The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age

Today’s nonfiction post is on The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age by Amy Sohn.  It is 386 pages long and is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The cover is extracted out newspaper clipping with two of the women that Comstock jailed. There is some foul language, very mild sexuality, and mild violence in this book. The intended reader is someone who is interested in American history, women’s rights, and where they meet. There Be Spoilers Ahead. 

From the back of the book-Author Amy Sohn presents a narrative history of Anthony Comstock, anti-vice activist and U.S. Postal Inspector, and the remarkable women who opposed his war on women's rights at the turn of the twentieth century. Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with harsh sentences and steep fines; his name was soon equated with repression and prudery. Between 1873 and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, eight remarkable women were tried under the Comstock Law. These "sex radicals" supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and a woman's right to sexual pleasure. They took on Comstock in explicit, bold, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, sex, and love for a new era. The Man Who Hated Women tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. They were publishers, editors, and doctors, including the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the birth control activist Margaret Sanger; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to go against a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, they paved the way for modern-day feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined contraceptive access as a human civil liberty.

Review- An interesting and well written biography of Anthony Comstock and the people he fought with. Sohn takes the reader from the beginning of Comstock's life and his childhood influences that made him into the man who saw the human body as a vile, sinful thing that must be hidden or destroyed. The reader also spends time with the people who Comstock saw as the bringers of filth and evil to young minds. From Free Lovers to nurses and other medical professionals, they all fought against the ignorance that Comstock believed was the root of a woman’s purity and the only way to be a good mother, and motherhood is the only goal that a woman should have. He was a dangerous man to all women and he did his best to make that all women were trapped by marriage and childbirth. Sohn does a wonderful job bringing this piece of women’s history to a modern reader and this is a timely book. I recommend this book for everyone to read. 

I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.