Everything about Amy Sohn’s book is backward, beginning with the title. The Man Who Hated Women refers to Anthony Comstock, the anti-obscenity crusader and longtime head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was famous in the Gilded Age for hunting down and prosecuting sellers of dirty books, pictures, and sex toys. She sets his story against those of rebellious women such as Manhattan abortionist Madame Restell, free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull, and anarchist Emma Goldman, all of whom Comstock tangled with during his career.
But Comstock did not hate women. He was extravagantly devoted to his mother, who died when he was 10 years old. He adored his wife and their adopted daughter, Adele. More importantly, the past half-century has proven that his prudish worldview was much kinder to women than the hedonistic free-for-all that replaced it, in which women are used for sex without commitment in their youth and then cast aside when their beauty fades.
Sohn says that the free-love movement “grew out of abolitionist principles: women were not to be enslaved by men, the church, or the government.” But that is backward, too. Simply as a matter of history, the stuffy New England WASPs who gave us abolitionism were more likely to be among Comstock’s supporters than his opponents. They were moralists who counted pornography and prostitution among the social ills of an urbanizing America. We think of Prohibition as one of the darkest moments in our history and women’s suffrage as one of the brightest, but they were pushed by the same people. And those people also supported Comstock.
Victoria Woodhull, by contrast, was an adventuress out of the Midwest whose activism was the product not of deep moral conviction but of having married a drunk as a young woman, which left her with a psychological grudge against marriage as an institution and a practical need to earn a living. When she tried to worm her way into the feminist movement, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton soon grew suspicious of her. Harriet Beecher Stowe, an actual abolitionist, called her an “impudent witch.”
Many modern feminist historians have tried to make a hero out of Woodhull, whose campaign in 1872 makes her technically the first woman to run for president, even though her “campaign” was not much more than a media gimmick. All of them have run aground on Woodhull’s awful personality. She was more of a con artist than an activist. She rarely stayed with the same business partner, or sexual partner, for long because her mercenary self-centeredness quickly alienated people. Woodhull eventually settled in England with husband number four, a rich banker, and published articles denying she had ever preached free love and praising monogamy.
Comstock never renounced his cause like that. He also had a more attractive personality. Far from being schoolmarmish, he was a bold and soldierly man who settled on pornography as a cause after he personally witnessed a colleague at his dry goods store die of venereal disease after a pornography habit led him to prostitutes. Even Sohn, who clearly hates Comstock, admits that he was physically brave. A newspaper reporter once called Comstock’s office to ask if it was true that he had been punched in the face that morning. Comstock’s assistant answered, “Probably.”
The idea that Comstock was self-interested is the most backward misconception of all. His crusade brought him no personal advantage. Quite the opposite; it made him very unpopular. Even people who agreed with Comstock held him in contempt as unbearably declasse. Woodhull’s sister Tennie Claflin was a friend (some say mistress) of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the two women were feted in some of New York’s wealthiest circles. When Comstock tried to join the Masons, he was blackballed.
If one side of a controversy is friends with the richest man in the country, and the other side can’t even get admitted into the Masons, it is hard to argue that the former are the underdogs.
Pornography-hunters have always been low on the social scale, and Comstock had to deal with the disadvantage of being not just an anti-sex busybody but a particularly grubby sort. It’s one thing to campaign against pornography in the abstract. It’s quite another to storm into bordellos yourself, seizing incriminating evidence and clapping men in handcuffs. It hurt Comstock’s middle-class respectability to do what he did. Only his sincere belief in his cause made the sacrifice worth it.
It is true that sexologist Ida Craddock endured mockery and social stigma due to her books, but that is not because her views were unpopular. It is because she was insane. Sohn tries to present Craddock as a woman before her time, a sex-positive feminist who published such enlightened sex guides as Helps to Happy Wedlock and The Marriage Relation. Sohn opens the book with the picturesque scene of Craddock watching the belly dance exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, rhapsodizing internally about its ancient religious significance.
But Craddock was not just a sex radical. As she explained in her memoir Story of My Life: In Regard to Sex and Occult Teaching, the source of her sexual knowledge was a long and happy marriage to a ghost. His name was Soph, and their congress was called “wissening,” for “growing wise.” This was not some metaphor for spiritual ecstasy but a literal claim on Craddock’s part. Sohn quotes Craddock’s descriptions of their intercourse, in a multiplicity of positions, from private letters.
Whatever the situation may have been at the turn of the century, surely even Sohn would admit that today, Woodhull’s side of the debate is the establishment and Comstock’s is the counterculture. Pornography is ubiquitous. Images that Comstock would have considered obscene appear on billboards. During the coronavirus lockdown, the Pennsylvania Department of Health recommended “sexting, subscription-based fan platforms, or chat rooms” as a safer alternative to in-person dates. Government officials were encouraging citizens to become prostitutes on OnlyFans.
At the moment when sex positivity has very little left to fight for, it is educational to look back at the women in Sohn’s book to see what kind of world they thought would follow from their precepts. When sex ceased to be taboo, “curiosity will give place to knowledge and obscene pictures and literature will have no patrons,” said Laura Kendrick in a lecture at Faneuil Hall in 1878. “When women gain their economic freedom they will cease being playthings and utilities for men,” predicted Margaret Sanger.
Needless to say, these predictions have not been borne out. Pornography has not disappeared from lack of interest. Economic independence has not liberated women from drudgery but liberated men from the need to become breadwinners in order to get women to sleep with them. The women Sohn profiles were all more clever than Comstock, certainly more intellectual, and yet, they were wrong about everything. Maybe we would all be better off following the homely moral compass that guided Comstock. “I cannot but feel,” he told his biographer at the end of his life, “that the teachings of my mother are vastly superior to anything that my opponents can offer.”
Helen Andrews is a senior editor at the American Conservative and the author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
