Historian Erik Loomis profiles the crusading American prude, the self-proclaimed “weeder in God’s garden,” the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the anti-birth control crank, the anti-obscenity zealot, the one, the only, Anthony Comstock:
Through his powerful congressional benefactors, Comstock pushed through Congress in 1874 the notorious Comstock Law, which made illegal sending “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” material through the U.S. mail. Examples of such material included information on birth control and biology textbooks that showed accurate representations of the human body.
Comstock believed the birth control devices caused lust to rise in the human body and lewd behavior to follow. It was primarily to stop birth control from being propagated that Comstock fought for the law that bears his name. Soon after, 24 states enacted similar laws to prevent the dissemination of birth control on the state level. The worst of these laws was in Comstock’s home state of Connecticut, where even the use of birth control was a violation of the law. Married couples could be prosecuted for using birth control in the privacy of their own homes and sentenced to a year in prison.
[…]
Comstock used to brag about how 15 people had killed themselves because of his attacks. Among them was Ida Craddock. Craddock has been convicted violating the obscenity laws for authoring sexually explicit marriage manuals and sending them to paying couples who needed help in the bedroom. On the eve of reporting to federal prison for such a heinous crime, Craddock killed herself, leaving a lengthy note blaming Comstock for driving her to this. It was one of his proudest moments. [Emphasis added.]
After Comstock’s death in 1915, the young Margaret Sanger began her campaign to overturn the Comstock Laws. You can read more about Sanger’s crusade in Jill Lepore’s outstanding profile of Planned Parenthood, published last November in the New Yorker.
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