-George Bernard Shaw

Sexually correct history considers the graphic depiction of sex to be the traditional and immutable enemy of women's freedom. Exactly the opposite is true.

Historically, feminism and pornography have been fellow travelers on the rocky road of unorthodoxy. This partnership was natural, perhaps inevitable. After all, both feminism and pornography flout the conventional notion that sex is necessarily connected to marriage or procreation. Both view women as sexual beings who should pursue their sexuality for pleasure and self-fulfillment. Indeed, most of feminism's demands have been phrased in terms of women's sexuality: equal marriage, lesbianism, birth control, abortion, gender justice....

In the nineteenth century, critics of feminism yelled from pulpits and soapboxes that feminists were corrupting the sanctity of the family and motherhood. Similar charges were also hurled at pornography, then called "obscenity." A century later, rightwing critics of feminism and pornography sound strangely similar to their early counterparts. Perhaps this sort of criticism endures because it contains truth. Both feminism and pornography do call the traditional institutions and assumptions of sexuality into question.

The similarity does not end here. Both feminism and pornography flourish in an atmosphere of tolerance, where questions are encouraged and differing attitudes are respected. Not surprisingly, both feminism and pornography are suppressed whenever sexual expression is regulated.

The current backlash of censorship is an alliance between the Moral Majority (the Right) and the politically correct (the Left). This alliance is threatening the freedom of both women and sexual expression. The Right defines the explicit depiction of sex as evil; the Left defines it as violence against women. The result is the same.

The censorship net has been cast so widely that feminist classics, such as Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will, are in the same peril as such porn icons as Debbie Does Dallas. This is inevitable. Both works address the same theme: sexual freedom in a sexually repressive world. They merely arrive at antagonistic conclusions.

Why are feminists linking hands with the Right? Perhaps they believe themselves to be in a position of power, at last. Perhaps they dream of having their view of sex become the status quo.

It is a realistic hope. Radical feminists have been successful in establishing sexual correctness as a form of orthodoxy in the university system, where no one currently dares to question concepts like sexual harassment. The media now censors itself to avoid sexually incorrect references. The workplace has turned into halls of paranoia. Anti-pornography feminists have good reason to believe they have a shot at becoming the new power structure.

Meanwhile, pornography is left as a lonely voice to depict the less popular sexual choices that women have available to them. Feminists desperately need to reacquaint themselves with their own history. What passes for feminist scholarship these days has too often been filtered through ideology. Feminists must come to terms with two of the important lessons that history has taught over and over again:

Freedom of speech is the freedom to demand change. It will always benefit those who seek to reform society far more than those who wish to maintain the status quo.

Recently, some scholars have seemed more receptive to the rather commonsense idea that there could be a connection between sexual liberty and women's rights. They have considered the possibility that denying one may hinder the other. A proximate cause for this may be the much-quoted scholarly book by Judith Walkowitz, which examined the Contagious Disease Acts passed in nineteenth-century Britain. [1] These laws were ostensibly intended to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the military. They were also viewed as a means of protecting women (especially young girls) from prostitution by regulating that profession.

The result was disastrous for poor working women.

In 1864, the British Parliament passed the first of the three statutes collectively known as the Contagious Disease Acts. This law mandated "the sanitary (or surgical inspection" of women suspected of being prostitutes in specific military areas of southern England and Ireland. Since the Act affected few people -- and was only expected to inconvenience whores -- it aroused little public comment. People did not seem bothered by the fact that diseased women were confined, while diseased soldiers were returned to duty.

The main difficulty in enforcing the law lay in deciding precisely who was a prostitute and who wasn't. After all, this was a period of history during which servant girls and other laboring women commonly sold their bodies on the side in order to supplement their starvation wages. The solution: The police were given unlimited power to pick up any and every female they consider suspicious.

In the wake of two other Contagious Disease Acts (1866, 1868), prostitution became virtually a state-run industry. The government issued cards to women who were medically checked our and "registered." Then, they were allowed to work the streets. With unlimited powers of arrest, plainclothes policemen picked up women at random. Often, the police proceeded on the basis of gossip or reports from people who had grudges. Women who refused to be surgically examined could be detained at the magistrate's discretion and imprisoned at hard labor. Of course, a well-placed bribe or sexual favor could work miracles.

