Anthony Comstock was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. And you likely have never heard of him. This man was RELENTLESS in his quest to damage the lives of many, mostly women. He swindled the US Supreme court into making him special agent" of the post office. A phenomenal book but my GOD i wish this was fiction because he was such a monster. Highly recommend.

This book is absolutely underrated. I would have loved to see this book more in round ups for nonfiction and women's history for last year, but I think that now that I have completed this read, I am going to suggest it for purchase for my local library.

Essentially, this book is about Anthony Comstock who was an anti-vice activist and U.S. Postal Inspector, and the remarkable women who opposed his war on women's rights at the turn of the twentieth century. His name was soon equated with repression and prudery. The Man Who Hated Women tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. They were publishers, editors, and doctors, including the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the birth control activist Margaret Sanger; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to go against a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, they paved the way for modern-day feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined contraceptive access as a human civil liberty.

I did not know anything about this part of history before requesting this book. I think this book filled a major gap in the modern release literature about women's history & feminist history, and I think that there was valuable information within. The readability is fine, the writing style was easy to follow. I'm impressed that the POV of the women involved & their advocating for their causes is the highlighted info.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This is a fascinating story about a man in history I’d never heard of before. Anthony Comstock, in New York between 1873 and his death in 1915, was the US Postal Inspector in charge of obscene material going through the mail system. Along with materials of female nudity, Comstock makes his name by opposing anything to do with contraception and abortion, making him the enemy of women that are trying to further women’s rights. With fines and imprisonment Comstock battles well know activists Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, but also a group of earlier activists that were crucial in this fight, sometimes giving up their very lives.

I have to agree with other reviewers that the title of Amy Sohn’s whirlwind recounting of Anthony Comstock and his eponymous laws, The Man Who Hated Women, is misleading. This book is much more about the women Comstock targeted than about the bewhiskered busybody himself. For those who aren’t familiar, Comstock crusaded against vice in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To Comstock, “vice” encompassed pornography, contraception, abortion, free love—basically, anything written or said about people doing things with their naughty bits. Leveraging his position as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock was able to convince Congress to appoint him as an inspector with the Postal Service. This position and a growing body of laws allowed Comstock to prosecute men and women who dared to challenge mores about sex and reproduction. Because of Comstock, Sohn argues, we Americans are still decades behind the rest of the world when it comes to reproductive rights. I have to agree.

Sohn includes brief biographical information about Comstock—much less than I would expect from a book supposedly about the man. Sohn uses Comstock’s arrest book and his few surviving letters, as well as contemporary newspaper articles and court records, as her biographical sources. I would’ve thought this would be enough to work with. Sohn is able to pull plenty of illustrative quotes from these documents. Because of this, I was often surprised when Sohn would speculate about how often Comstock masturbated without any evidence whatsoever as a way to, I don’t know, point out Comstock’s hypocrisy? Internal conflict about sex? Either way, we learn little about what drove Comstock to so relentlessly pursue people he saw as criminals that he is responsible for at least two suicides (Ann Trow Lohman and Ida C. Craddock).

Sohn is on firmer (and much more interesting) ground when she turns her attention to a series of women Comstock targeted during his decades working for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the U.S. Postal Service. She profiles Victoria Woodhull, Lohman, Craddock, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, among others. Where Comstock remains a somewhat murky (if fulminating and Puritanical) presence, Sohn outdoes herself in bringing these women to life. Her chapters on Woodhull and Craddock are especially detailed. (In Craddock’s case, this might be because the woman had some genuinely odd beliefs, not least of which was her firm conviction that she was married to a ghost.) Through these biographical sketches, Sohn is able to explore growing movements to provide contraception to American women, to challenge traditional ideas of marriage, and the push-and-pull over free speech and suppressed speech. Sohn also dips into Spiritualism, free love, and the long history of trying to legally define obscenity.

The Man Who Hated Women is a frustrating read. While frequently interesting, many sections of this book were a whirlwind of names, laws, and philosophies. This is definitely the sort of book you would want to read as an ebook so that you could quickly look things up. Because of the broad range of the book, Sohn’s theses never quite gelled for me. I don’t think Comstock hated women, for one. I think he was just terrified of and appalled by sex. I think if Sohn had focused more on fewer people, this book would have been a lot more effective.

Anthony Comstock, special agent to the Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity, and his name was soon equated with repression and prudery.
Between 1873 and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, eight remarkable women, also known as "sex radicals," supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and a woman's right to sexual pleasure. The Man Who Hated Women tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined contraceptive access as a human civil liberty.
Author Amy Sohn does bring these women's stories to life. While the content is very graphic sexually - both in the descriptions of sexual encounters and talk about sex norms of the time - the story is important. These eight women and many other men and women fought for freedoms.
Still 140 years later, women still fight for the right to sexual freedom and the control of their bodies. This book can encourage us to keep fighting.

I really enjoyed this book. it is a great first introduction to this era of history.

At times the story felt a little watered down and oversimplified, there wasn't much context provided for the time period for how revolutionary it truly was for women to write/publish books and speak at conventions. Most of the narratives were fully fleshed out and went very in-depth in the short amount of time provided to each woman.

Comstock was a man who represented all the worst parts of the era he grew up in, and his misogyny played a massive role in the development of contraceptive and abortion laws. I think this is a definite must-read for anyone interested in reproductive laws and the impact of Christian morality on the accessibility of abortion.

I received this book for an honest review from netgalley #netgalley

Such a great true crime book ,really true crime at its finest! This was definitely a true to me author. But I'm glad that I gave it a try

A great book about sexism and censorship. I actually never heard any of this history before so this was extremely interesting to me. I highly recommend this book.