July 18, 2022 • 53 mins
Some people have to fight for the right to use birth control, some people have to fight for the right to bear children. Margaret talks with Katy Stoll about Emma Goldman, Angela Heywood, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the complex fight for reproductive freedom in the US.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is the podcast I'm your host, Margot Kiljoy with
me today as though one and only Katie Stole, whose
name apparently don't pronounce it on my second take of
using this very normal name, I don't know. I I
welcome all pronunciations. The more creative, the better. So Katie
(00:22):
style is my guest today, who's from some more news
and Worst Year Ever? Which maybe did the worst year
ever come to a close? I who's to say? Did it? Okay?
I have no idea has it even begun? I don't know.
There's a podcast and you can listen to it, although
you should. You should only listen to this podcast because
(00:42):
Katie's on this podcast too, so you have everyone you need. Yeah,
why go elsewhere? I know? We also have Sophie, who
is our producer. Sophie, how are you doing? Yeah? Yeah,
that's that's that's that's what you're okay. We we've been
chatting for good thirty minutes minutes. It's just so good
(01:06):
to see you, Sophie, both of you. Margaret you as well.
You know Sophie. I just I haven't seen her face
in a few weeks. I know, Katie and Katie and
I are are connected in a beautiful way. I am yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean after a year later, after several years that
(01:27):
we've experienced, the decade we've experienced in the last two years,
I don't know everybody that you see regularly become like
little life rafts or something. Yeah that even like my
um the nonprofit job, I also work. I like look
forward to the everyone meetings on Zoom. It's really embarrassing
(01:49):
because I just like join and I'm like, hello, everyone,
how is your week? And Everyone's like, we hate work meetings,
And I'm like, but how are you doing? Yeah, yeah,
I talk about work. I just want to talk about
the door. Can wait? Work, can wait? I am yeah.
My My relationship to Zoom has so much. Uh you know,
at first there was the novelty. Then there was just
(02:12):
so much resentment and to needing to be on Zoom.
And yet that's what we had in your gratitude as well.
But now it's a way of life almost because I'm
not gonna drive across town for a meeting. Oh my god,
and park as no and park every time I try
(02:33):
to park to my heart races and I'm just grateful
I'm grateful for this little portal into people his lives,
my opportunity to connect, and then people get to use
it from wherever they want to be. Sometimes you get
glimpses of vacation. Sometimes your friends have done something bold
and moved to a new city where it's more affordable,
(02:54):
or they moved to where I moved, where parking is easy.
I'm like, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.
Are that sounds like literal heaven to me? Yeah, I
don't know what I'll do next time I have to
drive into a city. I went to three different coffee
shops today because I couldn't park at the first two. Oh,
it's so frustrating. It really is an anxious thing. I
(03:16):
think you guys know Miranda July, the Yeah performance artists,
Margaret Margaret absolutely does not, but continue, I don't know anybody.
I don't know she. I don't know if it was
a podcast that she was on, but I heard that
she grew up growing up her mom. It would look
for parking exactly once, and if there was nothing that
(03:37):
they just go home. And she has all this anxiety
about plans falling apart, like like, oh, no, you can't
find parking. Wait wait, wait, don't just like honey, no,
we're not going home. We'll still get ice cream. It's
just need we just need patience. Anyway, that well, that's
(03:58):
a perfect segue because let's see how can we do this.
So freedom is important, the freedom to be able to
park important, and another type of freedom that is important
is reproductive freedom. Yes, so today that's what we're going
to be talking about. We're gonna be talking less about abortion.
We covered that on our episodes about the Jain Collective.
(04:21):
But instead we're going to talk about the fight for
two different things that go well together, but unfortunately I've
been put at odds against each other sometimes, which is
first the right to choose to not have children and
second the right to choose to have children because we
live in such a fund up, racist, moralizing country that
in the past couple hundred years we've had to fight
for both. And Margaret, I'm thrilled you invited me on
(04:43):
for this conversation that I didn't know the topic until
right now. I can't pay for this. This is something
that Katie and I talked about all the time, just
in like friendship stuff. So that's why I knew Katie
would be our our person for this. Well I think
you already know, but you should interrupt and interjected at
(05:04):
any point either of you about any of these things.
So first, and unfortunately I really don't like doing this,
I have to start with a bad person. HM. So
if you're a reasonable person, your first question would have
to be, why the funk would anyone be against anyone's
right to choose whether or not they want to use
birth control? That doesn't make any sense, Like this isn't
(05:24):
even the abortion question, so you can't even pretend like
it's about babies lives or whatever. But it turns out
that some people really really don't like other people having fun.
And this is coming from someone who picked the last
name Killjoy. So I want to introduce you to today's villain,
Anthony Comstock, which is he's the namesake of one of
(05:46):
the worst groups of laws ever written, the Comstock Laws. Okay,
Anthony fucking Comstock hated cussing, He also thanks thanks, He
hated gambling, Eddie hated fucking, and he hated fun and
he decided to take it out on the entire fucking country.
(06:06):
And I'm going to cuss extra hard when I'm talking
about him, because I hate this fucking guy as you should.
As you should. And he was born on March seven,
eighteen forty four, in New Canaan, Connecticut. He cut his
teeth on being a little ship really early on, and
he was never afraid to brag about it. Most of
what we have about his life, all of the horrible
(06:26):
things he did, he bragged about them. He wrote these
like books about himself in order to like be a weird,
famous asshole guy. And he would say, I did this
horrible thing. Isn't that cool? And most people said, no,
that is not cool. Anthony Comstock, what are you doing?
And like what kind of stuff? Well, when he was
(06:47):
a kid, he he decided to drive out the evil,
evil booze merchant out of his town. Oh. He broke
into the bar, turned on all the taps of the
beer like would get wasted it and funk up the
floor and then left a note saying get out of
town or else and successfully drove out. Fun time. He's
(07:09):
like a real Karen kind of vibe here. Yeah yeah,
this is like the most aggressive. This is the mother
of all Karen's. Yeah yeah, okay, And like Karen's he
both uses the law to do all of his evil ship.
But he obviously doesn't actually care about law, because here
he is like bragging about breaking in and doing all
this other ship that's completely illegal. His older brother died
(07:31):
in the Battle of Gettysburg in eighteen sixty three. I
wrote down eight different Gettysburg. Yeah, so Comstock did the
only reasonable thing that he did in his entire life,
and he joined the Union Army. In the army he was,
and you will be shocked to know this, a little ship. Uh.
He kept bothering all of his fellow soldiers. He wanted
(07:53):
them to attend church, and he would like complain about
how they would cuss and talk about sex and the
soldier you know. Yeah. So eventually they got sick of
all of his nagging and they trashed all his ship.
So no one likes this guy, No, I no, I
really don't think anyone does. The war ends, Anthony moves
(08:15):
to Brooklyn and he gets a job as a sales
clerk at a dry goods store. He buys a house
in Brooklyn with is I guess something you can do
with a clerk job in the eighteen sixties. Yeah, back
then things were different. You see, Yeah, it was still Brooklyn. Though.
I've been feeling they're going to chew him up and
spit him out. I you know, well we'll we'll get
(08:39):
we'll get to it. So okay, So he decides to
continue his his moral crusade, and some sources claim that
he was spurred on by how disgusted he was by
seeing how his fellow soldiers had acted. You know, is
how he knew that something was wrong with this country
and needed cleaning up, and he's the man to do it.
So one day, one of his fellow employees has a
venereal disease, and I guess he tells Comstock, which was
(09:03):
his first mistake. Yeah, why would you tell it to
that guy? You know, I don't know. Um, he clearly
doesn't want to talk about sex. And he got it
after he had started buying erotic literature from a local bookshop. Wait,
he got that. There's not actual causality here, Okay, okay, okay,
(09:24):
he went there and he came back with the disease.
But what happened in between, we don't know. He started
reading dirty stories and then supposedly he went out and
got himself a venereal disease, got you, okay. So com
Stock decides that books should be blamed for this guy
getting the club or whatever it was. So he he
(09:47):
marches down to the bookstore, he buys some smut and
then goes and grabs a police captain and to come
and arrest the bookseller for selling the smut. And it's
here that we should point out that our ment and
nycom Stock suffered his whole life from what he described
as a deeply, deeply shameful problem. Is it that he
(10:07):
is a narc? Because I bet it's something sexual? Yea, yeah,
he masturbated, Oh my god, for shame. Yeah different gasp.
I am gasping in shock, I know, And so was
(10:29):
he um quite another. And so basically this is his
pattern his entire life. He buys dirty stories, he feels
guilty about them, and he ruins people's lives, and he
goes on and he gets all of the book vendors
in this open air market arrested for selling books full
of words he doesn't like, and he eventually he learns
(10:49):
he must be keeping track. I suspect he buys them all.
There are exactly one hundred and sixty nine dirty books
available for sale in New York City at this time. Wait,
how many hundred and sixty nine? Oh? Okay, So he
starts going after the publishers, and this actually gets to
one of the darkest parts of comstock story. He goes
(11:11):
after one publisher, a man named William Hayes, and he
sets out to take him down. William Hayes kills himself
as a result of this harassment, and Comstock later braggs
that he drove fifteen people to suicide over the course
of his life. And I wish I knew more about
what happened here, because if it was just one person,
if it was just this guy, I'd be like, Okay,
(11:32):
he got scared, he didn't want to go to jail,
and he took his own life. But fifteen people, I
like wonder what's up. Whether he was just like and
then they got scared and killed themselves, or whether he's
like specifically pressuring people into suicide, whether he's actually just
murdering people and then calling it suicide, or whether it's
all coincidence. Probably not coincidence. Any iteration sounds pretty evil. Yeah.
(11:56):
So Hayes dies, and Comstock goes and gets the local
y m c A to give him enough money to
buy all the printing plates off of his wife so
he can dissolve them in acid. Because this is how
much he hates the books. It's not enough that he
destroyed all the books or the publisher. He also needs
to then get enough money to buy the plates and
destroy them. Totally reasonable um reaction to. Well, not gonna
(12:21):
make any assumptions about his masturbation habits, but at worst
it's some sort of an addiction and uh yeah, so yeah,
let's just go and do this. But also it's not.
He just doesn't like the idea of sin at all.
He often talks about how like the devil drives him
to masturbate and things like that. So the y m
(12:43):
c A, which is not the y w c A.
Even I keep saying why w c A because I
used to go to the gym at the White w
c A. The y m c A made him secretary
of their Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and soon
he is confiscating hundreds of thousands of dirty pictures, song
lyric sheets, sex boys, whatever he can score. Sometimes he
destroys it. An awful lot just goes into this massive
(13:06):
collection he keeps in a warehouse and around this time,
a woman makes the first run for president of the US.