In the guise of protecting vulnerable women, the law created card-carrying prostitutes, who were at the mercy of the authorities. Girls who used to worry about white slavers now dreaded being sexually abused by the police.

In this campaign, feminists stood side-by-side with those who had been their loudest critics, Anglican bishops. There was no question: Hideous sexual abuses were occurring. But the solution that evolved did not punish those who forced women or girls into prostitution; it regulated the women who were in the profession. Police yanked suspected prostitutes off the street at will, and subjected them to humiliating internal exams.

Such methods lead to the conclusion that the state wanted to control women, rather than to protect them. (This is similar to the situation with pornography today, where the thrust is not to prosecute the individuals who truly coerce women, but to regulate the industry. This is not protection; it is control.)

The bill was used to control the "bad" habits of the working class, especially their social and sexual habits. For example, under the Bill, "fairs" were banned. These were traditional entertainments where working class men and women socialized freely. The fairs were said to ruin girls, who then brought disease and immorality into the well-to-do homes where they worked as servants.

The social-purity crusade was essentially conservative in nature. It represented a retreat from earlier progress toward women's sexual freedom and equality. Yet few reformers raised so much as a whisper against this brutalization of working-class women.

The French radical Yves Guyot could not understand how anyone who believed women were capable of determining their own best interests could dictate to those who "erred." He remarked: "It is no less strange that many of the very women who have braved insult and calumny in demanding these rights were among the first and loudest supporters of the measure for their furthest restriction."[2]

A century later, Judith Walkowitz asked a similar question: "Why did male and female repealers, who were advocates of personal rights, anti-statist in their political ideology, and even knowledgeable of the realities of working-class prostitution, permit themselves to be swept up in a movement with such repressive political implications?" [3]

An equally good question is: Why are reformers doing so now?

Anti-pornography feminists need not look across an ocean to find dramatic confirmation of the relationship between sexual freedom and women's rights. Nineteenth-century America provides its own cautionary tale.

In the social turbulence following the Civil War, thousands of men and women enlisted in a purity campaign. They sought to establish a single standard of sexual morality for both sexes. This was not a drive for greater freedom; it was a puritanical campaign to narrow the choices of individuals down to socially acceptable ones.

These crusaders considered a free and open sexuality to be a reflection of the selfish appetites of men, who disrespected women. After all, women were naturally chaste. They were the mothers and the wives and the cornerstone of the church. Purity -the curbing of men's appetites-required social control. Thus, the purity crusaders rallied for laws against prostitution, alcohol, and pornography-then called obscenity.

Many female and male reformers climbed on the purity bandwagon. In doing so, they destroyed a small but growing feminist movement. That movement was virtually the only voice of its time crying out for women's sexual rights. It focused on the twin goals of marriage reform and the distribution of birth control.

The story of how this movement was coldly killed is one of the most tragic episodes in feminist history. Yet it has been virtually ignored by modern feminist scholars. The tale is as follows:

By 1865-the year the Civil War ended-the U.S. Congress had adopted its first law barring obscenity from the U.S. mails. The mailing of obscenity was officially declared to be a criminal offense. But there was an enforcement problem: The post office had no legal right to refuse to deliver anything. Penalties could be imposed only after the obscene material had gone through the mail. This was awkward, both legally and tactically.

In 1868, the New York branch of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) began to urge the state legislature to outlaw "the traffic in obscenity" in order to keep corrupting material out of the hands of impressionable young men. In this cause, the YMCA found a zealous champion named Anthony Comstock.

Born in 1844, Comstock was one of ten children-three of whom died before reaching majority. One might think this background would make Comstock pro-birth control. But Comstock was deeply religious and seemed to blame man's animal nature, rather than poor medical techniques, for his family's tragedies.

A passionate rejection of sexuality led Comstock to attack the dime novels, popular in his day, as "devil-traps for the young." Indeed, one of his early slogans was "Books Are Feeders for Brothels."

Affluent members of the YMCA provided their crusader with an annual salary of $3,000 plus expenses. This allowed him to quit his employment as a dry-goods clerk and devote full time to anti-obscenity work.

