XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (11 page)

Using the false name of E. Edgewell, Comstock wrote to the Heywoods and ordered a copy of
Cupid's Yokes
to entrap the editor. This was one of a series of letters that Comstock addressed to Ezra.

On November 3, 1877, while speaking in Boston, Ezra was personally arrested by Comstock.

The purity crusader recorded his reaction at having to sit in the audience, listening to the meeting's proceedings, while he awaited the right moment to bag his prize: "I could see lust in every face.... The wife of the president [Ezra] (the person I was after) took the stand, and delivered the foulest address I ever heard. She seemed lost to all shame. The audience cheered and applauded. It was too vile; I had to go out." [9]

Ezra was charged with circulating obscene material through the mail. At the commencement of the trial, the prosecution held that
Cupid's Yokes
was too obscene to be placed upon the records of the court. Thus, the obscenity of the pamphlet was assumed when the trial started. The court also forbade any investigation into the purpose or merits of the work, as well as any medical or scientific testimony.

On June 25, 1878, Ezra Heywood was sentenced to pay a $100 fine and to be confined for two years at hard labor. On August 1, six thousand people demonstrated in Faneuil Hall in Boston.

They demanded the editor's release and the repeal of the Comstock laws. After serving six months, Ezra was released under a special pardon from President Hayes. Comstock was outraged; he renewed his determination to stop
Cupid's Yokes
from circulating.

His next target became D. M. Bennett-editor of the freethought periodical
Truth Seeker-
who flouted the Comstock laws by advertising
Cupid's Yokes.

The Bennett case-
U.S. versus
Bennett
(1879) [10]--rewrote American obscenity law, because it introduced the Hicklin standard to American jurisprudence. The Hicklin standard for obscenity derived from a decision in the British court case
Regina versus
Hicklin
(1868). [11] Under this

standard, anything that tended to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was considered to be obscene. The Hicklin standard would remain the basis of American obscenity law for more than half a century.

Persecutions only made Ezra harden his stand. In 1882, he was again arrested for distributing
Cupid's Yokes
along with other "obscene" materials, including two of Walt Whitman's poems.

He was acquitted on April 12, 1883, then quickly arrested again for distributing an essay written by Angela, which argued for birth control.

This obscenity charge, along with one in
1887,
was never prosecuted, largely due to public protest. Then, in 1890,
The Word
reprinted a letter from the free-love periodical
Lucifer, the
Light Bearer-
a letter which had occasioned the trial of
Lucifer's
editor, Moses Harman, on charges of mailing obscenity.

43

Heywood was arrested and indicted on three counts of obscenity. He was sentenced to two years at hard labor, which he served in its entirety. Released in poor health, Ezra Heywood died a year later, on May 22, 1893
,
after catching a cold.

The Word
ceased publication. It had been killed by those who sought to control sexual expression.

It was left t6 Moses Harman, publisher of
Lucifer, the Light Bearer,
and the circle of courageous reformers who gathered about him, to continue the fight for women's sexual rights.

The
Lucifer
Circle

On a hot June Sunday in 1879
,
the widower Moses Harman and his two children, George and Lillian, arrived in the sleepy Midwestern town of Valley Falls, Kansas. The small town would become a center of sexual reform in America. Although his neighbors must have initially approved of Harman's respectable appearance and well-mannered ways, they soon saw a more controversial side of the man. For Moses Harman was an uncompromising crusader for free love and against what he labeled the Twin Despots: the paternalistic state and the church.

In his private life, Harman was something of a prude, but he insisted that everyone be free to make decisions concerning sex without requiring permission from a church or the state. In particular, he demanded uncontrolled access to birth control, and marriage by contract.

In 1883
,
Harman began publishing a periodical entitled
Lucifer, the Light Bearer
(1883-1907)
.

The paper was so named because it was Lucifer, not God, who offered man the knowledge of good and evil. Like Prometheus, Lucifer brought light to man; like Prometheus; he became an outcast for doing so. Lucifer was the first political rebel; he questioned the status quo of authority called God.

Lucifer
quickly became the outstanding journal of sexual liberty of its day. It almost defined the limits of sexual freedom in late nineteenth-century America.

Lucifer
also became a prime target of Anthony Comstock, who bristled at the periodical's open discussion of birth control, and of forced marital sex as rape. Although Harman knew the risk involved in addressing such issues, he maintained: "Words are not deeds, and it is not the province of civil law to take preventative measures against remote or possible consequences of words, no matter how violent or incendiary." [12]

On February 23, 1887
,
a federal marshal arrived in Valley Falls to arrest the staff of
Lucifer
on
270
counts of obscenity, which resulted from its publication of four letters to the editor. The number of counts was somewhat arbitrary, since
Lucifer
was considered too obscene to be read before a judge or jury. Harman responded by reprinting the letters along with a passage from the Old Testament, which portrayed incest, harlotry, and
coitus interruptus
. He did this in the hope of having the Bible declared obscene. (His efforts carne to naught. Not until
1895,
when J. B.

Wise mailed a postcard inscribed with a salty verse, was the Bible declared legally obscene.) The charges sprang from a policy Moses Harman had initiated in the spring of 1886
.
Harman vowed not to edit letters sent to
Lucifer
because of the language they contained. Although Harman did not agree with everything he printed, he thought free speech vented whatever evil lay in the hearts of men and women.

In the June 18 issue, a letter appeared from a Tennessee doctor, W. G. Markland. Because of its historical importance the Markland letter is quoted here extensively: EDS. LUCIFER: To-day's mail brought me a letter from a dear lady friend, from which I quote and query:

"About a year ago F--- gave birth to a babe, and was severely torn by the use of instruments in incompetent hands. She has gone through three operations and all failed. I 44

brought her home and had Drs. ---and---operate on her, and she was getting along nicely until last night, when her husband came down, forced himself into her bed and the stitches were torn from her healing flesh, leaving her in a worse condition than ever. I don't know what to do....