Victoria Woodhall. She's actually too young to run for president,
so her campaign is based on, we will abolish the
United States Constitution and rewrite it so that it's just
and decent. Yes, I know, No, she's she's interesting. She um.
(13:30):
She paid for her campaign mostly with the fortune she
made as the first woman's stockbroker, which she did as
a socialist. What yeah, where is she is? Sounds amazing?
She ran a newspaper that wasn't that advocated for sex education,
free love, suffrage, vegetarianism, socialism, all that ship Victoria, thank you,
(13:53):
Victoria would have all she writ down. Yeah, she gets
complicated a little bit later, but um, as they most
of them do. Yeah. And one of the things that actually,
one of the things that she did that I think
also rules is that after before abolition, the suffrage movement
and the abolition movement were fairly friendly, right, and then
after the after abolition of slavery or the abolition of
(14:18):
certain forms of slavery in the United States. I say
it that way because prison slavery is still legal according
to the Constitution. But women, white women started being shittier
on race issues after that, right, And one of the
things that she did as a white woman is trying
to bring the suffrage movement back into solidarity with black
civil rights movement, And so again just did all kinds
(14:38):
of cool ship. Near the end of her life. She
was a Christian socialist the whole time, and near the
end of her life she kind of backed it all
up and was like, no, I'm a regular Christian now,
not a Christian socialist, started saying promiscuity is bad, and
then was like claiming other people wrote all the stuff
that she wrote. But at this point she's all fire
and feminism and cool as hell. And Comstock does not
(14:59):
like that a woman is running for president, so he's
watching her, waiting for her to slip up so he
can arrest her. When her newspaper runs a column that
exposes a celebrity minister for cheating on his wife, Comstock
arrests her for obscenity for talking about sex in her
fucking newspaper. Oh wow, this guy a piece of work.
(15:24):
He's just waiting, like this annoying shadow, just like waiting
to pop out and stop everyone from actually not being
ashamed of, you know, the human animal. He's just speeling
his own self hatred. The story as old as time,
So the case gets dropped and wood Hall had the
(15:47):
following to say about him, which I'm quoting a write
up about Comstock and lit Hub by Devon Leonard from
Maine to California. We believe the new order of Protestant
Jesuits called the y m c A. Is dubbed with
the well merited title of the American Inquisition. We do
not mean by this to assert that its leaders are
like those of the Spanish Inquisition of the same nature.
(16:08):
We should no more think of comparing comstock with Torque
Maata than contrasting a living skunk with a lion. So
it's both an inquisition and also a shitty one fuck you. Yeah,
so Comstocks like funk, I didn't get to arrest this person.
I need more legal power, So he needs more laws
passed to do his inquisition. Ship. So he grabs a
(16:30):
bunch of neat stuff from his warehouse full of neat stuff,
and he goes off to show it to Congress. And
while he was there he took special note to talk
shit about how all the women he saw at the
White House were far too much makeup, too low kind
of dresses and they did not deserve respect. Oh my god,
this guy, yeah, this fucking guy. So in newspapers are like, hey,
(16:55):
this is obviously a restriction of free press. You can't
do this. But Comstock got his bill, the Comstock to Act,
which is an antisanity law, and specifically, what it does
is it prevents you from sending obscene things through the
United States mail. The Postmaster General is like, all right,
you're our guy, Anthony Comstock. Go out and make sure
that no one ever talks about sex ever again. And
(17:17):
the y m c A keeps paying a salary even
always a government official now and he gets a special
government ride any train anywhere, free ticket, and he's to
go stop vice in America. My god, I feel like
there's a movie in there. I know, I know. And
the problem is that most of the people who make
this movie would try to make him like relatable, you know,
(17:39):
or like he's got to be a bad bad guy.
He is a good guy. Make him relatable and credit
where is due. He targets fake medicine and financial scams,
as well as gambling and pornography and sex work and
everything else and sex education, and we'll get to that.
But I I suspect that even when he was like
coming after like quote fake doctors, he probably just used
(18:01):
as an excuse to be a misogynist. I can't imagine otherwise.
And his true love was stopping people from looking at porn,
than confiscating the porn, than adding it to his collection,
then writing Long treatises in his diary about how he's
overcome by the devil that makes him touch himself, so
he would just conflicate this Long let me get it, okay.
(18:22):
He passed this law, okay, and he's going around making
sure people don't look at porn anymore, and he takes
away their porn and he keeps it for himself, an
awful lot of it. He destroys a lot of it
because he's there's there's millions of pounds or something of books.
I have the numbers at the end. I don't remember
them off the top of my head. He destroys a
lot of it, but he keeps an awful lot of
(18:43):
it as like evidence or whatever. He also he hates abortion,
and he hates it so much that he drags patients
away in the middle of procedures still bleeding. H what
like he goes in. How did they let him in?
It was different back then. Yeah, Like, the closest to
(19:06):
an anonymous hero in this story is one pornographer who
almost got him with a knife and stabbed him in
the face or cut him in the face. But then
Comstock successfully like took him down and disarmed him and
arrested him. And so unfortunately, instead of dying, which is
what should have happened, he got a wicked scar and
everyone was like, whoa, that guy is a wicked scar.
(19:27):
What a badass? Don't funk with him on he got
was credible. On the other hand, he wrote most of
the fucking stories about him, so God only knows what happened.
Oh that's funny. That is funny. You can't believe any
of that press. And within a few years he's kind
of succeeded at cracking down on porn in the United States.
(19:50):
Just impressive. So smut became hard to come by, so
he started arresting other people because he has to arrest somebody.
And it turns out you can call a lot of
stuff smut. You can call anatomy textbook smut, you can
call nude art smut, and you can relevant to today's
story say, anyone talking about birth control or sexual liberation
(20:11):
is producing smut and should be arrested. It's fun discovering
the funked up ways things started here, like like, yeah,
we still have these kinds of conversations in terms of
like Instagram or yeah, I mean there's lots of different
variations of this conversation, but like of what's yeah, any
(20:33):
who know that's such a good point and so relevant
to the fact that like on Instagram you can't post nudes,
Like there's no like I don't want miners to see
my page choice. There's just like sex is still completely
like not allowed to be talked about, you know. Yeah,
and it's and it can be traced back to, yeah,
you know this one person who clearly has problems, who
(20:58):
clearly was dealing with a lot of mental health this
use and shame to um. Yeah. And so so the
next really brief story is one that I can't source
because I read this ten years ago and I don't
know where I read it, and I spent trying to
find it. But apparently during this time in both the
UK and the US, I believe since sex education was
(21:20):
illegal and contraception and teaching people about contraception was illegal
and porn was illegal. People who wrote dirty stories. We
just start throwing in the information about contraception and sex
education into the stories because like in for a penny,
in for a pound, you're already fucking you're already a felon,
so fuck it, you know, wow? Yeah, yeah yeah. And
(21:40):
they would use the same again, I can't source this,
but they would use the same printers as well, right,
And it was the same printers that all the anarchists
and all the revolutionaries were using. Because the people willing
to print all the felony stuff are the people willing
to print the felony stuff. Oh that's quick. This is
a podcast about cool people, not little It's like Anthony Comstock.
(22:01):
So I want to talk about some of the people
who went up against him, the cool people who um
did yes please? So Angela and Ezra Haywood And there
were two Massachusetts based abolitionist feminists and anarchists. They met
through their work in the abolition movement. Most notably to history,
they were free love activists, which at the time was
(22:24):
less specifically about polyamory and more about consent and relationships
and marriage. Having consent and access to reproductive freedom and
basically like get the state out of the bedroom. Was
a lot of what free levels. Yeah, no, they were.
I really liked them. I love hearing this. I love
hearing about people's ideas and how long how long people
(22:46):
have been dancing around the truth of things? Yeah, totally,
it would be clear. It was also about polyamory and
ship for some of them, but not all of them,
Like some people were like free love and monogamous, you know.
So in eighteen seventy two they start a monthly mag
saying called the Word dedicated to all the ship they're into.
And also, like a bunch of nineteenth century radicals, they
(23:07):
named their kids really weird ship. In this case, they
named their kids Greek gods. Psyche, Angelo, Vesta, and Hermes
are their four kids. They're just some fucking hippie I know.
These are people are complete hippies. Almost everyone who comes
up against Comstock are hippies, and they're really weird in
awesome ways. Angela Haywood was descended from John Locke, a
(23:28):
philosopher that I should know more about than I do. Yeah,
her mom actually taught her kids sex education, so she
grew up being told like the Birds and the bees
or whatever. She wasn't well educated. She worked as a
housemaid and she joined the abolitionist movement despite sort of
not being a well educated person. A lot of the
white people involved in the abolition movement in the North
(23:49):
at the time were like more well to do, but
she wasn't. And in this movement she she meets her
her bow. She meets Ezra in eighteen seventy three, which
is the same year that the Comstock laws went into place.
Something that the Haywood's considered even more monumental happened. The
New England Free Love League of Boston formed and we
(24:10):
know that this was a big deal to them. It's
so he's read ahead, I think, so we know it's
a big deal to that because Ezra, at least he's
not into Christianity, right, So he doesn't like using BC
and a D for dates. He said that the problem
with a D is that it recognizes a mythical god
in the calendar, puts Christian colors marked j C on
(24:32):
naturally free necks, and registers the subject of the the
Chivio religious despotism, which the male sexual origin and history
of the Cross impose. So he didn't use BC and
a D. He used b L and y L, which
are before love and Year of love. Oh goodness, it
(24:56):
learned so much about this guy. Yeah, you know everything
you need to know about him right here, and and
the year of Love is of course three when the
New England Free Love League of Boston forms, and I
think we're currently in the Year of Love one and
there I believe a good that's good point. And so
(25:19):
of course their magazine starts using that notation because there
are a bunch of nerds, cute and nerdy. At first,
the magazine mostly talks about free love in the context
of the labor movement, but eventually it's the other way around,
and it's, you know, the labor movement in the context
of free love. And it was a prominent voice in
free love, birth control, and feminism. They advocated such wild
(25:40):
and controversial topics as men should be responsible for their actions,
children should learn what sex is, women can enjoy sex,
sex work is work, and sex workers should be defended,
which is still controversial in some feminist articles today. So
the free love movement wasn't It was also about hooking
(26:00):
up with whoever you wanted, not always, but for some people.
Angela in particular, was apparently inspired by the Oneida community
that was running at the time, which was a religious
commune where everyone decided that they were married to everyone
else in the commune and could fund whoever they wanted.
