America’s relationship with sex feels particularly fraught these days, from attacks on contraception to the criminalization of abortion and protests against LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed. The intensity of these political fights may seem shocking or even unprecedented. But the tactics and messages of modern conservative activists can be traced all the way back to the crusading 19th-century anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock.
Comstock, a bitter opponent of abortion and contraception, helped spearhead the idea of using the law to enforce Christian values on the press, sex educators, and artists. According to Amy Werbel, an art history professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology and author of Lust On Trial, Christians in the pre-Comstock era were focused on policing morality within their immediate communities. But Comstock took this fight nationally, creating a playbook for the kind of campaigns run by today’s religious right to eliminate access to abortion or deny the validity of trans identity.
“I definitely think that the patriarchal promise of keeping women in line gets its start during the Comstock era,” Werbel says.
Amy Sohn, author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Rights in the Gilded Age, tells Teen Vogue that Comstock was “a product of his time.” Born in 1844 and raised an evangelical Christian, he likely was influenced by biblical stories like Adam and Eve, where Eve gives in to temptation and brings about the fall of man. Comstock saw himself as a protector of men’s health and white, upper-class women’s innocence. His beliefs were bolstered by the pervasive ideas that masturbation was not just sinful but bad for men’s health and that women’s rightful place in the home was to be subordinate to men.
After serving in the Civil War, Comstock dedicated his life to purging society of materials he deemed obscene. Part vigilante, part politician, Comstock aided police in raiding brothels and turned in people who promoted contraception and abortion. He accrued political power, founding the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and teaming up with the YMCA to publicize the raids. At one point he was even given the title of “special agent” to the U.S. Post Office, which allowed him to intercept obscene mail. Ironically, by saving confiscated material and showing it to judges and politicians to persuade them to criminalize it, Comstock amassed a significant porn collection.
Comstock is best known for a set of anti-obscenity laws passed in his name. According to the ACLU, the 1873 Comstock law banned “the mailing, importation, and transportation” of a range of “obscene” paraphernalia and media through the postal service. Mini-Comstock laws popped up throughout the country which criminalized disseminating “lewd” material within a state. The statewide laws ranged in severity, with the most severe in Connecticut, where birth control was outlawed completely. Sohn explained that the laws even encroached on basic sex education. In 1928, activist Mary Ware Dennett was convicted of violating the Comstock Act for distributing a pamphlet that displayed anatomically correct drawings with the intention of teaching young people to see sex “as a vivifying joy, as a vital art, as a thing to be studied and developed with reverence for its big meaning, with an understanding of its far-reaching reactions, psychologically and spiritually.” Sohn adds, “The extent that [the Comstock laws] restricted information was damaging to all American women because it was passed in a time where you couldn't always depend on your doctor for clear information.”
As Amanda Frisken, professor of American Studies at SUNY College at Old Westbury and author of Graphic News: How Sensational Images Transformed Nineteenth-Century Journalism, tells Teen Vogue, “Comstock saw obscenity everywhere, believing that any image that brought to mind what he called ‘vile thoughts’ should be deemed obscene and suppressed. He included in this category physiological information about sexual reproduction and was particularly keen to suppress efforts to share information about birth control.”
One defining characteristic of Comstock’s activism is that it reinforced existing social hierarchies along the lines of class, gender, and race. He went after men’s sporting magazines that included so-called lewd images of barmaids with their ankles on display and reproductions of nude classical statues. The sporting magazines found a loophole by increasing depictions of Black men raping white women. Frisken explains that these images were deemed acceptable because they “came with a social message that happened to justify efforts to disenfranchise Black communities.” And, much like today, Comstock’s attempts to ban abortion and contraception placed added burdens on the poor, while rich women had resources to acquire a “therapeutic exemption” that gave them access to reproductive care.