"Laws are made for the protection of life, person and property.

"Will you point to a law that will punish this brute? Was his conduct illegal? The marriage license was a permit of the people at large given by their agent for this man and woman-a mere child-to marry.

"Marry for what? Business? That he may have a housekeeper? He could legally have hired her for that. Save one thing, is there anything a man and woman can do for each other which they may not legally do without marrying?

"Is not that one thing copulation? Does the law interfere in any other relations of service between the sexes?

"What is rape? Is it not coition with a woman by force, not having a legal right?

"Can there be legal rape? Did this man rape his wife?

"Would it have been rape had he not been married to her?

"Does the law protect the person of woman in marriage? Does it protect her person out of marriage? Does not the question of rape turn on the pivot of legal right regardless of consequences?

"If a man stabs his wife to death with a knife, does not the law hold him for murder?

"If he murders her with his penis, what does the law do?

"If the wife, to protect her life, stabs her husband with a knife, does the law hold her guiltless?

Can a Czar have more absolute power over a subject than a man has over the genitals of his wife?

"Is it not a fearful power? Would a kind, considerate husband feel robbed, feel his manhood emasculated, if deprived of this legal power?

"Does the safety of society depend upon a legal right which none but the coarse, selfish, ignorant brutal will assert and exercise? ...

"Has freedom gender? . . ."

W. G. Markland [13]

The second offending letter was a protest against contraceptives on the grounds that they removed an obstacle to husbands who wished to have sex: namely, the fear of another mouth to feed. The third letter retold an anecdote about a couple who thought the world was ending and, therefore, told each other about their sexual improprieties. A fourth one discussed the relative virtues of two methods of sexual abstinence.

For these obscenities, Moses and his son George were arrested. All charges were later dropped against George.

On February 14, 1890, the unrepentant
Lucifer
printed a letter from a New York physician that detailed the sexual abuses he had seen in the course of his practice. The doctor's graphic accounts included a description of a man who liked to perform oral sex on other men. The letter remains one of the few nineteenth-century journalistic discussions of oral sex.

Moses Harman was sentenced to serve five years in prison and to pay a $300 fine. After serving seventeen weeks, he was released on a technicality, retried without a jury on a slightly different charge, and sentenced to one year. After eight months, he was again released on a technicality.

45

The renowned British playwright George Bernard Shaw lamented Harman's plight in a front-page interview in
The New York Times:
". . .
A journal has just been confiscated and its editor imprisoned in America for urging that a married woman should be protected from domestic molestation when childbearing. Had that man filled his paper with aphrodisiac pictures and aphrodisiac stories of duly engaged couples, he would be a prosperous, respected citizen. " [14]

Harman continued to be persecuted through the Comstock laws, even though few people believed his periodical contained anything obscene. On one occasion, for example, the postal authorities objected to the sentence, "it is natural and reasonable that a prospective mother should be exempt from the sexual relation during gestation." Ironically, this sentence had been excerpted from a book by a noted doctor, E. B. Foote-a book that was allowed to circulate freely in the mails.

Harman's last imprisonment for obscenity was in 1906, when he was seventy-five years old.

Moses was sentenced to a year at hard labor in Joliet. When breaking rocks for eight-and-a-half hours a day in the bitter winter cold threatened his health, his friends pressured the authorities and managed to get him transferred.

At about this time, Shaw was asked why he did not visit America. He answered bluntly: The reason I do not go to America is that I am afraid of being arrested by Mr. Anthony Comstock and imprisoned like Mr. Moses Harman.... If the brigands can, without any remonstrance from public opinion, seize a man of Mr. Harman's advanced age, and imprison him for a year under conditions which amount to an indirect attempt to kill him, simply because he shares the opinion expressed in my
Man and Superman
that `marriage is the most licentious of human institutions,' what chance should I have of escaping? No thank you; no trips to America for me. [15]

The last issue of
Lucifer-
brought out by Moses's daughter Lillian-was a tribute to her father, who died in 1908. But the eulogy I have always preferred was published in 1891, by a woman who subscribed to
Lucifer.
She called the periodical "the cry of women in pain": It is the mouthpiece, almost the only mouthpiece in the world, of every poor, suffering, defrauded, subjugated woman. Many know they suffer, and cry out in their misery, though not in the most grammatical of sentences.... A simple woman ... may know nothing of her biology, psychology, or of the evolution of the human race, but she knows when she is forced into a relation disagreeable or painful to her. Let her express her pain; the scientists may afterwards tell why she suffers, and what are the remedies, -if they can. [16]

Censorship silenced women in pain. It silenced
The Word
and
Lucifer, the Light Bearer.
Today, it seeks to silence women with aberrant sexual preferences, such as bondage or exhibitionism.

The result of social purity was sexual ignorance.

The Word
and
Lucifer
were far from the only casualties of the anti-obscenity craze. The following is an abridged list, which gives no more than a sense of the extent of persecution: · Ann Lohman, who performed abortions and dispensed birth control information, was so hounded by Comstock that she committed suicide. He bragged that she was the fifteenth person he had driven to such an end.

· Frederick Hollick, a physician, tried to popularize the rhythm method, but was discouraged from doing so by the Comstock laws.

· Edward Bliss Foote, author of
Radical Remedy in Social Science
(1886), and his son, Edward Bond Foote, published home medical books. The father was arrested in
1874
for 46

mailing a pamphlet that contained contraceptive information. Because of public opinion, Foote was let off with a stiff fine.