And this is the place. The Oneta community is probably
the place that coined the the term free love. And
(26:21):
they're really complicated and culty, and I was like starting
to read into them, being like, oh, I'm gonna include them,
and I was like, not kind of fun these guys,
But you know, some interesting ship came out of him. Katie,
Do you have a good product that you would like
to plug? For example, are previously we have plugged the
(26:41):
concept of potatoes, the concept of tap water a very
good comb. Sure, that's a great question. Have you guys
considered the concept of free time? Oh my gosh, I mean,
I don't. Would they provide it to us? It's not free.
(27:05):
You have to work hard for it. But once you
have it, it's nice. Okay. I mean that's the way
I've been told it works. I don't think that you
can get it without really you have to let me know.
That is our new sponsor of the show is the
concept of having free time. Um, and I'm desperately waiting
(27:26):
for them to send free samples in the mail, also
sponsored by whoever comes after in this ad break. And
we are back, and we are trying to distract ourselves
from the number of shortages that are happening, which is
what we talked about over the break. But let's talk
(27:48):
about the nineteenth century when nothing bad happened. Yeah, take
me back in the paths of our heroes and our
villain intertwined. You see, Anthony Comstock was quite distressed that
there was someone somewhere talking about sex as something that
one might enjoy. The year prior the Haywitoz had published
(28:10):
an essay hold On for this title Cupids Yokes or
the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life, An essay to consider
some moral and physiological phases of love and marriage, where
it has asserted the natural right and necessity of sexual
self government. Oh my goodness, that is quite a title.
I really missed. Nineteenth century titling convinced the title take
up half the page. It is just is the cover
(28:31):
of it, you know, Oh my goodness, all on the cover. Yeah,
of course, it's the title. That's where you put it.
Put the title so the essay wasn't actually anti marriage.
Angela and Ezra were married, but it was against traditional
notions of marriage, and if it was anything like other
anarchist feminist texts at the time, it was probably complaining
about how marriage at the time was essentially a property
(28:53):
arrangement by which women are controlled by men. And I
I skimmed this pamphlet it's really in. It is not smart.
It's just a fucking essay of footnotes and various like
anthropological ideas about sex and marriage or whatever. Not to him,
though he could get off on it. Oh yeah anything. Yeah,
(29:13):
traffic cones would just suck him up. Conjugal traffic cones
so so calm Stock. He doesn't like it, so he
does what he does anytime he doesn't like something. He
buys himself a copy and then he goes about ruining
people's lives. He heads on down to the Free Love
League undercover, where Ezra and Angela are are giving speeches.
(29:37):
One of those speeches is actually specifically against com Stock.
They're just like at the meeting talking about com Stock,
and He's like, there is an undercover hearing them talk
to it on him. You know what? Good? He deserves it.
I know. He goes outside and according to him, I'm
just gonna quote him because it's so fucking strange. The
fresh air was never more refreshing. I resolved a stop
(30:00):
that exhibition of nastiness if possible. I looked for a policeman.
As usual, none was to be found when wanted. Then
I sought light and help from above. I prayed for
strength to do my duty and that I might have success.
I knew God was able to help me. Every manly
instinct cried out against turning my back on this horde
(30:22):
of lust. I determined to try. I resolved that one
man in America at least should enter a protest. I mean, honestly,
I feel sad for him. You know, he he's got
such a sad life. Yeah, if this at all had happened,
(30:44):
just like he's like in the hollow deck on Star
Trek or whatever, and it's just like, yeah, so so
ezra Heywood walks out into the lobby and com Stock
arrests him, and the doorman goes off and finds Angela,
who comes over and is like, look, if you're resting
my husband, I'm I'm mean with but there's a problem here,
Anthony Comstock is the paragon of virtue. He can't share
(31:06):
a carriage with Angela Haywood. Oh my god. He quote
felt obliged, out of respect to my wife, sister and
lady friends to decline this kind offer of her company.
And I like, I want to laugh at him. That
wasn't her offer, you fool? I know, I know, right,
She's not like, oh, please let me keep you company
while you arrest my my husband on bullshit charges. He's like,
(31:29):
she's trying to fuck me. Yeah, this guy, And I
want to laugh at him, but doesn't. Isn't this Mike
Pence is the whole fucking thing. Yeah, Yeah, that's very
Mike Pencey. Yeah, there is something I don't know. I
know a lot about Jordan Peterson, but I actually haven't
read that much of his work. But there's something I
(31:50):
know that he just has that like property type of element.
There's something about him that also feels like sad in
the Jordan Peterson kind of way, just so twisted anyway. Yeah,
and uh, this this officer of the law doesn't tell
Haywood what he's being arrested for, doesn't show him a
(32:10):
badge or a warrant none of that ship. He doesn't
find out until the next morning why he's in jail.
So he gets put on trial, and the judge is
an asshole and won't let the defense call character witnesses
or even call expert witnesses to testify that his pamphlets
weren't obscene. The pamphlets aren't even allowed to be read
in court because like they're too dirty. The jury is
(32:32):
allowed to read them with like the scary parts underlined,
and he's found guilty. He gets two years of hard
labor for writing this anthropological study about marriage. The backlash, fortunately, though,
was quite something, and it was just became like a
big national issue, and at one meeting of the people
(32:53):
getting together to try and figure out how to free him,
people were like joking and they were like, what's next,
You're going to confiscate the Bible. It's way dirtier than this.
But the thing is is that come stuck later when
he's trying to arrest the suffragets, he really really doesn't
like the suffragets. He arrests a bunch of them for
printing Bible quotes, and to be fair, I mean there's
(33:17):
some ship in the Bible that is like more lude
than any of this other ship. But sure, but he's
going the wrong direction with that lesson. If the Bible
has the reason you're doing this, man, then chill out. Yeah,
chill out. What you're dealing with is you issue, not
a God issue. Yeah. So there's such a huge campaign
(33:41):
that Ezra only serves six months of his two years
sentence before President Hayes personally pardons him. And this wasn't
like a small deal one for him that he's he
got sent to prison, but Angela and their kids were
homeless actually for a while after that because they relied
on the income of that he provided and ship like that.
(34:01):
The movement came through for them and they did get
home again. But good. So Ezra goes in and out
of jail four more times in his life, including for
distributing pamphlets about birth control that were written by his wife.
And honestly, if that isn't love, I don't know it is.
Angela for her part, though, she's always fighting for recognition
(34:22):
for all the like free love and equality society, and
maybe Ezra himself gave Ezra most of the credit and
blame for everything the couple got up to. But when
he's on trial for distributing her writing. She gets on
the stand and she's basically like, you fucking assholes, Like,
why is he on trial and not me? I wrote
the thing. You're just afraid that the jury would be
more sympathetic to me because I'm a woman. And I'm paraphrasing,
(34:47):
but she cussed a lot in her life, so much
that it always caused a stir and like all the
like proper ladies of the feminist movement didn't like that
this uneducated foul mouth firebrand was doing all this talking.
Now I want a movie about her. Oh yeah, totally.
I like uneducated foul mouth firebrands. They're kind of my
favorite sort of cool people. So I like her, especially
(35:08):
in this context, I know, especially, Yeah, like where the
whole thing is people like stopped cussing. You're like the
funk I will like, fuck you, yeah, fucker yeah. Maybe
this is the same case, but it's hard to keep track.
There's so many He went on trial for so many
different ships. As Row goes on trial for advertising comstock syringes.
See in eight there's this doctor named Sarah Chase and
(35:31):
she gets arrested by Comstock. She's found not guilty, but
she's arrested for selling syringes that you could use as
douches to limit the chance of pregnancy. And they're actually
fairly effective. All the spreading of birth control information, even
before medicated birth control or the mass production of condoms,
it dropped New York City's fertility rate by fifty in
the nineteenth century. Yeah, I because I'm kind of like, oh, well,
(35:53):
first control, that's condoms, and you know the pill and
I d S and ship you just shoot so water
up there and that will do. It's other stuff as
well that they're douching with it's and then they're like,
there's a whole bunch of other you know, for this
episode about like how birth control, I actually only wrote
about the how they fought for birth control. I didn't
actually write as much about the birth control methods. No,
(36:16):
that's fine, but I'm like, yeah, I mean it's not
as effective as what we have now. But yeah, I'm kidding,
I'm not going to do that. But I don't like
birth control. I don't like So the charges against Sarah
don't stick, and so after she she's free, she starts
selling the douches as comstock syringes. And this becomes one
(36:38):
of the main birth control methods as comstock syringes. That's
really funny, and god damn, I'd like to take her
out for a drink, I know. And they they advertise
the douches in the word the Heywitz paper, including with
the line if calm stocks mother had had a syringe
and knew how to use it, what a world of
(36:59):
woe would have saved us. Okay, someone write the movie
and then cast me to player. Yea, all right, someone
green light and get me to write it. Yeah. Um, Sophie,
you're also in charge of all movies? Is that true?
Mm hmm shoot, sorry, okay, all right, we'll circle background
to this idea. So, while he's on trial for the
(37:22):
comp Sucks syringes and some other ship, Ezra Haywood defends
himself in court, which is exactly like, Okay, My theory
is no one who invents their own system of numbering
years lets anyone else represent them in court right now? Honestly,
how could you. You're not going to be on the
same wave length at all. He wins. My man's a winner.
(37:46):
Another time, he's on trial for publishing Walt Whitman poems
and Walt Whitman. Yeah, he's a fucking asshole. He doesn't
defend Ezra. Wait he wait a minute, Wait a minute,
wait a minute. So so he him and Walt we're
working together. Walt willing Lee took his poems to Ezra
to publish as were publishes, gets taken to court, and
(38:08):
Walt doesn't back him up. That is my impression. There's
a chance that this was like a reprint of something
where there wasn't a direct communication with Walt. I don't know,
but I do know that Walt was like, well, what
do you expect for some bullshit? So I was all
set to be like, yeah, Walt Whitman, and then I'm like, really, yeah,
(38:29):
that's disappointing. But well, in eighteen ninety he gets sentenced
to two years hard labor for yet another one of
these things that he's always on trial for. And what
if Angela is getting tired of it at this pend, Well,
she unfortunately has a long life without him because in
in he dies in the same way that of people
(38:51):
who died in the nineteenth century died being asive in
the eighteenth century tuberculosis, which is the same as being
alive in the nineteenth century yeah. Yeah, and he probably
caught tuberculosis in jail. The probably the fight for birth
control killed him. Basically, so did being alive before antibiotics.
But the combination of the two of those two things, yeah,
(39:12):
lethal combo. Yeah, and so, Sophie, this leads me into
what could possibly be the next ad transition, which is
that if big Tuberculosis could throw us a couple of
bucks every time we talked about someone that they killed, Um,
I would buy everyone in my family a house. Oh cool, Yeah, yeah,
Big tuberculosis. Do you hear that? Do you guys think
(39:34):
you want to do that? That would be really great
for me. Yeah, I think so. They're still around. I mean,
you know, they're probably pretty desperate for more attention. Yeah,
I mean they they're certainly not breaking the news cycle.
But but yeah, that's true. Maybe, yeah, maybe they'd be
into this. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. I wouldn't
(39:55):
put all your hope and dreams on it, but it's
worth considering. I've put all my hopes and dreams on
Oh no, well, we're all in. It's gonna happen. Here's
some ads for tuberculosis, and we are back and we
are talking about people build by suberculosis, including cool people.
(40:16):
And actually, now I feel really guilty. I was all
set to have really positive sponsors for the show, and
I gave in to death. Well, best of us. Angela
did not given to death for forty years after her
fucking husband. What a sentence starter. Well wow, just wow.
Nice job and queen ship right there, I know. And
(40:39):
she started being more open about her support for abortion
the same year that her husband died. I actually think
it's a coincidence. Abortions were illegal. Mentioning abortions and anything
you mailed was illegal. So double badass for standing up
for abortions. Yeah, and then she she actually kind of
slips out of the public eye at this point. Sarah Chase,
(41:00):
the woman who invented the comstock syringe. She's working in
reproductive healthcare legally, and she spent six years in jail
at one point because another abortionist sucked up a procedure
and so she took the patient and tried to save
the patient, and the patient died, So she spent six
years in jail. After she gets out, she keeps on
lecturing about sexual health and safety, all the while supporting
(41:21):
herself with her needlework, which I guess also is the
thing you could do and lives into her seventies. At
one point, while she was in jail, she wrote a
letter that was published in a free love journal. I
think it was the Haywood Journal, but I don't know,
And to quote author Amy Son's quoting of her, the
letter ended with the need of reform is to be
(41:42):
seen on every hand, yet all do not see it,
and those who do are unable to resist the inn
it hatred of injustice and wrong that impels them to
try and remedy the evils that lie in their way.
They do not stop to count the cost. They only
say this work must be done and I must help.
I just like it because you see something that needs fixing,
you you fucking work on fixing it rather than worrying
(42:04):
about what it's going to cost you. Yeah, I think
that we all can relate to that. These days. You know,
it's like we have to do it. We just yeah totally,
Like I mean, how especially with climate change, is like
literally like well we we actually have to, like we
are just literally all going to die of this we
don't do this, So yeah, yeah exactly, And you're like, well,
(42:24):
i'd be willing to go get arrested. I'd be willing
to do what I have to do to make sure
if that's what it takes, you know, Yeah, yeah ah. Comstock, however,
continues being a fuck and slowly fucks tend to do.
I know. I feel like he's graduated from little ship
to just an outright funk at this point. Yeah, and
(42:46):
the public starts slowly turning against him. The Irish play
right George Bernard Shaw coined the word comes stockery for
the act of failing to distinguish between art and porn okay,
and basically was like, seriously, the United States, this is
why the rest of the world laughs at you, like
what the funk is wrong with you? And Comstock wrote
about himself a lot. He sold books with click bait
(43:08):
headlines of titles like Frauds Exposed and Traps for the
Young Odd it's like Fox News or something. Yeah. Absolutely.
He died in nineteen fifteen. He lived to be way
too old. He made it to seventy two, and when
he died his house was full of pornography he'd confiscated.
(43:28):
So the newspaper American Art News wrote this like fuck
you obituary to him. Um basically saying like, normally we
only talk about people who are important to the art world,
but but Comstock actually had a massive collection of art
in his house. That's hilarious and m hm yeah, and
(43:49):
then says like he fucked over all these innocent people
and he's terrible and so and his legacy is that
he's been written and as the villain or the namesake
of the villain of I think dozen of books, plays,
and also the video game BioShock Infinite. He's the That's amazing.
That is fucking rad. That's also you know, like, yeah,
(44:11):
there's there's all those things we can trace back to him.
But also now Colm Stock in general is a villain. Yeah, totally.
His Society for the Suppression of Ice lurched on for
another thirty five years, coming after James Joyce. It got
Broadway stars arrested, and generally it was just really fucked up.
And in the end, Comstock bragged that he had arrested
(44:33):
more than four thousand people, destroyed more than fifteen tons
of books, four million pictures, and he bragged about having
driven those fifteen people to suicide. One of the people,
one of those people, one of the fifteen was a
woman named Ira Craddock who was born in Philadelphia as
an only child. She's another cool hippie. She was born
(44:54):
in a Quaker family, so for everyone who's keeping track
with the stuff, bingo, that is yeah, quicker um. Her
dad died while she was still like crawling, and I
think she was six months old or something, and her
her mom raised her up smart. She was all set
to be the first woman led into the University of
Pennsylvania in two but then the board was like, wait, no,
(45:17):
no, no no, no, she's a woman. She can't do that.
Did they for not realize that at first? Yeah? I
don't know. I'm sure someone was like, fuck it, let's
do this, and then the board was like, the hell
we will. She wrote books about stenography, she quit the
Quakers to become an occultist, and I'm pretty sure she
was happy as a single woman who took care of
her own needs. In fact, she declared that she was
(45:39):
married to an angel named Soap different I think a
different so if I couldn't promise, and that there their
sex was so loud that neighbors would complain. Oh okay, yeah,
so she's doing fine. She doesn't need a husband and
incarnate mortal husband, and she's constantly getting arrested for writing.
(46:04):
So she writes like women's self help pamphlets about how
to make your marriage better, like this, like very standard
thing that you can get to the check out file,
you know, just how to have good sex with your husband.
And she gets arrested for it constantly, and she spends
a while institutionalized for it. She's in jail a lot.
She consistently refuses to plead insanity. Everyone's like, she's clearly
(46:25):
crazy because she's an occultist and she likes sex. And finally,
after a three months also she was married to what
was an angel? What was he? Yeah, yeah, an angel
named Sophia. I don't know. I agree, it's probably anything else,
but there was that in the mix. I am sure
that did not help convince people of her sanity, but
(46:47):
within the context of like the weird religious ship people,
we're in our end two, you know, yes, And so
she spends three months in jail one of these times,
and when she comes out, she's immediately re arrested by
calm Stock and she gets sentenced to five years. Her
pamphlet The Wedding Night was so obscene that the jury
wasn't allowed to see it during trial. But it wasn't
(47:09):
that bad. Yeah, and she's she's fucking convicted literally from hey,
take my word for it is bad to the jury. Yeah,
she couldn't face going back behind bars. So at forty
five years old, she killed herself and her her suicide
note is basically a long public letter saying, oh my god,
fuck you, calm Stock. I'm glad she was able to
(47:30):
express herself. That's fucking tragic. Yeah, he he just absolutely
ruined us. Woman's life who was like, by all accounts,
like every wonderful cat lady you've ever met who keeps
crystals and like, so she was married to an angel
named self. Yeah, and wrote about how people should have
good sex with their husbands. This wasn't even a like
(47:52):
everyone leave their husbands and gobie witches in the woods
and be lesbians or whatever. How not long ago? This
is you know, yeah, totally and so so Comstock. He
outlives a lot of his victims. But he doesn't win
the war, I would argue, And because both sides kept
fighting and are still fighting now. Most obviously you've got
(48:16):
the end of Roe v. Wade and the Christian right
wing is getting pretty open about how gay marriage and
birth control are like next in their war of reaction.
But also there's bipartisanship, like this Comstock was a bipartisan
law to my understanding, and the government past Sesta Fasta,
which are two bills that just just decimate the rights
(48:37):
of sex workers and the online services that sex workers
use to do their work safely. It's just the same
moralistic nightmare and we're not out of it. But I
don't want to say it one because like it's just
a constant pushing and pulling. It didn't win it just
but that's exactly correct. I mean, obviously, culturally we've evolved
well passed this and what we accept and how we
(49:02):
talk about sex and orgasms and sexuality and identity and
all of that. But yeah, no, it's the the argument
in the basis is still there, you know, just like, yeah,
we still have these ideas what is smart, what is
needs to be censored, what is allowed? Well, versions of
(49:25):
that morality argument obviously are still going on and continue
to be used as cudgels. Two further in trench people
you know, in in their team and their sides, but
it's on both you know, Yeah, even democratic lawmakers participate
in this game of morality and right and wrong when
(49:48):
it comes to sex and Fastasessta is a tragic example
of that with huge implications. Yeah. No, I knew you're
the right person to bring on because I feel like
you talked about a lot of this stuff, a lot
like I don't talk as much about the stuff that
happens now, you know. Well yeah, sure, I mean I do.
(50:08):
But I'm inviting you. Yeah yeah, I'm like I keep
talking about of them like now, Honestly, if you want
to go on, please do No, No, I'm good for
right now. But if something else pops up, all okay,
Well that's it for today's. When we come back on Wednesday,
we're going to bring the fight into the twentieth century
(50:30):
and we're gonna talk about my favorite birth control advocate,
I'm a Goldman, plus all the other people who tried
to fight on the other front the right to get
to have children, because it's about choice and we have
to fight for both of these things. Oh. These are
such good episode ideas, so important and interesting. Thank you
(50:50):
for in finding me on again. I loved this, Katie.
Do you have anything you would like to plug at
the end here. Oh boy, goodness, gosh. Yeah. Sure. Well
I've got my podcast even more News that I host
with Cody Johnston, and we've got our YouTube channel some
more news, and I don't know, there might be a
(51:13):
new show coming out on some on the Somewhere News
YouTube channel in the near future, about as much as
I'm going to say about that right now. And in
the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter at Katie Stole,
not Katie Style, not Katie Soyle. Um, that's a different person.
(51:33):
And I won't I won't see I won't see anything
that you tweet at me Katie Stoyle. Yeah, yeah, so
don't don't. I mean, you could still follow Katie Style.
I I don't know what she's about, but yeah, mm hmm.
I've continued that bit for a bit too long. And Margaret,
(51:54):
you have you have a book. You have a book
that should be available for pre order now soon, right,
I believe so. My book, which I'm once again vamping
so that I can remember the name of my own book,
We Won't Be Here Tomorrow. My book We Won't Be
Here Tomorrow is coming out from a K Press on
September and should be available for pre order in mid June,
(52:15):
which might be when you're listening to this. I don't know.
I don't know when you're listening to this. It might
not even be pre order by the time you listen
to this. It might be um old News. It might
be burned by Anthony Comstock Jr. By the time you
perhaps it might be or Anthony Comstock Jr. Might be
burned by the book legally not me. There are so
(52:41):
many ways this could play out. We don't know. We
can't see the future. But whatever your relationship to time
is or to this recording, cool check out and we
won't be here tomorrow, but we will be here on
Wednesday as my two back for
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
which is the podcast I'm your host, Margot Kiljoy with
me today as though one and only Katie Stole, whose
name apparently don't pronounce it on my second take of
using this very normal name, I don't know. I I
welcome all pronunciations. The more creative, the better. So Katie
(00:22):
style is my guest today, who's from some more news
and Worst Year Ever? Which maybe did the worst year
ever come to a close? I who's to say? Did it? Okay?
I have no idea has it even begun? I don't know.
There's a podcast and you can listen to it, although
you should. You should only listen to this podcast because
(00:42):
Katie's on this podcast too, so you have everyone you need. Yeah,
why go elsewhere? I know? We also have Sophie, who
is our producer. Sophie, how are you doing? Yeah? Yeah,
that's that's that's that's what you're okay. We we've been
chatting for good thirty minutes minutes. It's just so good
(01:06):
to see you, Sophie, both of you. Margaret you as well.
You know Sophie. I just I haven't seen her face
in a few weeks. I know, Katie and Katie and
I are are connected in a beautiful way. I am yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean after a year later, after several years that
(01:27):
we've experienced, the decade we've experienced in the last two years,
I don't know everybody that you see regularly become like
little life rafts or something. Yeah that even like my
um the nonprofit job, I also work. I like look
forward to the everyone meetings on Zoom. It's really embarrassing
(01:49):
because I just like join and I'm like, hello, everyone,
how is your week? And Everyone's like, we hate work meetings,
And I'm like, but how are you doing? Yeah, yeah,
I talk about work. I just want to talk about
the door. Can wait? Work, can wait? I am yeah.
My My relationship to Zoom has so much. Uh you know,
at first there was the novelty. Then there was just
(02:12):
so much resentment and to needing to be on Zoom.
And yet that's what we had in your gratitude as well.
But now it's a way of life almost because I'm
not gonna drive across town for a meeting. Oh my god,
and park as no and park every time I try
(02:33):
to park to my heart races and I'm just grateful
I'm grateful for this little portal into people his lives,
my opportunity to connect, and then people get to use
it from wherever they want to be. Sometimes you get
glimpses of vacation. Sometimes your friends have done something bold
and moved to a new city where it's more affordable,
(02:54):
or they moved to where I moved, where parking is easy.
I'm like, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about.
Are that sounds like literal heaven to me? Yeah, I
don't know what I'll do next time I have to
drive into a city. I went to three different coffee
shops today because I couldn't park at the first two. Oh,
it's so frustrating. It really is an anxious thing. I
(03:16):
think you guys know Miranda July, the Yeah performance artists,
Margaret Margaret absolutely does not, but continue, I don't know anybody.
I don't know she. I don't know if it was
a podcast that she was on, but I heard that
she grew up growing up her mom. It would look
for parking exactly once, and if there was nothing that
(03:37):
they just go home. And she has all this anxiety
about plans falling apart, like like, oh, no, you can't
find parking. Wait wait, wait, don't just like honey, no,
we're not going home. We'll still get ice cream. It's
just need we just need patience. Anyway, that well, that's
(03:58):
a perfect segue because let's see how can we do this.
So freedom is important, the freedom to be able to
park important, and another type of freedom that is important
is reproductive freedom. Yes, so today that's what we're going
to be talking about. We're gonna be talking less about abortion.
We covered that on our episodes about the Jain Collective.
(04:21):
But instead we're going to talk about the fight for
two different things that go well together, but unfortunately I've
been put at odds against each other sometimes, which is
first the right to choose to not have children and
second the right to choose to have children because we
live in such a fund up, racist, moralizing country that
in the past couple hundred years we've had to fight
for both. And Margaret, I'm thrilled you invited me on
(04:43):
for this conversation that I didn't know the topic until
right now. I can't pay for this. This is something
that Katie and I talked about all the time, just
in like friendship stuff. So that's why I knew Katie
would be our our person for this. Well I think
you already know, but you should interrupt and interjected at
(05:04):
any point either of you about any of these things.
So first, and unfortunately I really don't like doing this,
I have to start with a bad person. HM. So
if you're a reasonable person, your first question would have
to be, why the funk would anyone be against anyone's
right to choose whether or not they want to use
birth control? That doesn't make any sense, Like this isn't
(05:24):
even the abortion question, so you can't even pretend like
it's about babies lives or whatever. But it turns out
that some people really really don't like other people having fun.
And this is coming from someone who picked the last
name Killjoy. So I want to introduce you to today's villain,
Anthony Comstock, which is he's the namesake of one of
(05:46):
the worst groups of laws ever written, the Comstock Laws. Okay,
Anthony fucking Comstock hated cussing, He also thanks thanks, He
hated gambling, Eddie hated fucking, and he hated fun and
he decided to take it out on the entire fucking country.
(06:06):
And I'm going to cuss extra hard when I'm talking
about him, because I hate this fucking guy as you should.
As you should. And he was born on March seven,
eighteen forty four, in New Canaan, Connecticut. He cut his
teeth on being a little ship really early on, and
he was never afraid to brag about it. Most of
what we have about his life, all of the horrible
(06:26):
things he did, he bragged about them. He wrote these
like books about himself in order to like be a weird,
famous asshole guy. And he would say, I did this
horrible thing. Isn't that cool? And most people said, no,
that is not cool. Anthony Comstock, what are you doing?
And like what kind of stuff? Well, when he was
(06:47):
a kid, he he decided to drive out the evil,
evil booze merchant out of his town. Oh. He broke
into the bar, turned on all the taps of the
beer like would get wasted it and funk up the
floor and then left a note saying get out of
town or else and successfully drove out. Fun time. He's
(07:09):
like a real Karen kind of vibe here. Yeah yeah,
this is like the most aggressive. This is the mother
of all Karen's. Yeah yeah, okay, And like Karen's he
both uses the law to do all of his evil ship.
But he obviously doesn't actually care about law, because here
he is like bragging about breaking in and doing all
this other ship that's completely illegal. His older brother died
(07:31):
in the Battle of Gettysburg in eighteen sixty three. I
wrote down eight different Gettysburg. Yeah, so Comstock did the
only reasonable thing that he did in his entire life,
and he joined the Union Army. In the army he was,
and you will be shocked to know this, a little ship. Uh.
He kept bothering all of his fellow soldiers. He wanted
(07:53):
them to attend church, and he would like complain about
how they would cuss and talk about sex and the
soldier you know. Yeah. So eventually they got sick of
all of his nagging and they trashed all his ship.
So no one likes this guy, No, I no, I
really don't think anyone does. The war ends, Anthony moves
(08:15):
to Brooklyn and he gets a job as a sales
clerk at a dry goods store. He buys a house
in Brooklyn with is I guess something you can do
with a clerk job in the eighteen sixties. Yeah, back
then things were different. You see, Yeah, it was still Brooklyn. Though.
I've been feeling they're going to chew him up and
spit him out. I you know, well we'll we'll get
(08:39):
we'll get to it. So okay, So he decides to
continue his his moral crusade, and some sources claim that
he was spurred on by how disgusted he was by
seeing how his fellow soldiers had acted. You know, is
how he knew that something was wrong with this country
and needed cleaning up, and he's the man to do it.
So one day, one of his fellow employees has a
venereal disease, and I guess he tells Comstock, which was
(09:03):
his first mistake. Yeah, why would you tell it to
that guy? You know, I don't know. Um, he clearly
doesn't want to talk about sex. And he got it
after he had started buying erotic literature from a local bookshop. Wait,
he got that. There's not actual causality here, Okay, okay, okay,
(09:24):
he went there and he came back with the disease.
But what happened in between, we don't know. He started
reading dirty stories and then supposedly he went out and
got himself a venereal disease, got you, okay. So com
Stock decides that books should be blamed for this guy
getting the club or whatever it was. So he he
(09:47):
marches down to the bookstore, he buys some smut and
then goes and grabs a police captain and to come
and arrest the bookseller for selling the smut. And it's
here that we should point out that our ment and
nycom Stock suffered his whole life from what he described
as a deeply, deeply shameful problem. Is it that he
(10:07):
is a narc? Because I bet it's something sexual? Yea, yeah,
he masturbated, Oh my god, for shame. Yeah different gasp.
I am gasping in shock, I know, And so was
(10:29):
he um quite another. And so basically this is his
pattern his entire life. He buys dirty stories, he feels
guilty about them, and he ruins people's lives, and he
goes on and he gets all of the book vendors
in this open air market arrested for selling books full
of words he doesn't like, and he eventually he learns
(10:49):
he must be keeping track. I suspect he buys them all.
There are exactly one hundred and sixty nine dirty books
available for sale in New York City at this time. Wait,
how many hundred and sixty nine? Oh? Okay, So he
starts going after the publishers, and this actually gets to
one of the darkest parts of comstock story. He goes
(11:11):
after one publisher, a man named William Hayes, and he
sets out to take him down. William Hayes kills himself
as a result of this harassment, and Comstock later braggs
that he drove fifteen people to suicide over the course
of his life. And I wish I knew more about
what happened here, because if it was just one person,
if it was just this guy, I'd be like, Okay,
(11:32):
he got scared, he didn't want to go to jail,
and he took his own life. But fifteen people, I
like wonder what's up. Whether he was just like and
then they got scared and killed themselves, or whether he's
like specifically pressuring people into suicide, whether he's actually just
murdering people and then calling it suicide, or whether it's
all coincidence. Probably not coincidence. Any iteration sounds pretty evil. Yeah.
(11:56):
So Hayes dies, and Comstock goes and gets the local
y m c A to give him enough money to
buy all the printing plates off of his wife so
he can dissolve them in acid. Because this is how
much he hates the books. It's not enough that he
destroyed all the books or the publisher. He also needs
to then get enough money to buy the plates and
destroy them. Totally reasonable um reaction to. Well, not gonna
(12:21):
make any assumptions about his masturbation habits, but at worst
it's some sort of an addiction and uh yeah, so yeah,
let's just go and do this. But also it's not.
He just doesn't like the idea of sin at all.
He often talks about how like the devil drives him
to masturbate and things like that. So the y m
(12:43):
c A, which is not the y w c A.
Even I keep saying why w c A because I
used to go to the gym at the White w
c A. The y m c A made him secretary
of their Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and soon
he is confiscating hundreds of thousands of dirty pictures, song
lyric sheets, sex boys, whatever he can score. Sometimes he
destroys it. An awful lot just goes into this massive
(13:06):
collection he keeps in a warehouse and around this time,
a woman makes the first run for president of the US.
Victoria Woodhall. She's actually too young to run for president,
so her campaign is based on, we will abolish the
United States Constitution and rewrite it so that it's just
and decent. Yes, I know, No, she's she's interesting. She um.
(13:30):
She paid for her campaign mostly with the fortune she
made as the first woman's stockbroker, which she did as
a socialist. What yeah, where is she is? Sounds amazing?
She ran a newspaper that wasn't that advocated for sex education,
free love, suffrage, vegetarianism, socialism, all that ship Victoria, thank you,
(13:53):
Victoria would have all she writ down. Yeah, she gets
complicated a little bit later, but um, as they most
of them do. Yeah. And one of the things that actually,
one of the things that she did that I think
also rules is that after before abolition, the suffrage movement
and the abolition movement were fairly friendly, right, and then
after the after abolition of slavery or the abolition of
(14:18):
certain forms of slavery in the United States. I say
it that way because prison slavery is still legal according
to the Constitution. But women, white women started being shittier
on race issues after that, right, And one of the
things that she did as a white woman is trying
to bring the suffrage movement back into solidarity with black
civil rights movement, And so again just did all kinds
(14:38):
of cool ship. Near the end of her life. She
was a Christian socialist the whole time, and near the
end of her life she kind of backed it all
up and was like, no, I'm a regular Christian now,
not a Christian socialist, started saying promiscuity is bad, and
then was like claiming other people wrote all the stuff
that she wrote. But at this point she's all fire
and feminism and cool as hell. And Comstock does not
(14:59):
like that a woman is running for president, so he's
watching her, waiting for her to slip up so he
can arrest her. When her newspaper runs a column that
exposes a celebrity minister for cheating on his wife, Comstock
arrests her for obscenity for talking about sex in her
fucking newspaper. Oh wow, this guy a piece of work.
(15:24):
He's just waiting, like this annoying shadow, just like waiting
to pop out and stop everyone from actually not being
ashamed of, you know, the human animal. He's just speeling
his own self hatred. The story as old as time,
So the case gets dropped and wood Hall had the
(15:47):
following to say about him, which I'm quoting a write
up about Comstock and lit Hub by Devon Leonard from
Maine to California. We believe the new order of Protestant
Jesuits called the y m c A. Is dubbed with
the well merited title of the American Inquisition. We do
not mean by this to assert that its leaders are
like those of the Spanish Inquisition of the same nature.
(16:08):
We should no more think of comparing comstock with Torque
Maata than contrasting a living skunk with a lion. So
it's both an inquisition and also a shitty one fuck you. Yeah,
so Comstocks like funk, I didn't get to arrest this person.
I need more legal power, So he needs more laws
passed to do his inquisition. Ship. So he grabs a
(16:30):
bunch of neat stuff from his warehouse full of neat stuff,
and he goes off to show it to Congress. And
while he was there he took special note to talk
shit about how all the women he saw at the
White House were far too much makeup, too low kind
of dresses and they did not deserve respect. Oh my god,
this guy, yeah, this fucking guy. So in newspapers are like, hey,
(16:55):
this is obviously a restriction of free press. You can't
do this. But Comstock got his bill, the Comstock to Act,
which is an antisanity law, and specifically, what it does
is it prevents you from sending obscene things through the
United States mail. The Postmaster General is like, all right,
you're our guy, Anthony Comstock. Go out and make sure
that no one ever talks about sex ever again. And
(17:17):
the y m c A keeps paying a salary even
always a government official now and he gets a special
government ride any train anywhere, free ticket, and he's to
go stop vice in America. My god, I feel like
there's a movie in there. I know, I know. And
the problem is that most of the people who make
this movie would try to make him like relatable, you know,
(17:39):
or like he's got to be a bad bad guy.
He is a good guy. Make him relatable and credit
where is due. He targets fake medicine and financial scams,
as well as gambling and pornography and sex work and
everything else and sex education, and we'll get to that.
But I I suspect that even when he was like
coming after like quote fake doctors, he probably just used
(18:01):
as an excuse to be a misogynist. I can't imagine otherwise.
And his true love was stopping people from looking at porn,
than confiscating the porn, than adding it to his collection,
then writing Long treatises in his diary about how he's
overcome by the devil that makes him touch himself, so
he would just conflicate this Long let me get it, okay.
(18:22):
He passed this law, okay, and he's going around making
sure people don't look at porn anymore, and he takes
away their porn and he keeps it for himself, an
awful lot of it. He destroys a lot of it
because he's there's there's millions of pounds or something of books.
I have the numbers at the end. I don't remember
them off the top of my head. He destroys a
lot of it, but he keeps an awful lot of
(18:43):
it as like evidence or whatever. He also he hates abortion,
and he hates it so much that he drags patients
away in the middle of procedures still bleeding. H what
like he goes in. How did they let him in?
It was different back then. Yeah, Like, the closest to
(19:06):
an anonymous hero in this story is one pornographer who
almost got him with a knife and stabbed him in
the face or cut him in the face. But then
Comstock successfully like took him down and disarmed him and
arrested him. And so unfortunately, instead of dying, which is
what should have happened, he got a wicked scar and
everyone was like, whoa, that guy is a wicked scar.
(19:27):
What a badass? Don't funk with him on he got
was credible. On the other hand, he wrote most of
the fucking stories about him, so God only knows what happened.
Oh that's funny. That is funny. You can't believe any
of that press. And within a few years he's kind
of succeeded at cracking down on porn in the United States.
(19:50):
Just impressive. So smut became hard to come by, so
he started arresting other people because he has to arrest somebody.
And it turns out you can call a lot of
stuff smut. You can call anatomy textbook smut, you can
call nude art smut, and you can relevant to today's
story say, anyone talking about birth control or sexual liberation
(20:11):
is producing smut and should be arrested. It's fun discovering
the funked up ways things started here, like like, yeah,
we still have these kinds of conversations in terms of
like Instagram or yeah, I mean there's lots of different
variations of this conversation, but like of what's yeah, any
(20:33):
who know that's such a good point and so relevant
to the fact that like on Instagram you can't post nudes,
Like there's no like I don't want miners to see
my page choice. There's just like sex is still completely
like not allowed to be talked about, you know. Yeah,
and it's and it can be traced back to, yeah,
you know this one person who clearly has problems, who
(20:58):
clearly was dealing with a lot of mental health this
use and shame to um. Yeah. And so so the
next really brief story is one that I can't source
because I read this ten years ago and I don't
know where I read it, and I spent trying to
find it. But apparently during this time in both the
UK and the US, I believe since sex education was
(21:20):
illegal and contraception and teaching people about contraception was illegal
and porn was illegal. People who wrote dirty stories. We
just start throwing in the information about contraception and sex
education into the stories because like in for a penny,
in for a pound, you're already fucking you're already a felon,
so fuck it, you know, wow? Yeah, yeah yeah. And
(21:40):
they would use the same again, I can't source this,
but they would use the same printers as well, right,
And it was the same printers that all the anarchists
and all the revolutionaries were using. Because the people willing
to print all the felony stuff are the people willing
to print the felony stuff. Oh that's quick. This is
a podcast about cool people, not little It's like Anthony Comstock.
(22:01):
So I want to talk about some of the people
who went up against him, the cool people who um
did yes please? So Angela and Ezra Haywood And there
were two Massachusetts based abolitionist feminists and anarchists. They met
through their work in the abolition movement. Most notably to history,
they were free love activists, which at the time was
(22:24):
less specifically about polyamory and more about consent and relationships
and marriage. Having consent and access to reproductive freedom and
basically like get the state out of the bedroom. Was
a lot of what free levels. Yeah, no, they were.
I really liked them. I love hearing this. I love
hearing about people's ideas and how long how long people
(22:46):
have been dancing around the truth of things? Yeah, totally,
it would be clear. It was also about polyamory and
ship for some of them, but not all of them,
Like some people were like free love and monogamous, you know.
So in eighteen seventy two they start a monthly mag
saying called the Word dedicated to all the ship they're into.
And also, like a bunch of nineteenth century radicals, they
(23:07):
named their kids really weird ship. In this case, they
named their kids Greek gods. Psyche, Angelo, Vesta, and Hermes
are their four kids. They're just some fucking hippie I know.
These are people are complete hippies. Almost everyone who comes
up against Comstock are hippies, and they're really weird in
awesome ways. Angela Haywood was descended from John Locke, a
(23:28):
philosopher that I should know more about than I do. Yeah,
her mom actually taught her kids sex education, so she
grew up being told like the Birds and the bees
or whatever. She wasn't well educated. She worked as a
housemaid and she joined the abolitionist movement despite sort of
not being a well educated person. A lot of the
white people involved in the abolition movement in the North
(23:49):
at the time were like more well to do, but
she wasn't. And in this movement she she meets her
her bow. She meets Ezra in eighteen seventy three, which
is the same year that the Comstock laws went into place.
Something that the Haywood's considered even more monumental happened. The
New England Free Love League of Boston formed and we
(24:10):
know that this was a big deal to them. It's
so he's read ahead, I think, so we know it's
a big deal to that because Ezra, at least he's
not into Christianity, right, So he doesn't like using BC
and a D for dates. He said that the problem
with a D is that it recognizes a mythical god
in the calendar, puts Christian colors marked j C on
(24:32):
naturally free necks, and registers the subject of the the
Chivio religious despotism, which the male sexual origin and history
of the Cross impose. So he didn't use BC and
a D. He used b L and y L, which
are before love and Year of love. Oh goodness, it
(24:56):
learned so much about this guy. Yeah, you know everything
you need to know about him right here, and and
the year of Love is of course three when the
New England Free Love League of Boston forms, and I
think we're currently in the Year of Love one and
there I believe a good that's good point. And so
(25:19):
of course their magazine starts using that notation because there
are a bunch of nerds, cute and nerdy. At first,
the magazine mostly talks about free love in the context
of the labor movement, but eventually it's the other way around,
and it's, you know, the labor movement in the context
of free love. And it was a prominent voice in
free love, birth control, and feminism. They advocated such wild
(25:40):
and controversial topics as men should be responsible for their actions,
children should learn what sex is, women can enjoy sex,
sex work is work, and sex workers should be defended,
which is still controversial in some feminist articles today. So
the free love movement wasn't It was also about hooking
(26:00):
up with whoever you wanted, not always, but for some people.
Angela in particular, was apparently inspired by the Oneida community
that was running at the time, which was a religious
commune where everyone decided that they were married to everyone
else in the commune and could fund whoever they wanted.
