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.
The Met Gala Was Not the Fancy Dress Ball Historians Were Hoping For
Last Monday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned to its “First Monday at May” tradition, or as it is commonly known: the Met Gala. Drawing media attention and fashionistas from around the world, the Gala is the annual fundraising event for the museum’s Costume Institute. What began as a modest dinner held outside of the museum in 1948, has turned in recent years into a mega publicity event that brings to the museum millions of dollars in donations.
HBO’s The Gilded Age: A Disappointingly One-Sided Depiction of a Complex Era
As scholars who have long been immersed in this pivotal period, we were excited to learn of the lavishly produced HBO series The Gilded Age. With the exception of the fabulously successful feature film Titanic in 1997, ours is a historical period that is often overlooked in popular culture. So we were delighted when The Gilded Age generated advance reviews in mainstream publications including the New York Times and Washington Post. We hoped it would bring attention to the period we find so important in our history, especially for the light it can shed on present day problems and issues—both how they were created and how they might be remedied.
Taxing the Bachelors
On March 18, 1907, an anonymous individual at the Fort Dodge, Iowa, city council meeting proposed an ordinance to tax all bachelors and spinsters residing in the town. The proposal, smuggled into a pile of legitimate business papers, required “all able bodied persons between the ages of 25 and 45 years, whose mental and physical propensities and capabilities are normal” to pay a tax of between 10 and 100 dollars: the longer they remained single, the more they would have to pay.
Listening to the Progressive Era Domestic Soundscape
In my doctoral dissertation “Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1877-1930,” I presented a cultural history of the early recording industry in close conversation with the so-called “New Materialisms.” Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), phenomenological philosophy, and other strains of materialist literature, I sought to make sense of the ways in which machines and other material entities exercise agency over cultural processes. How, in other words, did the early phonograph itself—with its motor and governor and nuts and bolts and belts—shape how people responded to recorded sound?
Labor Reformer George Gunton and a Progressive Era Divorce Scandal
historians. So when I came across a story of divorce and abandonment involving economist George Gunton, one of my research subjects, my work received some personal background that I didn’t expect. In piecing together newspaper reports and letters that George’s wife Amelia sent to Columbia University professor Edwin Seligman, I found out that Gunton had been illegally married to two women at the same time, deserting Amelia and leaving her nearly destitute.
“A Place Among Original Investigators:” Walter Wyckoff, Alfred Pierce, and Me
My research is on the Princeton sociologist Walter Augustus Wyckoff. Readers may recall that Wycoff gained a fair amount of fame at the turn of the 20th century through the publication of his two-volume investigation, The Workers: The East and The Workers: The West (1897, 1898). My dissertation traces the connections between Wyckoff’s work and that of authors like Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. It is also the first biography of Wyckoff. I show that Wyckoff’s motivation to investigate the working class came from the influence of his “Third-Culture Kid” (TCK) upbringing, as the son of missionaries in India.