Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [809]
Feminists who had been ardent proponents of spreading knowledge about sexual physiology rejected Comstockery. The many women who found such openness alarming, on the other hand, were prepared to take shelter in Comstock-inspired prudery. And despite the new access of a handful of females to the professions, women remained economically dependent on men and quite aware that, while individual freedom could bring relief from oppressive customs and laws, it could also pitch women into a competitive world in which the deck was stacked against female players.
The fate of those who transgressed conventional boundaries provided a scary object lesson. Victoria Woodhull’s challenge to Henry Ward Beecher was a case in point. The reverend denied his adultery, and many in his congregation rallied around him and denounced his accusers. When Tilton finally sued his former friend for alienation of his wife’s affections, it led to a sensational 1875 trial, which ended, after six months of testimony, in a hung jury. While respectable opinion didn’t completely exonerate the minister, he soon recovered most of his standing in the community. Beecher boats continued to ferry crowds to Plymouth Church on Sundays; he still got a thousand dollars per lecture, while Elizabeth Tilton was hounded into oblivion. The double standard had survived a most vigorous challenge.
It would be left to a small but highly vocal band of sex radicals to contest, on libertarian principles, the new coercive circumspection. Ezra Heywood (author of “Cupid’s Yoke”) and Robert Ingersoll (who founded the National Liberal League in 1876) struggled against the right of church and state to limit expression of sexual ideas. They boldly printed and distributed “obscenities” and challenged the vice crusaders’ attempt to force discussion of sex and contraception behind closed doors. Comstock went after them too and, after a few temporary setbacks, emerged triumphant. In New York City, De Robigne Mortimer Bennett, an iconoclastic, anticlerical freethinker, helped mount an effort to repeal the Comstock Law that gathered over fifty thousand signatures. But Comstock, who considered Bennett “everything vile in Blasphemy and Infidelism,” nailed him for mailing an “obscene” scientific pamphlet (How do Marsupials Propagate?) and in 1879 got a landmark decision against him.
Another prominent casualty was Victoria Woodhull, attacked not only by Comstock but by her comrades in the IWA. In the aftermath of the disastrous 1872 strike, the International Workingmen’s Association fell into internal warfare between immigrant socialists and American radicals. The Germans thought their native-born allies’ attachment to temperance chauvinistic, their professions of spiritualism preposterous, and their devotion to greenbacks ludicrous, but most of all the Germans had no sympathy with the Americans’ feminism. The Americans found German atheism excessively materialistic, considered socialist devotion to the gold standard incomprehensible, and insisted “the extension of equal rights of citizenship to women must precede any general change in the relationship between capital and labor.” The IWA purged itself of feminists and “fanatics” but, fatally weakened by internal discord and external defeat, eked out an existence for only a few more years, then limped into history. Woodhull’s last attempt to rally feminists and assorted reformers was her People’s Party presidential campaign in 1872, which was crushingly defeated. After this the women’s movement would distance itself from radicalism. So would Woodhull, who in 1876 packed herself off to England, married a nobleman, repudiated her scandalous Free Love views, and settled into respectability and good works.
Among the last holdouts was the sixty-seven-year-old Ann Lohman—Madame Restell. As late as 1878 she was still running her business on