And this is the place. The Oneta community is probably
the place that coined the the term free love. And
(26:21):
they're really complicated and culty, and I was like starting
to read into them, being like, oh, I'm gonna include them,
and I was like, not kind of fun these guys,
But you know, some interesting ship came out of him. Katie,
Do you have a good product that you would like
to plug? For example, are previously we have plugged the
(26:41):
concept of potatoes, the concept of tap water a very
good comb. Sure, that's a great question. Have you guys
considered the concept of free time? Oh my gosh, I mean,
I don't. Would they provide it to us? It's not free.
(27:05):
You have to work hard for it. But once you
have it, it's nice. Okay. I mean that's the way
I've been told it works. I don't think that you
can get it without really you have to let me know.
That is our new sponsor of the show is the
concept of having free time. Um, and I'm desperately waiting
(27:26):
for them to send free samples in the mail, also
sponsored by whoever comes after in this ad break. And
we are back, and we are trying to distract ourselves
from the number of shortages that are happening, which is
what we talked about over the break. But let's talk
(27:48):
about the nineteenth century when nothing bad happened. Yeah, take
me back in the paths of our heroes and our
villain intertwined. You see, Anthony Comstock was quite distressed that
there was someone somewhere talking about sex as something that
one might enjoy. The year prior the Haywitoz had published
(28:10):
an essay hold On for this title Cupids Yokes or
the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life, An essay to consider
some moral and physiological phases of love and marriage, where
it has asserted the natural right and necessity of sexual
self government. Oh my goodness, that is quite a title.
I really missed. Nineteenth century titling convinced the title take
up half the page. It is just is the cover
(28:31):
of it, you know, Oh my goodness, all on the cover. Yeah,
of course, it's the title. That's where you put it.
Put the title so the essay wasn't actually anti marriage.
Angela and Ezra were married, but it was against traditional
notions of marriage, and if it was anything like other
anarchist feminist texts at the time, it was probably complaining
about how marriage at the time was essentially a property
(28:53):
arrangement by which women are controlled by men. And I
I skimmed this pamphlet it's really in. It is not smart.
It's just a fucking essay of footnotes and various like
anthropological ideas about sex and marriage or whatever. Not to him,
though he could get off on it. Oh yeah anything. Yeah,
(29:13):
traffic cones would just suck him up. Conjugal traffic cones
so so calm Stock. He doesn't like it, so he
does what he does anytime he doesn't like something. He
buys himself a copy and then he goes about ruining
people's lives. He heads on down to the Free Love
League undercover, where Ezra and Angela are are giving speeches.
(29:37):
One of those speeches is actually specifically against com Stock.
They're just like at the meeting talking about com Stock,
and He's like, there is an undercover hearing them talk
to it on him. You know what? Good? He deserves it.
I know. He goes outside and according to him, I'm
just gonna quote him because it's so fucking strange. The
fresh air was never more refreshing. I resolved a stop
(30:00):
that exhibition of nastiness if possible. I looked for a policeman.
As usual, none was to be found when wanted. Then
I sought light and help from above. I prayed for
strength to do my duty and that I might have success.
I knew God was able to help me. Every manly
instinct cried out against turning my back on this horde
(30:22):
of lust. I determined to try. I resolved that one
man in America at least should enter a protest. I mean, honestly,
I feel sad for him. You know, he he's got
such a sad life. Yeah, if this at all had happened,
(30:44):
just like he's like in the hollow deck on Star
Trek or whatever, and it's just like, yeah, so so
ezra Heywood walks out into the lobby and com Stock
arrests him, and the doorman goes off and finds Angela,
who comes over and is like, look, if you're resting
my husband, I'm I'm mean with but there's a problem here,
Anthony Comstock is the paragon of virtue. He can't share
(31:06):
a carriage with Angela Haywood. Oh my god. He quote
felt obliged, out of respect to my wife, sister and
lady friends to decline this kind offer of her company.
And I like, I want to laugh at him. That
wasn't her offer, you fool? I know, I know, right,
She's not like, oh, please let me keep you company
while you arrest my my husband on bullshit charges. He's like,
(31:29):
she's trying to fuck me. Yeah, this guy, And I
want to laugh at him, but doesn't. Isn't this Mike
Pence is the whole fucking thing. Yeah, Yeah, that's very
Mike Pencey. Yeah, there is something I don't know. I
know a lot about Jordan Peterson, but I actually haven't
read that much of his work. But there's something I
(31:50):
know that he just has that like property type of element.
There's something about him that also feels like sad in
the Jordan Peterson kind of way, just so twisted anyway. Yeah,
and uh, this this officer of the law doesn't tell
Haywood what he's being arrested for, doesn't show him a
(32:10):
badge or a warrant none of that ship. He doesn't
find out until the next morning why he's in jail.
So he gets put on trial, and the judge is
an asshole and won't let the defense call character witnesses
or even call expert witnesses to testify that his pamphlets
weren't obscene. The pamphlets aren't even allowed to be read
in court because like they're too dirty. The jury is
(32:32):
allowed to read them with like the scary parts underlined,
and he's found guilty. He gets two years of hard
labor for writing this anthropological study about marriage. The backlash, fortunately, though,
was quite something, and it was just became like a
big national issue, and at one meeting of the people
(32:53):
getting together to try and figure out how to free him,
people were like joking and they were like, what's next,
You're going to confiscate the Bible. It's way dirtier than this.
But the thing is is that come stuck later when
he's trying to arrest the suffragets, he really really doesn't
like the suffragets. He arrests a bunch of them for
printing Bible quotes, and to be fair, I mean there's
(33:17):
some ship in the Bible that is like more lude
than any of this other ship. But sure, but he's
going the wrong direction with that lesson. If the Bible
has the reason you're doing this, man, then chill out. Yeah,
chill out. What you're dealing with is you issue, not
a God issue. Yeah. So there's such a huge campaign
(33:41):
that Ezra only serves six months of his two years
sentence before President Hayes personally pardons him. And this wasn't
like a small deal one for him that he's he
got sent to prison, but Angela and their kids were
homeless actually for a while after that because they relied
on the income of that he provided and ship like that.
(34:01):
The movement came through for them and they did get
home again. But good. So Ezra goes in and out
of jail four more times in his life, including for
distributing pamphlets about birth control that were written by his wife.
And honestly, if that isn't love, I don't know it is.
Angela for her part, though, she's always fighting for recognition
(34:22):
for all the like free love and equality society, and
maybe Ezra himself gave Ezra most of the credit and
blame for everything the couple got up to. But when
he's on trial for distributing her writing. She gets on
the stand and she's basically like, you fucking assholes, Like,
why is he on trial and not me? I wrote
the thing. You're just afraid that the jury would be
more sympathetic to me because I'm a woman. And I'm paraphrasing,
(34:47):
but she cussed a lot in her life, so much
that it always caused a stir and like all the
like proper ladies of the feminist movement didn't like that
this uneducated foul mouth firebrand was doing all this talking.
Now I want a movie about her. Oh yeah, totally.
I like uneducated foul mouth firebrands. They're kind of my
favorite sort of cool people. So I like her, especially
(35:08):
in this context, I know, especially, Yeah, like where the
whole thing is people like stopped cussing. You're like the
funk I will like, fuck you, yeah, fucker yeah. Maybe
this is the same case, but it's hard to keep track.
There's so many He went on trial for so many
different ships. As Row goes on trial for advertising comstock syringes.
See in eight there's this doctor named Sarah Chase and
(35:31):
she gets arrested by Comstock. She's found not guilty, but
she's arrested for selling syringes that you could use as
douches to limit the chance of pregnancy. And they're actually
fairly effective. All the spreading of birth control information, even
before medicated birth control or the mass production of condoms,
it dropped New York City's fertility rate by fifty in
the nineteenth century. Yeah, I because I'm kind of like, oh, well,
(35:53):
first control, that's condoms, and you know the pill and
I d S and ship you just shoot so water
up there and that will do. It's other stuff as
well that they're douching with it's and then they're like,
there's a whole bunch of other you know, for this
episode about like how birth control, I actually only wrote
about the how they fought for birth control. I didn't
actually write as much about the birth control methods. No,
(36:16):
that's fine, but I'm like, yeah, I mean it's not
as effective as what we have now. But yeah, I'm kidding,
I'm not going to do that. But I don't like
birth control. I don't like So the charges against Sarah
don't stick, and so after she she's free, she starts
selling the douches as comstock syringes. And this becomes one
(36:38):
of the main birth control methods as comstock syringes. That's
really funny, and god damn, I'd like to take her
out for a drink, I know. And they they advertise
the douches in the word the Heywitz paper, including with
the line if calm stocks mother had had a syringe
and knew how to use it, what a world of
(36:59):
woe would have saved us. Okay, someone write the movie
and then cast me to player. Yea, all right, someone
green light and get me to write it. Yeah. Um, Sophie,
you're also in charge of all movies? Is that true?
Mm hmm shoot, sorry, okay, all right, we'll circle background
to this idea. So, while he's on trial for the
(37:22):
comp Sucks syringes and some other ship, Ezra Haywood defends
himself in court, which is exactly like, Okay, My theory
is no one who invents their own system of numbering
years lets anyone else represent them in court right now? Honestly,
how could you. You're not going to be on the
same wave length at all. He wins. My man's a winner.
(37:46):
Another time, he's on trial for publishing Walt Whitman poems
and Walt Whitman. Yeah, he's a fucking asshole. He doesn't
defend Ezra. Wait he wait a minute, Wait a minute,
wait a minute. So so he him and Walt we're
working together. Walt willing Lee took his poems to Ezra
to publish as were publishes, gets taken to court, and
(38:08):
Walt doesn't back him up. That is my impression. There's
a chance that this was like a reprint of something
where there wasn't a direct communication with Walt. I don't know,
but I do know that Walt was like, well, what
do you expect for some bullshit? So I was all
set to be like, yeah, Walt Whitman, and then I'm like, really, yeah,
(38:29):
that's disappointing. But well, in eighteen ninety he gets sentenced
to two years hard labor for yet another one of
these things that he's always on trial for. And what
if Angela is getting tired of it at this pend, Well,
she unfortunately has a long life without him because in
in he dies in the same way that of people
(38:51):
who died in the nineteenth century died being asive in
the eighteenth century tuberculosis, which is the same as being
alive in the nineteenth century yeah. Yeah, and he probably
caught tuberculosis in jail. The probably the fight for birth
control killed him. Basically, so did being alive before antibiotics.
But the combination of the two of those two things, yeah,
(39:12):
lethal combo. Yeah, and so, Sophie, this leads me into
what could possibly be the next ad transition, which is
that if big Tuberculosis could throw us a couple of
bucks every time we talked about someone that they killed, Um,
I would buy everyone in my family a house. Oh cool, Yeah, yeah,
Big tuberculosis. Do you hear that? Do you guys think
(39:34):
you want to do that? That would be really great
for me. Yeah, I think so. They're still around. I mean,
you know, they're probably pretty desperate for more attention. Yeah,
I mean they they're certainly not breaking the news cycle.