Werbel jokes to Teen Vogue that obscenity at the time was defined “in the groin of the beholder,” meaning that anything which personally offended Comstock could be deemed obscene in court. It didn’t help that the U.S. legal system allowed Comstock to burn evidence before a trial as well as essentially entrap activists he sought to destroy, many of whom were women. Sohn describes how Comstock “would go to [an activist’s] house, use a false name, buy abortifacients from her, summon a policeman from across the street, and the policemen would arrest her.”
Comstock’s wild tactics received significant pushback from the public. The New York Times reported that a 1915 cartoon from The Masses magazine showed Comstock before a judge, infuriated that a woman had given birth to a naked child. Even Comstock’s targets essentially trolled him. Dr. Sara Blakeslee Chase, a homeopathic medicine practitioner, named a model of a contraceptive syringe after Comstock. Fellow free-love activists Angela and Ezra Heywood were quick to pile on, running an ad for Chase’s syringe in their journal, featuring the line, “If Comstock’s mother had had a syringe and known how to use it, what a world of woe it would have saved us!”
But jokes aside, Comstock’s activism had very serious consequences. Ann Lohman Restell, a.k.a. Madame Restell, a well-known abortionist who served New York’s middle-class women, was one of the first people charged under the state’s Comstock law. Comstock instigated Restell’s arrest in 1878. Rather than face possibly spending the rest of her life in prison, Restell committed suicide at 67. She wasn’t the only one. Comstock boasted about the number of doctors, activists, and contraception providers he had driven to suicide. The Washington Post reported the number was as high as 15.
Comstock’s legacy hinges on a disturbing contradiction: Despite supposedly fighting to restore moral order in America, Comstock resorted to reckless tactics that today would be seen as illegal. Werbel sees Comstock’s tactics as a key factor in his failure to eliminate obscenity. “It's such a cautionary tale about not looking at the big picture, not seeing the forest for the trees,” she says. “He was throwing people in jail. He was confiscating and burning things. But every year, there was vastly more [pornography] than the year before.”
Comstock's crusade marked a turning point in American history, bringing about societal changes that undermined his tactics and messages. Frisken describes how Comstock’s actions actually made people more tolerant of obscenity. “I was fascinated in my research to discover that libertarians and free thinkers who challenged the regulation of unorthodox ideas at first were sympathetic to efforts to suppress ‘obscene materials,’” she says. “But when they saw how wide a net Comstock was casting and how much power he was acquiring to control ideas, they began — albeit reluctantly — to rethink their position. They came to see Comstock’s prosecution of some reformers, such as D.M. Bennett and Ezra Heywood, as excessive. In this sense, Comstock’s actions had the unintended consequence of pushing libertarians [activists] to support the principle of free speech.”
This ideological transformation was mirrored in the legal system. Werbel says that as a result of Comstock’s antics, the legal system began to “firm up its procedures and guidelines.” Judges became stricter about bringing evidence to the court, nullifying Comstock’s tactic of burning evidence before a trial because it was “too obscene." As obscenity cases rose, lawyers created the National Defense Association to defend Comstock targets. Werbel admits that while there was some regrouping in the interim, “There's pretty much a direct line from 1878, when the [NDA] is formed, to 1920, when the ACLU was born of attorneys who are specifically talking to each other and publishing textbooks on how to defend against obscenity prosecutions.” She continues, “What Comstock was doing provided opportunities for lawyers to get smart about how to defend against these kinds of prosecutions.”
Comstock died in 1915, and his laws were chipped away in Supreme Court cases over the course of the 20th century. But some essential dynamics of the Comstock era remain. The recent sweeping abortion ban in Texas, which lets citizens sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion, is a model of the kind of vigilante justice Comstock championed. As Sohn says, “It's taking advantage of this dangerous level of misogyny in the culture and encouraging a kind of vigilantism.”
Werbel hopes that contemporary attacks on reproductive rights and access to care may, like the Comstock laws, have some “unintended consequences” by increasing acceptance of the very practices censors hope to eradicate. “But that depends on we, the people, basically saying this isn't who we are,” she says. “And remembering that we are a pluralistic nation with a separation between church and state.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Anti-Trans Lawmakers — Meet the Roller Derby Community
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
