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The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2025

Kimberly A. Hamlin ,
Cathleen D. Cahill ,
Andrew Wender Cohen ,
Allison K. Lange ,
Lauren MacIvor Thompson ,
Nicholas L. Syrett  and
Magdalene Zier
Kimberly A. Hamlin
Affiliation:
Corresponding author: Kimberly A. Hamlin, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA. Email: [email protected].
Cathleen D. Cahill
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Andrew Wender Cohen
Affiliation:
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA.
Allison K. Lange
Affiliation:
Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, USA.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Affiliation:
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA.
Nicholas L. Syrett
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA.
Magdalene Zier
Affiliation:
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
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Abstract

The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for new Supreme Court abortion rulings or congressional legislation. As scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we are uniquely situated to intervene in this dialogue and ensure that contemporary conversations are grounded in historical context. We present this forum not as an exhaustive account of the Comstock Act and its architect, but as aopportunity to highlight the context in which this law, which holds so much potential relevance for our present, was created, enacted, enforced, and challenged. We hope this forum will stimulate further scholarly and public conversations around the nation’s long history of regulating reproductive rights and how that history became entangled with other social anxieties.

Keywords

Comstockobscenityabortionbirth controlcensorship
Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , October 2024 , pp. 431 - 437
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 58–59.

2 Broun, Heywood and Leech, Margaret, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), 131 Google Scholar.

3 Act of Mar. 3, 1873, ch. 258, 17 Stat. 598.

4 Comstock, Anthony, Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and the Youth Corrupted (New York: J. Howard Brown, 1880)Google Scholar.

5 In addition to Amy Werbel’s comprehensive modern biography, other good histories of Comstock can be found in Beisel, Nicola Kay, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Giesberg, Judith, Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sohn, Amy, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)Google Scholar. Historic biographies include Broun and Leech’s Anthony Comstock, as well as Trumbull, Charles Gallaudet, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil, 2nd ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913)Google Scholar.

6 For an analysis of the claims of Comstock “revivalists,” see Reva B. Siegel and Mary Ziegler, “Comstockery: How Government Censorship Gave Birth to the Law of Sexual and Reproductive Freedom, and Again May Threaten It,” Yale Law Journal 134 (forthcoming 2024), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4761751 (accessed June 11, 2024).

7 Sohn, Man Who Hated Women, 21.

8 Werbel, Lust on Trial, 21.

9 Giesberg, Sex and the Civil War, 68–69.

10 Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 45.

11 Sohn, Man Who Hated Women, 61.

12 For an overview of the impacts of the Comstock Act and problems of enforcement, see Brodie, Janet Farrell, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; Wayne E. Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2002)Google Scholar; Tone, Andrea, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001)Google Scholar.

13 Act of Mar. 3, 1873, ch. 258, 17 Stat. 598, 598–99.

14 Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 145.

15 Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 148.

16 On the variety of elements that the implementation of Comstock’s regime required, see Escoffier, Jeffrey, Strub, Whitney, and Colgan, Jeffrey Patrick, “The Comstock Apparatus” in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality and Governance in Modern U.S. History, ed. Canaday, Margot, Cott, Nancy F., and Self, Robert O. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 41–64 Google Scholar.

17 Dennett, Mary Ware, Birth Control Laws, Shall We Keep Them, Change Them, or Abolish Them (New York: F. H. Hitchcock, 1926)Google Scholar; Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “The Comstock Apparatus,” 48–52; Bailey, Martha, “‘Momma’s Got the Pill’: How Anthony Comstock and Griswold v. Connecticut Shaped U.S. Childbearing,” American Economic Review 100 (Mar. 2010): 104–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brooks, Carol Flora, “The Early History of the Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut,” American Quarterly 18 (Spring 1966): 3–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While historians have hypothesized that Comstock and colleagues in anti-vice societies played an important role in lobbying for the state laws, relatively little evidence about the public and legislative debates surrounding the laws’ passage survives. See, for example, Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, 266, 349 n.37.

