The Man Who Hated Women
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
“If Anthony Comstock were alive today, he’d be a regular talking head on Fox News,” said Elizabeth Austin in The Washington Monthly. The 19thcentury anti-vice crusader is best known for the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law prohibiting the mailing of obscene materials, which included everything from pornographic postcards to pamphlets about contraception. Comstock is technically the subject of Amy Sohn’s vivid new book. But the author is clearly more inspired by the eight women she’s chosen to showcase as the censor’s chief antagonists. Some of this colorful group, dubbed “sex radicals” by Sohn, are well-known, such as anarchist Emma Goldman and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Others, like sexologist Ida Craddock, may surprise: In 1904, she was writing sex tips that newspapers even today “would blush to reprint.”
Sohn, a novelist and ex-columnist, “makes a very successful transition to feminist historian,” said Charlotte Gray in The Wall Street Journal. As she chronicles Comstock’s rise in Gilded Age New York City, she deftly uses his own writings, those of his foes, and the titillating newspaper stories of the era that tsk-tsked about sex and sin. She abhors the Comstock Act, writing that the law “dealt a near-century-long blow to women’s health.” But she also reminds us that Comstock also exercised police powers as an agent of the U.S. postal service, and he hounded one of the book’s heroines until she took her own life.
The Man Who Hated Women “gestures at a gripping narrative and a profound argument,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Sohn, however, “doesn’t try to present Comstock as anything more complicated than a self-satisfied prig.” She’s also hesitant to probe troubling traits of her heroines. Victoria Woodhull, a declared 1872 presidential candidate, is valorized even though at one point she threatened to publish the sexual histories of her suffragist peers unless they paid her. Sohn also goes too far when she declares Comstock the man who did more than anyone to trample women’s rights in America. “More than anyone? Is she sure about that?”