Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. Because Restell remains best known as an abortion provider, and because Comstock succeeded in passing a federal statute that bears his name, one might assume that abortion occupied a central place in his campaign, or that Restell was arrested for performing an abortion. Neither is completely accurate. By taking the arrest of Restell as a case study, this post considers the various legal modes by which Comstock did his work, and the way he understood abortion as related to his greater campaign against obscenity and sexual license.
Targeting Victoria Woodhull: The Visual Debates that Drove Anthony Comstock’s Pursuit of the First Woman to Run for United States President
Anthony Comstock, an evangelical Christian who made it his mission to protect public morals, almost certainly imagined the woman who promoted free love as the personification of evil. He needed public support for his crusade, and this cartoon by Thomas Nast helped him win it.
Robert W. McAfee: The Comstock of Chicago
By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every state had enacted or revised some sort of anti-obscenity statute, and eight of the country’s ten largest cities had an anti-vice society. This blog post spotlights one understudied arm of the apparatus: Robert W. McAfee. Although McAfee never rivaled Comstock’s prominence in the press and in public imagination, he was instrumental to the expansion and daily operation of the Comstock regime across stretches of the Midwest, Upper South, and Great Plains.
Abortion, Contraception, and the Comstock Law’s Original Medical Exemption, 1873-1936
The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban. This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past. The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.
Comstock, Reconstruction Politics, and Moral Surveillance
It is best to think of Anthony Comstock’s campaign against vice as a response to Reconstruction that afflicted the nation long after that period was over. Comstock’s rise in the 1870s was not organic; it was backed by wealthy patrons engaged in intense political fighting over issues such as racial equality, taxation, and democracy. And although Comstock began by arresting vendors of so-called obscene goods, he soon expanded his portfolio, pursuing folks of every race and gender engaged in erotic, profane, or blasphemous correspondence.
Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws: A JGAPE Forum Preview
This blog series aims to provide vital historical context for those seeking to understand the modern revival of Anthony Comstock and his namesake law. The Comstock Act has never been repealed and remains part of Sections 1461 and 1462 in the United States Code, although many Americans have little to no idea about the details of this law, if they have even heard of it. Anthony Comstock himself seems like an odd joke today: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer and a relic of a bygone past. And yet, because the act has been revived as a strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke.