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The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2025
Abstract
The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for new Supreme Court abortion rulings or congressional legislation. As scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we are uniquely situated to intervene in this dialogue and ensure that contemporary conversations are grounded in historical context. We present this forum not as an exhaustive account of the Comstock Act and its architect, but as aopportunity to highlight the context in which this law, which holds so much potential relevance for our present, was created, enacted, enforced, and challenged. We hope this forum will stimulate further scholarly and public conversations around the nation’s long history of regulating reproductive rights and how that history became entangled with other social anxieties.
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- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , October 2024 , pp. 431 - 437
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 58–59.
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5 In addition to Amy Werbel’s comprehensive modern biography, other good histories of Comstock can be found in Beisel, Nicola Kay, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B., Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Giesberg, Judith, Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sohn, Amy, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)Google Scholar. Historic biographies include Broun and Leech’s Anthony Comstock, as well as Trumbull, Charles Gallaudet, Anthony Comstock, Fighter: Some Impressions of a Lifetime Adventure in Conflict with the Powers of Evil, 2nd ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913)Google Scholar.
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7 Sohn, Man Who Hated Women, 21.
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21 Sex reformer Ida Craddock was another notable target of the Comstock laws. See Shirley J. Burton, “Obscene, Lewd, and Lascivious: Ida Craddock and the Criminally Obscene Women of Chicago, 1873–1913,” Michigan Historical Review 19 (Apr. 1993): 1–16; Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar; Silberman, Marsha, “The Perfect Storm: Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago Sex Radicals: Moses Harman, Ida Craddock, Alice Stockham and the Comstock Obscenity Laws,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 102 (Fall–Winter 2009): 324–67Google Scholar.
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29 “Application of the Comstock Act to the Mailing of Prescription Drugs That Can Be Used for Abortions,” 46 Op. O.L.C. (Dec. 23, 2022), 5–9, https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/file/1560596/dl?inline (accessed June 10, 2024); Cohen, David S., Donley, Greer, and Rebouché, Rachel, “Abortion Pills,” Stanford Law Review 76 (Feb. 2024): 342–43Google Scholar; Weinrib, “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties”; Wheeler, How Sex Became A Civil Liberty, 39–60.
30 United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 F.2d 737, 739–40 (2d. Cir. 1936).
31 The vagaries of state-level anti-obscenity laws are an area ripe for further exploration. Generally, however, see Dienes, Law, Politics, and Birth Control, 116–47; Garrow, David J., Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1994)Google Scholar.
32 Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965). On the historical and legal backdrop to Griswold, see Garrow; Liberty and Sexuality; Johnson, John W., Griswold v. Connecticut: Birth Control and The Constitutional Right to Privacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005)Google Scholar; Siegel, Neil S. and Siegel, Reva B., “Contraception as a Sex Equality Right,” Yale Law Journal Forum 124 (Mar. 2015): 349–58Google Scholar.
33 Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).
34 On this and subsequent statutory revisions, see Cohen, Donley, and Rebouché, “Abortion Pills,” 343–44.
35 Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476, 481–89 (1957); Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 22–24 (1973). For more on the doctrinal development of obscenity law, see Whitney Strub, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013).
Hamlin et al. supplementary material
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