan-minded reformers. The sex radicals understood that women's liberation was possible only if sex was wholly reimagined. Alongside Craddock, they included the suffragist, stockbroker, publisher, and presidential candidate Victoria C. Woodhull; her sister, and partner in brokerage and publishing, Tennessee Claflin; the free lover and editor Angela Tilton Heywood; the Fifth Avenue abortionist Ann "Madame Restell" Lohman; the homeopathic physician Dr. Sara B. Chase; the anarchist and labor organizer Emma Goldman; and the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, whose friend Otto Bobsein coined the phrase birth control in her Manhattan apartment in 1914.

With the exception of Sanger, the women were eccentrics even within the women's rights and progressive movements. Their more mainstream male peers did not always support them, distancing themselves from their frank speech and bold writing, while conservative suffragists were afraid of their edgy ideas about sex. Some sex radicals focused on the terrors of unwanted pregnancy, some on the inverse relationship between fear and delight. What could enlightened, free-loving men do to help women enjoy sex? Was it possible that contraceptive practices such as male continence could increase joy for women by extending the act?

The sex radicals believed it was not fair for men to have orgasms when women did not, or for men to rape their wives or any other women. They thought sex should be loving, bonded, and sensual. Mutuality would lead to respect, equality, and reasonably sized families. The idea of contraception, then as now, was not only about the body. It was about pleasure: How could a woman enjoy sex when she lived in terror of life-threatening childbirth? It was women who took responsibility for the raising of children; additional babies were harder on the mothers than on the fathers.

What makes the Comstock women all the more remarkable is that they did their agitating, writing, and speaking out against him at a time when women did not have the right to vote (though Comstock was appointed and could not be voted out of his position). In court, their fates were decided by men; women were not appointed to judgeships until 1921 and could not serve on federal juries until 1957. With one exception, the Comstock women retained male lawyers who encouraged them to plead guilty and were ineffective advocates, in part because the men did not understand their clients' thinking.

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.