Download or read book Lust on Trial written by Amy Werbel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 589 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Comstock was America’s first professional censor. From 1873 to 1915, as Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock led a crusade against lasciviousness, salaciousness, and obscenity that resulted in the confiscation and incineration of more than three million pictures, postcards, and books he judged to be obscene. But as Amy Werbel shows in this rich cultural and social history, Comstock’s campaign to rid America of vice in fact led to greater acceptance of the materials he deemed objectionable, offering a revealing tale about the unintended consequences of censorship. In Lust on Trial, Werbel presents a colorful journey through Comstock’s career that doubles as a new history of post–Civil War America’s risqué visual and sexual culture. Born into a puritanical New England community, Anthony Comstock moved to New York in 1868 armed with his Christian faith and a burning desire to rid the city of vice. Werbel describes how Comstock’s raids shaped New York City and American culture through his obsession with the prevention of lust by means of censorship, and how his restrictions provided an impetus for the increased circulation and explicitness of “obscene” materials. By opposing women who preached sexual liberation and empowerment, suppressing contraceptives, and restricting artistic expression, Comstock drew the ire of civil liberties advocates, inspiring more open attitudes toward sexual and creative freedom and more sophisticated legal defenses. Drawing on material culture high and low, including numerous examples of the “obscenities” Comstock seized, Lust on Trial provides fresh insights into Comstock’s actions and motivations, the sexual habits of Americans during his era, and the complicated relationship between law and cultural change.
Download or read book Outlawed written by Charles Gallaudet Trumbull and published by Scott Matthew Dix. This book was released on 2013-03-02 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man fought the battle for national purity... and won. By the 1870’s, a young Anthony Comstock arrived in New York City in the middle of the Second Industrial Revolution. America was changing. As the world’s first billion dollar company was being formed, rural families flocked to the city and immigration exploded. New technologies coupled with metropolitan anonymity enabled the rapid spread of obscenity, contraception, and abortion. Insufficient laws had not caught up to new challenges and Comstock saw how these vices would have a detrimental effect on the family and American culture if not properly checked. At the age 28, he made an unconditional surrender of his life to the will of God; he gave up his personal ambitions and took God’s will for himself, no matter what might be the cost. He entered the fight. He began by making citizen’s arrests and incredibly within a year he found himself in Washington, DC meeting with congressmen and drafting the Postal Act of 1873. The Comstock Act, as it soon came to be known, passed in dramatic fashion during the final hours of the 42nd Congress and Comstock himself was shortly thereafter surprised with an appointment to be its chief enforcer with the newly created office of U.S. Post Office Special Agent. Thus, Comstock embarked on the life work in which he would serve for the next 42. This thrilling and remarkable story tell the account of how Anthony Comstock fought the battle for national purity and won. “Fear thou not; for I am with thee. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.” (Isaiah 41:10; 54: 17)
Download or read book The Man Who Hated Women written by Amy Sohn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.
Download or read book The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder written by Robert Corn-Revere and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the importance of free speech in America by telling the stories of its chief antagonists - the censors.
Download or read book Imperiled Innocents written by Nicola Kay Beisel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral reform movements claiming to protect children began to emerge in the United States over a century ago, most notably when Anthony Comstock and his supporters crusaded to restrict the circulation of contraception, information on the sexual rights of women, and "obscene" art and literature. Much of their rhetoric influences debates on issues surrounding children and sexuality today. Drawing on Victorian accounts of pregnant girls, prostitutes, Free Lovers, and others deemed "immoral," Nicola Beisel argues that rhetoric about the moral corruption of children speaks to an ongoing parental concern: that children will fail to replicate or exceed their parents' social position. The rhetoric of morality, she maintains, is more than symbolic and goes beyond efforts to control mass behavior. For the Victorians, it tapped into the fear that their own children could fall prey to vice and ultimately live in disgrace. In a rare analysis of Anthony Comstock's crusade with the New York and New England Societies for the Suppression of Vice, Beisel examines how the reformer worked on the anxieties of the upper classes. One tactic was to link moral corruption with the flood of immigrants, which succeeded in New York and Boston, where minorities posed a political threat to the upper classes. Showing how a moral crusade can bring a society's diffuse anxieties to focus on specific sources, Beisel offers a fresh theoretical approach to moral reform movements.
Download or read book Traps for the Young written by Anthony Comstock and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Frauds Exposed written by Anthony Comstock and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sex and the Constitution Sex Religion and Law from America s Origins to the Twenty First Century written by Geoffrey R. Stone and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 935 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A “volume of lasting significance” that illuminates how the clash between sex and religion has defined our nation’s history (Lee C. Bollinger, president, Columbia University). Lauded for “bringing a bracing and much-needed dose of reality about the Founders’ views of sexuality” (New York Review of Books), Geoffrey R. Stone’s Sex and the Constitution traces the evolution of legal and moral codes that have legislated sexual behavior from America’s earliest days to today’s fractious political climate. This “fascinating and maddening” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) narrative shows how agitators, moralists, and, especially, the justices of the Supreme Court have navigated issues as divisive as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception. Overturning a raft of contemporary shibboleths, Stone reveals that at the time the Constitution was adopted there were no laws against obscenity or abortion before the midpoint of pregnancy. A pageant of historical characters, including Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, enliven this “commanding synthesis of scholarship” (Publishers Weekly) that dramatically reveals how our laws about sex, religion, and morality reflect the cultural schisms that have cleaved our nation from its founding.
Download or read book Family Limitation written by Margaret H. Sanger and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family Limitation By Margaret H. Sanger Revised - Sixth Edition 1917 A Classic American Family Planning Booklet Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States. Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion, although Planned Parenthood did not begin providing abortions until 1970, after Sanger had already died. Sanger, who has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics, remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.
Download or read book The Future of Another Timeline written by Annalee Newitz and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A revolution is happening in speculative fiction, and Annalee Newitz is leading the vanguard."--Wil Wheaton From Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, comes a story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love. 1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too. 2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost. Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline? Praise for The Future of Another Timeline: "An intelligent, gut-wrenching glimpse of how tiny actions, both courageous and venal, can have large consequences. Smart and profound on every level.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) "You close the book reeling with questions about your own life and your part in changing the future."—Amy Acker, actress (Angel and Person of Interest) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth century America written by Janet Farrell Brodie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from a wide range of private and public sources, examines how American families gradually found access to taboo information and products for controlling the size of their families from the 1830s to the 1890s when a puritan backlash made most of it illegal. Emphasizes the importance of two shadowy networks, medical practitioners known as Thomsonians and water-curists, and iconoclastic freethinkers.
Download or read book A History of the Birth Control Movement in America written by Peter C. Engelman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.
Download or read book My Notorious Life written by Kate Manning and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In the end, they celebrated. They bragged. They got me finally, was their feeling. They said I would take my secrets to the grave. They should be so lucky.' Defiant and daring, Axie Muldoon claws her way from the streets up to the dizzying heights of New York society. But as her fame grows and her name hits the headlines, her reputation as the most scandalous midwife of her time begins to threaten everything she holds dear. And one crusading official will not rest until he has brought about the downfall of 'Madame X'. It will take all of Axie's cunning to save both herself and those she loves from ruin...
Download or read book Morals Versus Art written by Anthony Comstock and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morals versus Art by Anthony Comstock Comstock was a fervent advocate of Victorian morality and led a campaign to ce3nsor things he considered vulgar or offensive. His book, Morals versus Art, he describes as an attempt to decide what is lewd, obscene or impure in terms of the law.
Download or read book Debate on Birth Control written by Margaret Sanger and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Obscenity and the Law written by Norman St. John-Stevas and published by London : Secker & Warburg. This book was released on 1956 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The New England Watch and Ward Society written by Paul Charles Kemeny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By suppressing obscene literature, gambling, and prostitution, the moral reform organization embodied Protestant efforts to shape public morality in an increasing intellectually and culturally diverse society.
