“The Man Who Hated Women” is mostly about the women he hated
The Man Who Hated Women
“The Man Who Hated Women,” the arresting title of Amy Sohn’s new book, would have been more fitting if the book were truly about the man who hated women. But Sohn’s narrative is less about Anthony Comstock — the self-styled moral crusader and chief architect of the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offense to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mail — than it is about the targets of his hatred, the women themselves.
Aside from offering a few perfunctory biographical details, Sohn mostly depicts Comstock as a nuisance or a cartoon villain — a pathetically obsessed figure who pops up now and again to make life horrendously difficult for the people he pursued. She earnestly pronounces him “the man who did more to curtail women’s rights than anyone else in American history.” More than anyone?
Sohn, author of several dishy novels and a former columnist about sex and relationships for New York Press and New York magazine, doesn’t try to present Comstock as anything more complicated than a self-satisfied prig; nor does she sufficiently parse some of the more troubling beliefs of the women she calls “sex radicals.” As she explains in her conclusion, in which she takes a swipe at “victim-oriented feminism,” Sohn intended this book to drive home a point.
“Greater historical awareness of the sex radicals can make them provocative role models for women emboldened by today’s #Metoo movement and outraged by the 21st-century rise of nativist, sexist demagogues who want to turn back the clock to the Comstock era,” she writes. The combination of the overstated (“turn back the clock”) and underdrawn (“greater historical awareness”) reflects the awkwardness of this book: “The Man Who Hated Women” gestures at a gripping narrative and a profound argument while ultimately falling short of either.
Those “provocative role models” include stockbroker, suffragist and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull; her sister Tennessee Claflin; sexologist Ida Craddock; anarchist Emma Goldman; and birth-control activist Margaret Sanger. They violated the Comstock law by dispensing information about sex or birth control or providing actual contraceptive devices. Some of the women in Sohn’s book were free lovers; a few of them were spiritualists. Almost all of them were advocates of hereditarianism and eugenics. Craddock insisted that giving women control over reproduction would make for a more harmonious social order, because children who were wanted by their parents were “superior” to those “who are the result of accident or of lust.”
The book begins at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, with Craddock watching a dazzling belly-dancing performance. Where Craddock saw a sublime manifestation of phallic worship, Sohn writes, Comstock would recall that he only saw “the most shameless exhibition of depravity.”
Ever since he had successfully lobbied for the Comstock Act two decades before, he had been serving as a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service. He seemed to enjoy this federal extension of his powers; he had started out as a puritanical vigilante — a dry-goods shop clerk in New York City who took it upon himself to conduct pornography raids — before he obtained official sanction as a secretary for the Ymca-created New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Comstock’s attempt to shut down the “Oriental dances” at the World’s Fair didn’t succeed, but he continued to pursue his other targets with a monomaniacal zeal, and drove a number of them to suicide, including Craddock herself. (When, earlier in his career, Comstock was told that he had worried several publishers to literal death, he was chillingly unrepentant: “Be that as it may, I am sure the world is better without them.”)
Despite the attention Sohn lavishes on Craddock’s life and work, the “vibrant, comely sex teacher” remains a bit of a mystery. Craddock, who was technically single, identified herself on her business card as “Mrs. Ida C. Craddock”; she maintained that her in-depth knowledge of sexual techniques came from the sex she had with her secret husband — a ghost named Soph.
About those qualities of her role models that today we might call problematic, Sohn is mostly circumspect; she doesn’t try to hide them, but she doesn’t offer much by way of penetrating insight either. Woodhull, who took multiple lovers and prided herself on being what was known as a “varietist,” as opposed to a monogamist, lashed out at her rivals in the suffragist movement by threatening to publish their sexual histories unless they paid her.
Some of the knottiest complications get relegated to Sohn’s epilogue, where she offers summaries of what happened to her role models after their encounters with Comstock. Woodhull, for instance, moved to England and “rewrote her past,” extolling the benefits of monogamy and “denying that she had been a free lover.” Sanger endorsed the forced sterilization of institutionalized people, what Sohn calls “an appalling position that nonetheless had mainstream support.”
Sohn isn’t wrong, but in her determination to flatten Sanger into a hero for our times, she ends by affirming a kind of girlboss feminism, unapologetically glib and individualistic: “A woman’s ultimate duty, she believed until the end, was not to the state,” Sohn writes. “It was to herself.”