Comstock spent his days tracking down those who dealt in books that offended him. Then, he arranged for their arrest. But his jurisdiction extended only to the borders of New York State. To get at the publishers of obscenity-the source of the vileness! -Comstock needed a federal law that let him cross state lines. In 1872, the Committee for the Suppression of Vice was founded in New York, with Comstock as its agent. (The "Committee" later became the "Society.") Together with the YMCA, the Committee pushed for a sweeping federal law.

Comstock went to Washington, D.C., where he vigorously lobbied in the halls of Congress. Like some current anti-pornography crusaders, Comstock carried pornographic displays with him, with which he shocked and manipulated people's sensibilities. He must have put on a good show, because what came to be known as the Comstock Act passed at two a.m. Sunday March 2, 1873. The Act was pushed through in a rowdy closing session of Congress, with less than one hour of debate. Through this legislation, Congress amended the United States criminal code to prohibit the transport by public mail of material that included the following:

Birth control information was now obscene. The Act provided for up to ten years' imprisonment for anyone who knowingly mailed or received such "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" printed and graphic material.

A series of state laws modeled on the federal one quickly ensued. Every state but New Mexico took some form of action. Twenty-four states passed legislation that banned contraceptive information and devices from the public mails, and from being circulated through private publication. Fourteen states banned speech on the subject. Connecticut prohibited people from using birth control. Collectively, these became known as the Comstock laws.

Meanwhile, the post office assumed independent powers of censorship and confiscation. And Congress appointed Comstock as a special agent of the post office to inspect mail and to hunt down those who violated federal standards of what was mailable. The Society for the Suppression of Vice-which Comstock headed until his death in 1915-received a large chunk of every fine collected from these prosecutions.

Using blatant entrapment, the purity crusader racked up a large list of "victories." With no due process, postal officials confiscated, refused to accept, or simply destroyed any mail they didn't like. Postmaster General Wanamaker interpreted "obscenity" in very broad terms indeed: For example, he declared a book by the Christian pacifist Leo Tolstoy to be obscene. Comstock's major target, however, was contraception, which he associated with prostitution.

Comstock zealously pursued birth control advocates. Using false signatures, he wrote decoy letters that asked for information. These letters appealed to the sympathy of doctors and reformers in order to entrap them. At one point, he arrested a woman doctor for selling him a syringe to be used for birth control-a syringe that was legally available in any drugstore. By January 1874, Comstock had traveled 23,500 miles by rail, seized 194,000 obscene pictures and photos, 134,000 pounds of books, 14,200 stereo plates, 5,500 decks of playing cards, had made 55 arrests, secured 20 convictions, and seized 60,300 "obscene rubber items."

Soon, he started to run out of birth control advocates to persecute. Reformers fell silent rather than become targets. Books that discussed birth control before 1873 simply removed these sections from later editions. Even periodicals that were sympathetic to women's sexual rights refused to back birth control in print.

Those brave enough to protest Comstock's methods were ignored. For example, in February 1878, the influential Liberal League presented Congress with a petition 2,100 feet long bearing 70,000 names. It protested the Comstock Act. The petition was tabled.

Many of the Comstock laws are still in force today. Contraception was not removed from the postal prohibition list until 1971, after four years of effort by Representative James H. Scheuer of New York. He became involved in this cause when a U.S. customs officer made one of Scheuer's constituents throw her diaphragm into the harbor before allowing her to re-enter the country.

The real tragedy of the Comstock laws is best appreciated by looking at how it devastated the lives of the brave reformers both male and female-who tried to better the lot of women.

For most of the nineteenth century, women were the chattel of their husbands. Men had legal title to their wives' property and wages, to children, and even to their wives' bodies. Women could be locked away in insane asylums at the discretion of their husbands or other male relatives. They had no voice in government. They could not enter into contracts without their husband's consent. Even labor unions shut out the most needy of workers: women. Those seats of enlightenment-the universities-locked their doors against women who dared to ask for knowledge. To be a woman was to be powerless.

Before the Civil War, a vibrant feminist movement arose to address the abysmal condition of women.

Feminism in America, as an organized self-conscious force, grew out of the abolitionist movement of the 1830s. Here women played prominent roles as lecturers, writers, and political organizers. Abolitionism was the radical anti-slavery movement that demanded an immediate cessation to slavery on the grounds that every human being is a self-owner. In other words, every human being has moral jurisdiction over his or her own body.

