XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (10 page)

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 antipornography 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: "... [A]ny obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for unlawful abortion, or ...

advertise same for sale. . . ." [4]

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 39

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.

THE BACKGROUND OF SEXUAL REPRESSION

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 selfconscious 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 40

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: À 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.

From this point onward, feminists tended to take one of three paths toward women's rights. The mainstream reformers worked for woman's suffrage. Some radical women worked for social change as expressed through "social-purity crusades"-e.g., raising the age of consent, the reformation of prostitutes, and the censorship of obscenity. In
Woman's Body, Woman's Right,
Linda Gordon commented on this period: "The closer we look, the harder it is to distinguish social-purity groups from feminist ones. Feminists from very disparate groups were advocates of most major social purity issues. . . ." [7]

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 41

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 Cooperative 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."

In 1873, The Cooperative Publishing Company put out a pamphlet entitled
Uncivil Liberty,
which had been written by Ezra, with Angela's active assistance. It called for women's suffrage and argued that the political enfranchisement of women would lead to the social emancipation of both sexes. Eighty thousand copies of the pamphlet were distributed.

42

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.