In 1873, the United States was in a period of
reconstruction. The Civil War, that had torn the country apart, had ended only
eight years earlier. President Ulysses S. Grant was beginning his second term
as president, having defeated Horace Greeley with 55.6% of the vote. The United
States had just passed the Coinage Act of 1873, placing America on the gold
standard. The day before Grant began his second term, the United States
Congress passed the Comstock Act on March 3, 1873. This act sought to censor
and make it illegal to send mail that included anything deemed, obscene, lewd
or lascivious. The historical significance of the Comstock Act on the history
of women’s healthcare is profound. Once the Comstock Act was passed, it limited
the accessibility of information about contraceptives, abortifacients and
anything else obscene, including the specifics of childbirth. The aim of the
act was to prevent these items from being sent by the United States Postal
Service.
For many, these did not have any immediate
effects, but as the twentieth century began, women wanted access to birth
control options. At the turn of the century, children began to live longer,
many more of children began to reach adulthood and this created a problem for
mothers who felt their families were growing too quickly. Advances in
healthcare made it possible for children to survive to adulthood, which
presented an unexpected issue for family planning. The United States saw a jump
between 1880 and 1900 in the life expectancy, as more than ten million United
States citizens had lived past the age of 40.[1] In
1910, the birth rate per 1000 births was 30.1, by the beginning of World War
II, this number had dropped to 19.4. When the decision of Roe v. Wade was
handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973, a full century after the Comstock Act
had passed, the birth rate had dropped to 18.4 and by 2012 the birthrate was a
mere 12.6 per 1000 births.[2]
In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act.
This made it illegal to use United States mail services to send any books,
pamphlets, letters or packages that could be deemed obscene.
J.C. Ruppenthal, a former district court judge, stated that, “In the
United States, laws relating to birth control seem to have been developed since
about 1870.”[3]
This meant that women, in a
time where they needed access to information about family planning and birth
control methods, were not going to get it, especially after the Comstock Act
passed. Unfortunately for many women, this also meant
that any information about family planning and contraceptives was now very
difficult to come by. The Comstock Act accounted for many issues in women’s
healthcare, simply because information about a woman’s body and how best to
prevent pregnancy was not seen as a fundamental right or an educational right. The
access to information about contraceptives was not there, because Comstock
believed that contraceptives would lead to a lack of consequences for lewd
actions.[4] The historical significance of Anthony
Comstock on the future of women’s healthcare is a strange one, but the evidence
suggests he negatively impacted the ability women had to access the information
that they needed for the purposes of family planning and accosted and arrested
many men and women who were disseminating any material he saw as obscene, which
included information about birth control and family planning. Comstock believed
that contraception would have a negative impact because it would allow for
people to avoid the consequences of their “immoral” behavior.
There were many women who sought to do the
opposite of what Comstock was doing. These women wanted to educate women about
their bodies, family planning and contraception. Two names that continue to
recur in studying the history of women’s healthcare, as well as adversaries of
Anthony Comstock are Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger. Sanger is perhaps
best remembered for her creation of Planned Parenthood, but despite what the
organization has become, it was created to give women access to information about
family planning, birth control and to prevent what Sanger called, “back alley
abortions.”[5] Sanger,
much like Mary Ware Dennett, knew that they would be in flagrant disregard to
the Comstock Act, but regardless of the consequences, both women felt it was
more important to provide information to women.[6] This
is something she briefly touches on in her autobiography. By the mid-1910s, Sanger
had published her pamphlet on Family Limitation and had opened the first birth
control clinic in the United States. This led to her arrest in 1916, under the
Comstock Act.[7] For Mary
Dennett Ware, her problems with Comstock also began in the 1900s. She published
her pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People, in
1915. It was a 24-page, self-published work, that aimed to provide answers for
young men about sex, pregnancy and birth control. She was angered that the
limited books her children had access to were inaccurate and wanted to make
sure that she shared her knowledge and understanding of sex to help further
early sex education and family planning initiatives.[8] By
the time she was arrested in 1928, her pamphlet had been published in many
medical journals and reviews. Anthony Comstock had passed away thirteen years
prior, but this did not stop her from continuing to disseminate the
information.[9]
In 1926, Mary Ware Dennett published again,
this time she was discussing the laws that pertained to birth control and
family limitation. She made sure to include many facts and medically accurate
information, as she had done in her previous pamphlets, but her 1926 work, Birth Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them or
Abolish Them, also included its fair
share of opinions.[10]
At the time that this was published, the Comstock Laws had been on the books
for forty-three years. Anthony Comstock had passed away in 1915, but that would
not limit his reach. Both Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger were negatively
impacted by the Comstock Act. They both had the mission to educate young people
about sex and family planning, but were both arrested and tried under the
Comstock Act for their obscene writings and for using the United States Postal
Service to send them.[11]
This was a strange new time for young women in America, who had just been
freshly politcally franchised, and the years that would follow would show the
desire women had to be educated about their bodies and their desire for
knowledge on family planning and limitation. In a 2012 article, Laura Weinrib,
