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.
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.
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 The Comstock Act has never been repealed and remains part of Sections 1461 and 1462 in the United States Code, although many Americans have little to no idea about the details of this law, if they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.
An “Adamless Eden for Female Offenders”?: Katharine Bement Davis and the Carceral State in Progressive-Era New York
In 1912, journalist Ida Tarbell wrote an admiring article about Katharine Bement Davis, the first superintendent of New York’s Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills (commonly known as Bedford Reformatory). In keeping with the aims of women’s reformatories, Tarbell explained, Davis had made Bedford a site of rehabilitation rather than retribution. With “Good Will to Women” and “an apparently exhaustless source of cheerful energy,” Davis had instituted a program of schoolwork, physical exercise, domestic chores, religious instruction, and “a varied program of dances and entertainment.”
Con-FLU-ence: Documenting the WCTU’s Response to the 1918 Pandemic
The 1918 influenza pandemic provides an opportunity for GAPE historians to examine how health and medicine intersected with the Great War, the Progressive Era, and the movements for prohibition and woman suffrage. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was at the confluence of these streams and offers a case study of an organization whose activities were disrupted and reshaped by the pandemic. The holdings of the WCTU Archives reveal how the national organization mobilized the testimony of health experts and “viral” newspaper reports in 1918 to support its Prohibition ratification campaign and resist attempts by the producers and suppliers of alcohol to push their products as an influenza cure.
“Romanists Jeopardize Nation’s Health”: The 1918 Flu Epidemic in the Anti-Catholic Newspaper The Menace
I encountered the 1918 flu epidemic while reading a weekly from the small town of Aurora, MO: The Menace. The Menace was the most successful anti-Catholic newspaper in the 1910s: it regularly reached over one million readers. Some of the issues its news coverage of the flu raised still resonate today—conspiracy theories, fake news, sensationalism, scapegoating, fear of death, anxiety over the end of the USA and hopes for miraculous treatments—even if political targets and alliances have changed.
“The Mask Law will be Rigidly Enforced”: Ordinances, Arrests, and Celebrations during the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic
On November 15, 1918, in the midst of the influenza epidemic, C. E. Stanford, a resident of Stockton, California, openly defied the city’s mask ordinance saying, “I have never worn an influenza mask and never will. I am a healthy man now and know full well if I put one of those things on, I will get sick. I would rather stay in jail the rest of my life than wear one.”
An extended account of Stanford’s defiance provides insights into the tensions between enforcing, contesting, and evading mask ordinances. After proclaiming “that [he] had never worn a mask, was not wearing one, and would never wear one,” Stanford was “gathered in by the alert police force and forthwith confined in the county jail,” where he spent the night.
Teaching the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the Time of COVID-19, Part 2
In a previous post, I laid out what I see as some of the overarching issues that I think are important to keep in mind when teaching the influenza pandemic of 1918 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post I would like to go over some additional themes that I find particularly useful when I discuss the 1918 catastrophe with my students. As in my previous effort, my focus here is on approaches that might be helpful for general history courses that focus on the United States (as opposed to, say, classes on world history or clinically-oriented courses intended for healthcare providers). As will probably become clear, I approach the topic primarily from the perspective of a historian of medicine. I hope this post will help explain how some of the insights from my field can be applied to classes in US history more generally.
Teaching the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the Time of COVID-19, Part 1
The influenza pandemic of 1918 is often left out of history courses and other classes that cover the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has made the topic newly relevant and as a result many educators may want to add a lecture or other material on the 1918 pandemic into their courses. In this post I’d like to offer some general information about the 1918 pandemic and some suggestions about how to discuss it with students in the context of COVID-19 that might be helpful for historians and others who do not have a lot of experience with the history of medicine or public health.
Decoding the 1918 Flu
I had never heard of the 1918 influenza pandemic when my laboratory decided to try to decode the genetic sequence of the virus from archived samples at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). The year was 1995, and I was in my mid-thirties. None of my contemporaries had ever heard of the pandemic either. So what made this a compelling scientific question? Despite its obscurity (the only book we could find about it, by Alfred Crosby, was entitled America’s Forgotten Pandemic), the pandemic raised important questions: why was the mortality rate so much higher than other pandemics? Why did it particularly target young adults? Where did the virus come from?
“An Avalanche of Unexpected Sickness”: Institutions and Disease in 1918 and Today
Between August 14 and August 19, 1908, the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-minded Children at Elwyn admitted seven new “inmates,” part of the yearly influx of new arrivals before the school year began. They ranged in age from seven to twenty and received diagnoses at the highest (“high grade imbecile”) and lowest (“excitable idiot”) ends of the classification scale used by Elwyn’s superintendent, Dr. Martin Barr. During their time at Elwyn some of them learned woodworking, floor scrubbing, laundry, or chicken keeping. Their unpaid labor was crucial to the maintenance of Elwyn’s budget and staffing levels, both of which were stretched impossibly thin. Other “inmates” were deemed “helpless.”