Abolitionist women began to ask themselves how much better off they were than slaves. The anti-slavery feminist Abbie Kelly observed: "We have good cause to be grateful to the slave, for the benefit we have received to ourselves, in working for him. In striving to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves." [5]

And, in case anyone missed the parallel being drawn between slavery and the condition of women, the Grimke sisters-Sarah and Angelina-explicitly compared the two. Sarah began by quoting the foremost legal authority of the day, judge Blackstone, who declared: "If the wife be injured in her person or property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband's concurrence, and in his name as well as her own."'

Sarah went on to observe: "[T]his law is similar to the law respecting slaves: `A slave cannot bring suit against his master or any other person for an injury-his master must bring it.' "

Sarah also compared a Louisiana law that said everything possessed by a slave belonged to his master with a law that said, "A woman's personal property by marriage becomes absolutely her husband's which, at his death, he may leave entirely from her." [6]

The issue that united the anti-slavery and feminist movements was a demand for the right of every human being to control his or her own body and property. This same principle is the core of individualist feminism today.

The Civil War derailed the drive for women's rights. Women were explicitly asked to put aside their own complaints and fight for a larger cause: freedom for the slaves through victory for the North. After the War, when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution passed Congress, women were left out in the political cold. The Fourteenth Amendment ensured the right to vote to every law-abiding male American (excluding Native Americans). The Fifteenth Amendment assured that the right to vote could not be abridged because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Not sex. Women were omitted from both Amendments.

Abolitionist feminists had also believed in purity, but for them it had to emerge from the purity of an individual's conscience; social-purity feminists seemed quite willing to enforce morality by law.

Other radicals fought for sexual rights, for freedom rather than for purity. This movement offered an ideological home for those who believed in self-ownership: a woman's body, a woman's right. It was called free love.

The free-love movement is best remembered by a witticism from the twentieth-century radical Emma Goldman. When asked if she believed in free love, Emma retorted, "I certainly don't believe in paying for it." The theory of free love, however, is a bit more complicated than this response implies.

The philosophy of free love has no connection with promiscuity. For example, the banner flying over a nineteenth-century free-love community in Ohio proclaimed, "Freedom, Fraternity, Chastity." Why was such a chaste community considered a haven for free-lovers? Because it lived by the principle that no coercion should exist in sexual relations between adults. Freelovers vehemently denied the state had any right to intervene in the sexual arrangements of consenting adults. They focused on empowering the weakest and most abused partner in sex: the woman.

There were two keys to securing sexual rights for women. The first was to reform the marriage laws, which gave husbands almost absolute authority over their wives. Marriage-free-lovers insisted-should be a voluntary and equal association between two people who shared a spiritual affinity.

The second key was access to birth control information and devices.

As Comstock tried to push the door closed on women's sexuality, the free-love movement tried to take that door off its hinges. Although it is not politically correct to acknowledge the fact, two of the most courageous figures in the fight for women's freedom were white males: Ezra Heywood and Moses Harman. Both men were destroyed because they tried to help women.

The Heywoods and The Word

Ezra H. Heywood was an abolitionist and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. In 1865, he married Angela Fiducia Tilton. Although they were a devoted couple with four children, Ezra and Angela became convinced that marriage was the single greatest obstacle to true love. Indeed, the Heywoods considered traditional marriage to be prostitution. They reasoned: Men had reduced women to such socioeconomic dependence that, in order to live, the women were forced to chose between selling their labor for next to nothing or selling their bodies into unwanted unions.

In 1872, Ezra launched his periodical, The word, from Princeton, Massachusetts, as a vehicle for labor` reform. The Prospectus of The Word declared, "THE WORD favors the abolition of speculative income, of women's slavery, and war government. . . ." Almost from the beginning, The Word had a wide circulation with subscribers in every state of the union, as well as internationally. The Heywoods began with the declared intention of rescuing women from economic subordination; but, slowly, The Word was drawn deeper and deeper into the free-love issue. Soon, it began to focus on sexual freedom in a direct and candid manner that can be directly attributed to Angela.

Angela's style was a strange blend of flowery language and a no-holds-barred bluntness. Although she wrote with an idealistic flourish, she did not blush at using the word fuck in print. Angela shocked nineteenth-century sensibilities when she wrote, "Sexuality is a divine ordinance elegantly natural from an eye-glance to the vital action of the penis and womb, in personal exhilaration or for reproductive uses."

As for women's pleasure, she insisted that if a woman "duly gives to man who cometh in unto her, as freely, as equally, as well as he give her, how shall she be abashed or ashamed of the innermost?" Angela also provided what is perhaps the first defense of abortion solely on the basis of self-ownership, thus breaking intellectual ground for the principle "a woman's body, a woman's right." [8]

The Heywoods established The Co-operative Publishing Company, from which they launched a full frontal attack on marriage. In 1873, they founded the New England Free Love League and began to date their correspondence and writings with the chronological designation Y.L., "Year of Love."

Then, in 1876, the Company put out another pamphlet entitled Cupid's Yokes, subtitled The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life: An Essay to Consider Some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein Is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Government. The distribution of this twenty-three-page essay has been estimated variously at from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand. The term "Cupid's Yokes" referred to the healthy ties of love that should replace a legal certificate as the true evidence of marriage. Ezra also argued for birth control and called for the immediate repeal of the Comstock laws. He even ridiculed the august Anthony Comstock as "a religious monomaniac."

Indeed, Ezra seemed to delight in ridiculing Comstock. At one point, The Word offered a contraceptive device for sale-a vaginal-douche syringe-which was called the Comstock syringe.

Using the false name of E. Edgewell, Comstock wrote to the Heywoods and ordered a copy of Cupid's Yokes to entrap the editor. This was one of a series of letters that Comstock addressed to Ezra.

On November 3, 1877, while speaking in Boston, Ezra was personally arrested by Comstock. The purity crusader recorded his reaction at having to sit in the audience, listening to the meeting's proceedings, while he awaited the right moment to bag his prize:

"I could see lust in every face.... The wife of the president [Ezra] (the person I was after) took the stand, and delivered the foulest address I ever heard. She seemed lost to all shame. The audience cheered and applauded. It was too vile; I had to go out." [9]

Ezra was charged with circulating obscene material through the mail. At the commencement of the trial, the prosecution held that Cupid's Yokes was too obscene to be placed upon the records of the court. Thus, the obscenity of the pamphlet was assumed when the trial started. The court also forbade any investigation into the purpose or merits of the work, as well as any medical or scientific testimony.

On June 25, 1878, Ezra Heywood was sentenced to pay a $100 fine and to be confined for two years at hard labor. On August 1, six thousand people demonstrated in Faneuil Hall in Boston. They demanded the editor's release and the repeal of the Comstock laws. After serving six months, Ezra was released under a special pardon from President Hayes. Comstock was outraged; he renewed his determination to stop Cupid's Yokes from circulating.

His next target became D. M. Bennett-editor of the freethought periodical Truth Seeker-who flouted the Comstock laws by advertising Cupid's Yokes.

The Bennett case-U.S. versus Bennett (1879) [10]--rewrote American obscenity law, because it introduced the Hicklin standard to American jurisprudence. The Hicklin standard for obscenity derived from a decision in the British court case Regina versus Hicklin (1868). [11] Under this standard, anything that tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was considered to be obscene. The Hicklin standard would remain the basis of American obscenity law for more than half a century.

Persecutions only made Ezra harden his stand. In 1882, he was again arrested for distributing Cupid's Yokes along with other "obscene" materials, including two of Walt Whitman's poems. He was acquitted on April 12, 1883, then quickly arrested again for distributing an essay written by Angela, which argued for birth control.

This obscenity charge, along with one in 1887, was never prosecuted, largely due to public protest. Then, in 1890, The Word reprinted a letter from the free-love periodical Lucifer, the Light Bearer- a letter which had occasioned the trial of Lucifer's editor, Moses Harman, on charges of mailing obscenity.

Heywood was arrested and indicted on three counts of obscenity. He was sentenced to two years at hard labor, which he served in its entirety. Released in poor health, Ezra Heywood died a year later, on May 22, 1893, after catching a cold.

The Word ceased publication. It had been killed by those who sought to control sexual expression.