a professor of Law at the University of Chicago, discusses the policy changes
that took place in the 1920s, as the ACLU was fighting the Comstock Act. She
believes that people were being punished for their political identity, under
the act, rather than for what they did. She also reasons that because women had
been recently given the right to vote, that targeting women under the Comstock
Act was an attempt to limit their voting rights.[12]
During the 1920s and 1930s, birth
control was being confiscated by the government under the Comstock Act. Women
had been trying to get access to items such as sponges, condoms and pessaries,
and the best way to get them was to have them discreetly mailed via the United
States Postal Service, despite it being against the law. In a 1937 edition of
the Columbia Law Review, they discussed how the Comstock Act was
affecting access to birth control. The article looked at whether shipping these
items was actually a violation, as the items were not labeled. The article
sought to shape the legality of how these items were shipped, confiscated and
whether the confiscated items were admissible in court.[13]
It did not change the law, but it was a big deal that lawyers were finally
taking an interest in the effect of the Comstock Act, even if it had taken them
twenty-two years after his death to do so. The Comstock Act was not the first
of its kind, but it was the first to gain major publicity, however, The Harvard
Law Review had published an article in 1932 entitled, “Some Legislative
Aspects of the Birth-Control Problem."[14]
In this article, they argued that obscene mail had been outlawed in 1865, and
that the Comstock Act itself was directly affecting women and women’s healthcare,
because the results of the act seemed targeted at family planning, almost
exclusively. This seemed to be the case when Sarah Chase was arrested in May of
1878. Chase was found in violation of the Comstock Act on many occasions, but
she continued to sell contraceptives and provide information on family
planning, which she had done for years.[15]
Comstock went after her many times, but she was one of the women who didn’t
allow this to affect her conviction that it was imporant to desiminate the
information, and the contraceptives themselves. This was the foucs of an
article by Andrea Tone, in 2000. She is a professor of history at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, and her article on Black Market Birth Control, looked
at birth control in the gilded age and the arrest record of Ohio native, Sarah
Chase.
In
her book, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society
in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Susie Steinbach, a professor of history at Hamline University
who has written about gender and focuses on Victorian history, looks at the
English equivalent to the Comstock Act in the nineteeth century. Comstock had
used English law as the basis for his crusade, and when the laws were being
shaped, the Englsih law was consulted as well. Comstock personally believed
that the the English law was superior, however, in one chapter of her book,
Steinbach discusses the correlation between culture and sexuality.[16]
One interesting thing to note, is that some of the women who had been arrested
under the Comstock Act, would flee or spend time hiding in England to escapte
punishment in the United States, all of this despite Comstocks belief that
England was morally superior. Nicola Beisel, an Associate Professor Emeritus at
Northwestern University, focused her 1997 work, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony
Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America, on the American
Victorian period. She really examines the Comstock Act within the context of
Anthony Comstock’s life and the efforts made by Comstock and the YMCA to censor
obscenity. She also provides an indepth look at NYSSV, which was the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice, a censorship society directly resulting from the passage
of the Comstock Act and the efforts made by Anthony Comstock and the YMCA. She
argues that NYSSV had a lasting impact on access to family planning sources and
birth control information within the state of New York that led to more
stringent laws around the country, following suit.[17]
By the time the Comstock Act was
taken off of the United States law books in the 1970s, the United States had
seen the “baby boom,” in the wake of World War II. In the report given by the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1968, it was concluded that
there had been an increase in birth rate as well as a decline in child
mortality rate and maternal mortality rate.[18]
The United States would go on to pass many new laws regarding family planning
and birth control in the years after the repeal, but the Comstock Act had
already made its impact on American women. It is important to remember the
effect that Comstock had and that men have on the history of women’s
healthcare. Monica Green, a professor of history, gender studies and the
history of medicine wrote about this in a 2008 article. She warns that as
historians continue to examine the changes of women’s healthcare, that it is
important to remember that men had a profound effect as well. It can be very
easy to forget this, because women’s healthcare seems to focus on women, and
forgets about male midwives and men like Anthony Comstock, who also made an
impact.[19]
Amy Werbel, a
professor of history and gender studies, wrote a book about the life of Anthony
Comstock and what led him on his crusade against obscenity. She believes that Comstock did not
intend for the limitation of family planning services for women, but that despite
that it was still not an unwelcomed side effect, as Comstock believed that
access to birth control and family planning services would ultimately allow
people to escape the consequences of their immoral actions. In Werbel’s words
in Lust on Trial, “Every win in this attempt, however, was accompanied
by uncontrollable contradictory results. In pushing back against censorship,
Americans developed a much more muscular view of civil liberties. And despite
Comstock’s best efforts, American lust did not diminish.”[20] When
Anthony Comstock began his crusade after the Civil War ended, he wanted to
prevent the spread of lustful and obscene materials and wanted to make sure
that people were held responsible for their actions, but what happened, was an
impact felt mostly by women in terms of family planning, sex education and
access to birth control.