But but yeah, that's true. Maybe, yeah, maybe they'd be
into this. Yeah, it's not a bad idea. I wouldn't
(39:55):
put all your hope and dreams on it, but it's
worth considering. I've put all my hopes and dreams on
Oh no, well, we're all in. It's gonna happen. Here's
some ads for tuberculosis, and we are back and we
are talking about people build by suberculosis, including cool people.
(40:16):
And actually, now I feel really guilty. I was all
set to have really positive sponsors for the show, and
I gave in to death. Well, best of us. Angela
did not given to death for forty years after her
fucking husband. What a sentence starter. Well wow, just wow.
Nice job and queen ship right there, I know. And
(40:39):
she started being more open about her support for abortion
the same year that her husband died. I actually think
it's a coincidence. Abortions were illegal. Mentioning abortions and anything
you mailed was illegal. So double badass for standing up
for abortions. Yeah, and then she she actually kind of
slips out of the public eye at this point. Sarah Chase,
(41:00):
the woman who invented the comstock syringe. She's working in
reproductive healthcare legally, and she spent six years in jail
at one point because another abortionist sucked up a procedure
and so she took the patient and tried to save
the patient, and the patient died, So she spent six
years in jail. After she gets out, she keeps on
lecturing about sexual health and safety, all the while supporting
(41:21):
herself with her needlework, which I guess also is the
thing you could do and lives into her seventies. At
one point, while she was in jail, she wrote a
letter that was published in a free love journal. I
think it was the Haywood Journal, but I don't know,
And to quote author Amy Son's quoting of her, the
letter ended with the need of reform is to be
(41:42):
seen on every hand, yet all do not see it,
and those who do are unable to resist the inn
it hatred of injustice and wrong that impels them to
try and remedy the evils that lie in their way.
They do not stop to count the cost. They only
say this work must be done and I must help.
I just like it because you see something that needs fixing,
you you fucking work on fixing it rather than worrying
(42:04):
about what it's going to cost you. Yeah, I think
that we all can relate to that. These days. You know,
it's like we have to do it. We just yeah totally,
Like I mean, how especially with climate change, is like
literally like well we we actually have to, like we
are just literally all going to die of this we
don't do this, So yeah, yeah exactly, And you're like, well,
(42:24):
i'd be willing to go get arrested. I'd be willing
to do what I have to do to make sure
if that's what it takes, you know, Yeah, yeah ah. Comstock, however,
continues being a fuck and slowly fucks tend to do.
I know. I feel like he's graduated from little ship
to just an outright funk at this point. Yeah, and
(42:46):
the public starts slowly turning against him. The Irish play
right George Bernard Shaw coined the word comes stockery for
the act of failing to distinguish between art and porn okay,
and basically was like, seriously, the United States, this is
why the rest of the world laughs at you, like
what the funk is wrong with you? And Comstock wrote
about himself a lot. He sold books with click bait
(43:08):
headlines of titles like Frauds Exposed and Traps for the
Young Odd it's like Fox News or something. Yeah. Absolutely.
He died in nineteen fifteen. He lived to be way
too old. He made it to seventy two, and when
he died his house was full of pornography he'd confiscated.
(43:28):
So the newspaper American Art News wrote this like fuck
you obituary to him. Um basically saying like, normally we
only talk about people who are important to the art world,
but but Comstock actually had a massive collection of art
in his house. That's hilarious and m hm yeah, and
(43:49):
then says like he fucked over all these innocent people
and he's terrible and so and his legacy is that
he's been written and as the villain or the namesake
of the villain of I think dozen of books, plays,
and also the video game BioShock Infinite. He's the That's amazing.
That is fucking rad. That's also you know, like, yeah,
(44:11):
there's there's all those things we can trace back to him.
But also now Colm Stock in general is a villain. Yeah, totally.
His Society for the Suppression of Ice lurched on for
another thirty five years, coming after James Joyce. It got
Broadway stars arrested, and generally it was just really fucked up.
And in the end, Comstock bragged that he had arrested
(44:33):
more than four thousand people, destroyed more than fifteen tons
of books, four million pictures, and he bragged about having
driven those fifteen people to suicide. One of the people,
one of those people, one of the fifteen was a
woman named Ira Craddock who was born in Philadelphia as
an only child. She's another cool hippie. She was born
(44:54):
in a Quaker family, so for everyone who's keeping track
with the stuff, bingo, that is yeah, quicker um. Her
dad died while she was still like crawling, and I
think she was six months old or something, and her
her mom raised her up smart. She was all set
to be the first woman led into the University of
Pennsylvania in two but then the board was like, wait, no,
(45:17):
no, no no, no, she's a woman. She can't do that.
Did they for not realize that at first? Yeah? I
don't know. I'm sure someone was like, fuck it, let's
do this, and then the board was like, the hell
we will. She wrote books about stenography, she quit the
Quakers to become an occultist, and I'm pretty sure she
was happy as a single woman who took care of
her own needs. In fact, she declared that she was
(45:39):
married to an angel named Soap different I think a
different so if I couldn't promise, and that there their
sex was so loud that neighbors would complain. Oh okay, yeah,
so she's doing fine. She doesn't need a husband and
incarnate mortal husband, and she's constantly getting arrested for writing.
(46:04):
So she writes like women's self help pamphlets about how
to make your marriage better, like this, like very standard
thing that you can get to the check out file,
you know, just how to have good sex with your husband.
And she gets arrested for it constantly, and she spends
a while institutionalized for it. She's in jail a lot.
She consistently refuses to plead insanity. Everyone's like, she's clearly
(46:25):
crazy because she's an occultist and she likes sex. And finally,
after a three months also she was married to what
was an angel? What was he? Yeah, yeah, an angel
named Sophia. I don't know. I agree, it's probably anything else,
but there was that in the mix. I am sure
that did not help convince people of her sanity, but
(46:47):
within the context of like the weird religious ship people,
we're in our end two, you know, yes, And so
she spends three months in jail one of these times,
and when she comes out, she's immediately re arrested by
calm Stock and she gets sentenced to five years. Her
pamphlet The Wedding Night was so obscene that the jury
wasn't allowed to see it during trial. But it wasn't
(47:09):
that bad. Yeah, and she's she's fucking convicted literally from hey,
take my word for it is bad to the jury. Yeah,
she couldn't face going back behind bars. So at forty
five years old, she killed herself and her her suicide
note is basically a long public letter saying, oh my god,
fuck you, calm Stock. I'm glad she was able to
(47:30):
express herself. That's fucking tragic. Yeah, he he just absolutely
ruined us. Woman's life who was like, by all accounts,
like every wonderful cat lady you've ever met who keeps
crystals and like, so she was married to an angel
named self. Yeah, and wrote about how people should have
good sex with their husbands. This wasn't even a like
(47:52):
everyone leave their husbands and gobie witches in the woods
and be lesbians or whatever. How not long ago? This
is you know, yeah, totally and so so Comstock. He
outlives a lot of his victims. But he doesn't win
the war, I would argue, And because both sides kept
fighting and are still fighting now. Most obviously you've got
(48:16):
the end of Roe v. Wade and the Christian right
wing is getting pretty open about how gay marriage and
birth control are like next in their war of reaction.
But also there's bipartisanship, like this Comstock was a bipartisan
law to my understanding, and the government past Sesta Fasta,
which are two bills that just just decimate the rights
(48:37):
of sex workers and the online services that sex workers
use to do their work safely. It's just the same
moralistic nightmare and we're not out of it. But I
don't want to say it one because like it's just
a constant pushing and pulling. It didn't win it just
but that's exactly correct. I mean, obviously, culturally we've evolved
well passed this and what we accept and how we
(49:02):
talk about sex and orgasms and sexuality and identity and
all of that. But yeah, no, it's the the argument
in the basis is still there, you know, just like, yeah,
we still have these ideas what is smart, what is
needs to be censored, what is allowed? Well, versions of
(49:25):
that morality argument obviously are still going on and continue
to be used as cudgels. Two further in trench people
you know, in in their team and their sides, but
it's on both you know, Yeah, even democratic lawmakers participate
in this game of morality and right and wrong when
(49:48):
it comes to sex and Fastasessta is a tragic example
of that with huge implications. Yeah. No, I knew you're
the right person to bring on because I feel like
you talked about a lot of this stuff, a lot
like I don't talk as much about the stuff that
happens now, you know. Well yeah, sure, I mean I do.
(50:08):
But I'm inviting you. Yeah yeah, I'm like I keep
talking about of them like now, Honestly, if you want
to go on, please do No, No, I'm good for
right now. But if something else pops up, all okay,
Well that's it for today's. When we come back on Wednesday,
we're going to bring the fight into the twentieth century
(50:30):
and we're gonna talk about my favorite birth control advocate,
I'm a Goldman, plus all the other people who tried
to fight on the other front the right to get
to have children, because it's about choice and we have
to fight for both of these things. Oh. These are
such good episode ideas, so important and interesting. Thank you
(50:50):
for in finding me on again. I loved this, Katie.
Do you have anything you would like to plug at
the end here. Oh boy, goodness, gosh. Yeah. Sure. Well
I've got my podcast even more News that I host
with Cody Johnston, and we've got our YouTube channel some
more news, and I don't know, there might be a
(51:13):
new show coming out on some on the Somewhere News
YouTube channel in the near future, about as much as
I'm going to say about that right now. And in
the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter at Katie Stole,
not Katie Style, not Katie Soyle. Um, that's a different person.
(51:33):
And I won't I won't see I won't see anything
that you tweet at me Katie Stoyle. Yeah, yeah, so
don't don't. I mean, you could still follow Katie Style.
I I don't know what she's about, but yeah, mm hmm.
I've continued that bit for a bit too long. And Margaret,
(51:54):
you have you have a book. You have a book
that should be available for pre order now soon, right,
I believe so. My book, which I'm once again vamping
so that I can remember the name of my own book,
We Won't Be Here Tomorrow. My book We Won't Be
Here Tomorrow is coming out from a K Press on
September and should be available for pre order in mid June,
(52:15):
which might be when you're listening to this. I don't know.
I don't know when you're listening to this. It might
not even be pre order by the time you listen
to this. It might be um old News. It might
be burned by Anthony Comstock Jr. By the time you
perhaps it might be or Anthony Comstock Jr. Might be
burned by the book legally not me. There are so
(52:41):
many ways this could play out. We don't know. We
can't see the future. But whatever your relationship to time
is or to this recording, cool check out and we
won't be here tomorrow, but we will be here on
Wednesday as my two back for
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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