About this item
Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. 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 with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery.Between 1873 and Comstock's death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These "sex radicals" supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women's right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press.
About the Author
Amy Sohn's new novel, The Actress, will be published by Simon & Schuster on July 1, 2014. She is also the author four other novels, including Prospect Park West and Run Catch Kiss. She has been a columnist at New York, the New York Post, the New York Press, and Grazia. She co-created a television show for Oxygen entitled "Avenue Amy." She has written for Harper's Bazaar, Premiere, Playboy, Elle, The New York Times, and Details. As a pundit on popular culture, she has appeared on such networks as VH1, MTV, Fox News, CNN, Lifetime, MSNBC, and PBS. She has a brother, five years younger. Her favorite writers are Laurie Colwin, Hilma Wolitzer, Charles Bukowski, Nathanael West, Mary Gaitskill, and Bruce Jay Friedman. As a child she was taken to the films Heartland, Splash, Heart Like a Wheel, The Magical Mystery Tour, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday. If she could switch careers she would be a Broadway musical theater producer or a sommelier. She dresses to the left. She believes that when it comes to hair highlights, cheap is expensive. Her favorite candy is York Peppermint Patties and she always has a knot in the same section of her hair when she wakes up. A native New Yorker, she still lives there today.
www.facebook.com/amysohn
www.twitter.com/amysohn
www.amysohn.com.