Beisel, Nicola. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Columbia Law Review Association, Inc. "Comstock Act. Admissibility of Contraceptive Devices." Columbia Law Review, 1937: 854-856.
Dennett, Mary Ware. Birth Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them or Abolish Them. New York : Grafton Press, 1926.
—. The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People. New York: Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett, 1919.
Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics. Live Births and Crude Birth Rates Michigan and United States Residents, Selected Years 1900 to 2017. June 2018. https://www.mdch.state.mi.us/osr/natality/tab1.1.asp (accessed May 30, 2019).
Green, Monica H. "Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare." Gender & History, 2008: 487-518.
Hetzel, Robert D. Grove Ph.D. and Alice M. Vital Statistics Rates in the United States 1940-1960. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, 1968.
M.D, John S. Billings. Report on Vital and Social Statistics in the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1896.
Ruppenthal, J.C. "Criminal Statutes on Birth Control ." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 1919 : 48-61.
Sanger, Margaret. "Family Limitation." Michigan State University Libraries Archive. 1917. https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/familylimitations.pdf (accessed May 23, 2019).
Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography . New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1938.
Steinbach, Susie L. Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. New York: Routledge, 2017.
The Harvard Law Review Association. "Some Legislative Aspects of the Birth-Control Problem." Havard Law Review, 1932: 723-729.
Tone, Andrea. "Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age." The Journal of American History, 2000: 435-459.
Weinrib, Laura M. "The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech." Law and History Review, 2012: 325-386.
Werbel, Amy. Lust On Trial. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
[1] Billings, John S. Report
on Vital and Social Statistics in the United States at the Eleventh Census:
1890. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1896.
[2] Division for Vital
Records and Health Statistics. Live Births and Crude Birth Rates Michigan
and United States Residents, Selected Years 1900 to 2017. June 2018. https://www.mdch.state.mi.us/osr/natality/tab1.1.asp
(accessed May 30, 2019).
[3] Ruppenthal, J.C.
"Criminal Statutes on Birth Control ." Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology, 1919 : 48.
[4] Werbel,
Amy. Lust On Trial. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
[5] Sanger, Margaret.
"Family Limitation." Michigan State University Libraries Archive.
1917. https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/familylimitations.pdf (accessed May
23, 2019).
[6] Sanger, Margaret. Margaret
Sanger: An Autobiography . New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1938.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Dennett, Mary Ware. The
Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People. New York: Mrs. Mary Ware
Dennett, 1919.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Dennett, Mary Ware. Birth
Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them or Abolish Them. New York : Grafton
Press, 1926.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Weinrib, Laura M. "The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech." Law and History Review, 2012: 325-386.
[13] Columbia Law Review
Association, Inc. "Comstock Act. Admissibility of Contraceptive
Devices." Columbia Law Review, 1937: 854-856.
[14] The Harvard Law Review
Association. "Some Legislative Aspects of the Birth-Control Problem."
Havard Law Review, 1932: 723-729.
[15] Tone, Andrea. "Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age." The Journal of American History, 2000: 435-459.
[16] Steinbach, Susie L. Understanding
the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
New York: Routledge, 2017.
[17] Beisel, Nicola. Imperiled
Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
[18] Hetzel, Robert D.
Grove Ph.D. and Alice M. Vital Statistics Rates in the United States
1940-1960. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, Public Health Service, 1968.
[19] Green, Monica H. "Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare." Gender & History, 2008: 487-518.
[20] Werbel,
Amy. Lust On Trial. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2018. 13.
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