What did the Comstock Act do?
Comstock’s influence extended far beyond the 1873 law. In the years following the Comstock Act’s passage, state lawmakers greenlit a series of related restrictions now known collectively as the Comstock laws. The scope of these measures was staggering.
“The early Comstock Act enforcement is extraordinarily broad, and gets broader and broader,” Mary Ziegler, a legal scholar at the University of California, Davis, tells the New York Times. She adds that targeted acts could include “writing a letter to somebody asking them for a date if they weren’t married.”
In 1905, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw popularized the term “Comstockery,” which referred to the strict censorship of materials considered obscene. “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” wrote Shaw in the Times in 1905. “Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”
The bans’ most obvious targets were erotic images and texts. But they also covered subjects that could only be considered obscene under loose definitions of the word, such as sex education texts that went to pains to circumvent the laws. In 1915, reproductive rights activist Mary Ware Dennett distributed a popular sex education booklet that omitted information about birth control. She wrote, “At present, unfortunately, it is against the law to give people information as to how to manage their sex relations so that no baby will be created.” But the book was still deemed obscene, and Dennett was charged with violating the Comstock Act. (Her conviction was later overturned in a landmark free speech case.)
The Comstock laws applied to works of art and literature, too. In 1883, Comstock targeted an art gallery that sold reproductions of famous nude artworks, such as Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. A court ruled against the gallery owner and seized the paintings.
Similar censorship cases continued for decades. In 1920, two women published a particularly lewd chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary journal. They were found guilty of distributing obscene materials through the mail and forced to shut down the publication. For the following decade, Americans interested in reading Ulysses—now commonly counted among the greatest novels of all time—could only do so by finding copies smuggled in from Paris.