18 Escoffier, Strub, and Colgan, “The Comstock Apparatus,” 52–53. On Boston’s society, see Kemeny, Paul Charles, The New England Watch and Ward Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

19 Alison M. Parker, Purifying America: The Women’s Moral Reform Movement and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Wheeler, Leigh Ann, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

20 Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 15–16, 153; Elizabeth Bainum Hovey, “Stamping out Smut: The Enforcement of Obscenity Laws, 1872–1915” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), 17 n.35.

21 Sex reformer Ida Craddock was another notable target of the Comstock laws. See Shirley J. Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873–1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (Apr. 1993): 1–16; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar; Silberman, Marsha, “The Perfect Storm: Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago Sex Radicals: Moses Harman, Ida Craddock, Alice Stockham and the Comstock Obscenity Laws,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 102 (Fall–Winter 2009): 324–67Google Scholar.

22 See Beisel, Imperiled Innocents, 104–27; Hovey, “Stamping out Smut,” 215–32; Werbel, Lust on Trial, 293–94.

23 Some examples include Deer, Sarah, The Beginning and the End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jagodinsky, Katrina, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Theobald, Brianna, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Molina, Natalia, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Stern, Alexandra Minna, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shah, Nayan, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sex, and the Law in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Feimster, Crystal N., Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Hunter, Tera W., Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Owens, Deirdre Cooper, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018)Google Scholar; Rosen, Hannah, Terror In the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 On the broad reach of anti-miscegenation laws, see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For an example of work that demonstrates the influence of Comstock laws on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, see Murillo, Lina-Maria, “Birth Control, Border Control: The Movement for Contraception in El Paso, Texas, 1936–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 90 (Summer 2021): 314–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Werbel, Lust on Trial, 297–98.

26 Fawcett, James Waldo, ed., Jailed for Birth Control: The Trial of William Sanger, September 10, 1915 (New York: Birth Control Review, 1917)Google Scholar.

27 On early efforts to mobilize resistance, see Dienes, C. Thomas, Law, Politics, and Birth Control (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 68–69 Google Scholar. See also Engelman, Peter C., A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: ABC-CLIO, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCann, Carole R., Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Reed, James, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, 1978)Google Scholar; Wheeler, Leigh Ann, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

28 Thompson, Lauren MacIvor and O’Donnell, Kelly, “Contemporary Comstockery: Legal Restrictions on Medication Abortion,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 37 (June 2022): 2566 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Brooks, “Early History of the Anti-Contraceptive Laws in Massachusetts and Connecticut,” 22; Weinrib, Laura, “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech,” Law and History Review 30 (May 2012): 341–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 “Application of the Comstock Act to the Mailing of Prescription Drugs That Can Be Used for Abortions,” 46 Op. O.L.C. (Dec. 23, 2022), 5–9, https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/file/1560596/dl?inline (accessed June 10, 2024); Cohen, David S., Donley, Greer, and Rebouché, Rachel, “Abortion Pills,” Stanford Law Review 76 (Feb. 2024): 342–43Google Scholar; Weinrib, “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties”; Wheeler, How Sex Became A Civil Liberty, 39–60.

30 United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737, 739–40 (2d. Cir. 1936).

31 The vagaries of state-level anti-obscenity laws are an area ripe for further exploration. Generally, however, see Dienes, Law, Politics, and Birth Control, 116–47; Garrow, David J., Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar.

32 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). On the historical and legal backdrop to Griswold, see Garrow; Liberty and Sexuality; Johnson, John W., Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and The Constitutional Right to Privacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar; Siegel, Neil S. and Siegel, Reva B., “Contraception as a Sex Equality Right,” Yale Law Journal Forum 124 (Mar. 2015): 349–58Google Scholar.

33 Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

34 On this and subsequent statutory revisions, see Cohen, Donley, and Rebouché, “Abortion Pills,” 343–44.

35 Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 481–89 (1957); Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 22–24 (1973). For more on the doctrinal development of obscenity law, see Whitney Strub, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013).

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