It was left t6 Moses Harman, publisher of Lucifer, the Light Bearer, and the circle of courageous reformers who gathered about him, to continue the fight for women's sexual rights.

The Lucifer Circle

On a hot June Sunday in 1879, the widower Moses Harman and his two children, George and Lillian, arrived in the sleepy Midwestern town of Valley Falls, Kansas. The small town would become a center of sexual reform in America. Although his neighbors must have initially approved of Harman's respectable appearance and well-mannered ways, they soon saw a more controversial side of the man. For Moses Harman was an uncompromising crusader for free love and against what he labeled the Twin Despots: the paternalistic state and the church.

In his private life, Harman was something of a prude, but he insisted that everyone be free to make decisions concerning sex without requiring permission from a church or the state. In particular, he demanded uncontrolled access to birth control, and marriage by contract.

In 1883, Harman began publishing a periodical entitled Lucifer, the Light Bearer (1883-1907). The paper was so named because it was Lucifer, not God, who offered man the knowledge of good and evil. Like Prometheus, Lucifer brought light to man; like Prometheus; he became an outcast for doing so. Lucifer was the first political rebel; he questioned the status quo of authority called God.

Lucifer quickly became the outstanding journal of sexual liberty of its day. It almost defined the limits of sexual freedom in late nineteenth-century America.

Lucifer also became a prime target of Anthony Comstock, who bristled at the periodical's open discussion of birth control, and of forced marital sex as rape. Although Harman knew the risk involved in addressing such issues, he maintained: "Words are not deeds, and it is not the province of civil law to take preventative measures against remote or possible consequences of words, no matter how violent or incendiary." [12]

On February 23, 1887, a federal marshal arrived in Valley Falls to arrest the staff of Lucifer on 270 counts of obscenity, which resulted from its publication of four letters to the editor. The number of counts was somewhat arbitrary, since Lucifer was considered too obscene to be read before a judge or jury. Harman responded by reprinting the letters along with a passage from the Old Testament, which portrayed incest, harlotry, and coitus interruptus. He did this in the hope of having the Bible declared obscene. (His efforts carne to naught. Not until 1895, when J. B. Wise mailed a postcard inscribed with a salty verse, was the Bible declared legally obscene.)

The charges sprang from a policy Moses Harman had initiated in the spring of 1886. Harman vowed not to edit letters sent to Lucifer because of the language they contained. Although Harman did not agree with everything he printed, he thought free speech vented whatever evil lay in the hearts of men and women.

In the June 18 issue, a letter appeared from a Tennessee doctor, W. G. Markland. Because of its historical importance the Markland letter is quoted here extensively:

The second offending letter was a protest against contraceptives on the grounds that they removed an obstacle to husbands who wished to have sex: namely, the fear of another mouth to feed. The third letter retold an anecdote about a couple who thought the world was ending and, therefore, told each other about their sexual improprieties. A fourth one discussed the relative virtues of two methods of sexual abstinence.

For these obscenities, Moses and his son George were arrested. All charges were later dropped against George.

On February 14, 1890, the unrepentant Lucifer printed a letter from a New York physician that detailed the sexual abuses he had seen in the course of his practice. The doctor's graphic accounts included a description of a man who liked to perform oral sex on other men. The letter remains one of the few nineteenth-century journalistic discussions of oral sex.

Moses Harman was sentenced to serve five years in prison and to pay a $300 fine. After serving seventeen weeks, he was released on a technicality, retried without a jury on a slightly different charge, and sentenced to one year. After eight months, he was again released on a technicality.

The renowned British playwright George Bernard Shaw lamented Harman's plight in a front-page interview in The New York Times:

Harman continued to be persecuted through the Comstock laws, even though few people believed his periodical contained anything obscene. On one occasion, for example, the postal authorities objected to the sentence, "it is natural and reasonable that a prospective mother should be exempt from the sexual relation during gestation." Ironically, this sentence had been excerpted from a book by a noted doctor, E. B. Foote-a book that was allowed to circulate freely in the mails.

At about this time, Shaw was asked why he did not visit America. He answered bluntly:

Censorship silenced women in pain. It silenced The Word and Lucifer, the Light Bearer. Today, it seeks to silence women with aberrant sexual preferences, such as bondage or exhibitionism. The result of social purity was sexual ignorance.

