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

Amy Sohn

eAudio - 2021

Bestselling author Amy Sohn presents a narrative history of Anthony Comstock, antivice activist and US 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 US 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 long prison sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery.Between 1873 and Comstock's death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These "sex radicals" supported contraception, sexual educat...ion, gender equality, and women's right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked... more