Stellar research in women’s history, especially crucial due to recent threats to abortion rights across the country.
How the reactionary Christian ideology of one government official contributed to the suppression of women’s reproductive freedom for decades.
In this important work of biographical history, novelist Sohn traces the career of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), special agent to the U.S. Post Office and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. For more than 40 years, Comstock, a deeply Christian dry goods seller from Connecticut, harassed and imprisoned many of the important pioneers in the birth control movement. “He became convinced that obscenity, which he called a ‘hydra-headed monster,’ led to prostitution, illness, death, abortions, and venereal disease,” writes the author. In 1873, with the aid of well-heeled YMCA leaders, he was able to pass the Comstock Act, which “made the distribution, selling, possession, and mailing of obscene material and contraception punishable with extreme fines and prison sentences.” Wielding this law, he doggedly pursued freethinking, activist women and their supporters as they attempted to speak and write about women’s bodies, sexual matters, and abortion. These activists included the sisters Victoria C. Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, stockbrokers, spiritualists, and “free lovers”; Angela and Ezra Heywood, printers and writers; abortionist Ann “Madam Restell” Lohman, who committed suicide rather than be prosecuted; Dr. Sara B. Chase, who, in defiance, named her popular birth control device the “Comstock Syringe”; Ida Craddock, a spiritual consultant and writer on happy marital sex, who also killed herself when prosecuted; Emma Goldman, anarchist and birth control activist; and Margaret Sanger, who took on Comstock in court and prevailed in starting the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Throughout this immensely readable history, Sohn fashions sympathetic narratives of these women’s lives and underscores their invaluable sacrifices for a vital cause. Many readers will be appalled to learn that literature about birth control was once considered obscene.
Stellar research in women’s history, especially crucial due to recent threats to abortion rights across the country.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-17481-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An instructive history with a disturbing coda: If you want to learn about evolution, go to college.
Fox News commentator Jarrett’s account of the iconic 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial turns out to be a satisfying traditional history that celebrates the good guys.
Although widely derided, the flurry of post–World War I state laws forbidding public schools from teaching evolution enjoyed a great deal of popular support. Concerned about the effect on academic freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union ran a news release seeking a volunteer to test the newly enacted Tennessee law. The trial took place in the small town of Dayton only because local boosters believed it “would put [the town] on the map.” They persuaded high school teacher John Scopes to offer himself as defendant. News of the case made headlines, and a mass of journalists descended on the city along with celebrities, including William Jennings Bryan and legendary lawyer Clarence Darrow. With a churchgoing jury and biased judge who began the proceedings by declaiming the first chapter of Genesis, the outcome was never in doubt, but Jarrett remains firmly for the defense, praising Darrow’s and colleagues’ arguments in favor of First Amendment freedoms and opposing religious bigotry and government interference in education. To Darrow’s frustration, the judge ruled that the trial was solely to determine whether Scopes broke the law, so he refused to allow the defense to call scientists and theologians to inform the jury that evolution was not equivalent to atheism. After several frustrating days, Darrow grew discouraged, and many reporters left before he hit the jackpot cross-examining Bryan, who had volunteered to prove the literal truth of everything in the Bible and did a terrible job. Despite an upbeat conclusion, Jarrett admits that there is less in Darrow’s triumph than meets the eye. Disbelief in evolution remains common, so school boards (and publishers anxious to sell them science textbooks) treat the subject with kid gloves.
An instructive history with a disturbing coda: If you want to learn about evolution, go to college.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781982198572
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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