The Word and Lucifer were far from the only casualties of the anti-obscenity craze. The following is an abridged list, which gives no more than a sense of the extent of persecution:

• Ann Lohman, who performed abortions and dispensed birth control information, was so hounded by Comstock that she committed suicide. He bragged that she was the fifteenth person he had driven to such an end.
• Frederick Hollick, a physician, tried to popularize the rhythm method, but was discouraged from doing so by the Comstock laws.
• Edward Bliss Foote, author of Radical Remedy in Social Science (1886), and his son, Edward Bond Foote, published home medical books. The father was arrested in 1874 for mailing a pamphlet that contained contraceptive information. Because of public opinion, Foote was let off with a stiff fine.
• Elizabeth (Elmina) Drake Slenker, an elderly Quaker lady who advocated abstinence was arrested for mailing allegedly obscene material. The purported obscenity had not been published in a periodical, but enclosed within a sealed envelope.
• Lois Waisbrooker, a feminist and editor of the journal Foundation Principles, advised a correspondent to divorce a wife he did not love. For this, she was arrested under the Comstock laws.

The list could scroll on and on.

Yet these people will not be found in books of feminist history. It is difficult to imagine honest motives for ignoring the immense and courageous contributions Ezra Heywood and Moses Harman made to the well being of women.

A Test of Anti-Porn Feminist Honesty

If these ignored radicals were the only people persecuted by social purity laws, then anti-porn feminists could argue they were unaware of an historical connection between sexual freedom and women's rights. But there is at least one woman persecuted by Anthony Comstock of whom no educated feminist can be ignorant: Margaret Sanger.

Sanger first came into conflict with the Comstock laws as a result of her column entitled "What Every Girl Should Know," which ran in the socialist periodical The Call. The offending column graphically described venereal disease. In early 1913, Comstock banned it. In place of the column, The Call ran an empty box, with the headline "What Every Girl Should Know--Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office."

On October 16,1916; Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic in a storefront tenement in Brooklyn. Handbills advertising the clinic were printed in English, Yiddish, and Italian. They urged women not to have abortions, but to prevent conception in the first place. On October 26, Sanger was arrested by the vice squad for distributing contraceptive information. Released that afternoon, she re-opened the clinic. This time the police strong-armed the landlord into evicting her and closed the place down.

As Sanger was driven away in a police vehicle, she looked out the back at the crowds of poor women still standing at the door of her clinic. They had come to her for help. Sanger wrote:

"I heard ... a scream. It came from a woman wheeling a baby carriage, who had just come around the corner, preparing to visit the clinic. She saw the patrol wagon ... left the baby carriage, rushed through the crowd to the wagon and cried to me: `Come back and save me!' " [17]

In a provocative move, the first issue of her periodical, Woman Rebel announced an intention to disperse contraceptive information. When the postal authorities declared this issue "obscene," Sanger avoided having it confiscated by mailing it in small batches all over the city. As subscriptions poured in, the post office declared five other issues unmailable.

Meanwhile, Sanger prepared a pamphlet entitled Family Limitation, which provided contraceptive information. Before it could be published, the federal government indicted her for the August issue of Woman Rebel. Facing a possible forty-five years in prison, Sanger fled to England.

Before doing so, she arranged to have copies of Family Limitation printed by a radical publisher, who virtually guaranteed himself a jail term. In early 1915, Comstock personally arrested her husband, William Sanger. He was sentenced to thirty days. Ironically, his trial created a backlash of public support for birth control advocates. Fake subpoenas were sold to those who wished to sit in the extremely crowded courtroom. By the time Margaret Sanger returned to the U.S. in 1916, the political climate had changed. She was a cause celebre and the government prudently refrained from prosecuting her.

Sexual freedom-especially pornography, which is sexual free speech-is an integral part of the battle for women's freedom. The censoring of sexual words and images does not simply lead to the suppression of women's sexual rights. It is an attempt to control women themselves. For women's rights have traditionally been phrased in terms of their sexuality: marriage, abortion, and birth control. To surrender one iota of women's control over their own sexual expression is to deny that it is their sexuality in the first place.

Today, both pornography and women's sexuality are victims of sexual correctness.

Unfortunately, to those driven by ideology, history means very little.