 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Amy Sohn, author of The Man Who Hated Women. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, July 15th at noon, we'll hear from Paul Lettersky, who in 1965 was assigned to assist the legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Lettersky's new book, The Director, describes his years in Hoover's inner circle. And on Tuesday, July 20th at 1 p.m., former Congresswoman and Wilson Center Director Jane Harmon will discuss her recently published book, Insanity Defense, which examines how four administrations have failed to confront some of the toughest national security policy issues. First of all, I'm delighted, as always, to see thanks to the National Archives staff in the acknowledgments of the man who hated women. Amy Sohn's recognition of the staff of the National Archives at Chicago is much appreciated. The anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock devoted his career to opposing what he deemed immoral. His namesake law, the 1873 Comstock Act, outlawed sending obscenity and contraceptives through the U.S. mail, and its effect lasted for 100 years. After the act's passage, eight remarkable women engaged in a decades-long fight against Comstock's law in court and the press. In The Man Who Aided Women, Amy Sohn brings to light their stories and describes how their activism laid the groundwork for expansion of women's rights in the future. Amy Sohn is the New York Times' best-selling author of 12 books, which have been published in 11 languages and on five continents, and is also a screenwriter for television. She has written weekly columns for the Downtown Weekly New York Press and The New York Post, and was a contributing editor at New York Magazine for six years. As a freelance journalist, she has written for The New York Times, Slate, Harper's Bazaar, L., Men's Journal, and many others. Moderator Elizabeth Mitchell is the author of four nonfiction books and formerly served as the executive director of George Magazine, the features editor of Spin Magazine, and a contributing editor to Newsweek. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Convinas Traveler, Glamour, and The Nation, among others. Mitchell has been interviewed on numerous radio and television shows and has taught nonfiction writing at Columbia University. Now let's hear from Amy Sohn and Elizabeth Mitchell. Thank you for joining us. Hi there. I am so thrilled to welcome Amy Sohn today to this program at the National Archives. I am a huge fan of this book, The Man Who Hated Women, and I am so excited to get a chance to ask all the questions I had while I was reading it. So, Amy, I want to start off just with how you even came across this story. Where did the whole adventure of researching this begin? Thank you so much for doing this, Biz. I feel aligned with you in our important work of uncovering women's stories, which is not always easy work. And thank you to the National Archives Foundation for having us, both of us, which I'm sure we're going to talk about at some point a little bit, have done a lot of research at the National Archives. For this book, I utilized the archives in Chicago, New York, and Walfam, and, of course, D.C. and College Park. So how did I, we already forgot the question, how did I get interested in this subject? I've always been interested in ideas around women's hysteria and women's sanity or insanity. I love the film Gaslight. We use the term gaslighting all the time. But very few people have seen the incredible Ingrid Bergman film from which the term derives. I learned about the story of Ida Craddock, who was this odd, Philadelphia Quaker-born woman born in 1857. And I learned that she was visited at night by a ghost husband. And through researching her story, I learned that she was prosecuted under the Comstock laws. And I decided that if I wanted to write a book that included Ida Craddock's story, I needed to be a little broader than that. And so I began researching all of the women who I felt had meaty, juicy, interesting stories and who had butted heads with him in one way or another. Some were prosecuted, eight women in my book, some were prosecuted under state Comstock laws and some under federal. But I thought that he was a great opportunity to really tell the stories of these what I call sex radicals, these incredibly unconventional women, who some of whom we've heard about, but most of whom we hadn't, because they were active before suffrage passed. And they were in this kind of middle generation of women born generally in the middle of the 19th century, some of them 1830s, some 1850s who don't get a lot of attention. And some reviewers have said it's called The Man Who Mated Women, but it's really about the women and it is. Anthony Comstock is a great foil. If we can use him, I felt like if I could use him to tell these stories, why not? Because it would be exactly what he wouldn't want, right? Exactly, yes, yes. And as we all, he too is an evocative and evocative character. Well, let's get a little sketch of where he comes from. I don't want to, you know, I want to move into the women's stories because there are pros, but who was he? Because basically he had this profound impact on the lives of women going forward for a hundred years. And, you know, there's still resonance and 150 really. Yeah, because the passage of the Comstock Act was 1873. So we're now coming up on, am I adding correctly, 150 years. Anthony Comstock was born in 1844 in New Canaan, Connecticut. Then an agrarian part of Connecticut grew up on a farm. He could see the Long Island sound from the farm. And every Sunday, he and his brothers and sisters and parents went to the Congregationalist Church for many, many hours. His mother was, his mother, Polly Comstock, was a direct descendant of the Puritans. And Anthony fought in the Civil War. His brother, Samuel, died in service and he enlisted afterward. And he appears from his Civil War diaries to have masturbated obsessively and then felt obsessively guilty about it. We think that some of his animus toward obscenity came from the fact that during the Civil War, men were passing around books and pictures and this kind of thing because it had become cheaper to mail those kinds of materials. He moved to New York around 1867, 1868, like many young veterans. And he wanted to become a dry good salesman. But because he was interacting a lot with other men his age who were visiting prostitutes and pursuing what was called the sporting life, sporting culture, which included boxing, billiards, pretty waiter girl saloons, bars, the wonderful book, Little Life by Luke Saunt gets it all of this. He became very bothered by the men's pursuit of vice. And through a series of kind of small world coincidences, he was able to befriend the scions of the YMCA, which was founded in this country in 1852. And through the connections that he made to those guys who included Samuel Colgate, a name you might know from your toothpaste tube and John Pierpott Morgan, he was sent to Washington in 1872 and 1873 and got this law passed that became known as the Comstock law, even though it has a much longer and more complicated name. So Anthony Comstock was essentially, he was an iconic figure in the sense that he had kind of a classic civil war era biography, which was a young religious Christian fought in the war and then moved to a large city and became really overwhelmed by the amount of vice, noise, craziness manufacturing of New York. And it drove him to become what I call a monomaniac. I found it fascinating actually that the street, one of the key streets where this was all happening was Nassau Street, which I happened to have lived on. So it was really interesting to see that that was the, the place where pornography was sold and produced and all the rest and that it was done quite openly. And it seems, I mean, I think one of the interesting things is people often have this impression of that era as if it was this really Puritan across the board society. But in fact, it wasn't really, it was, I mean, even when you're talking about the, these women that you're coming across, I too was finding that women had a certain level of liberation in the sort of mid to late 1800s, which they seem to have lost once World War I came along. And so can you describe a little bit more, what that New York was like? I mean, you give some adjectives there, but I mean, like, go ahead, go ahead. So, I mean, how prevalent was the, this kind of seedy society as far as you can tell? I mean, some people, if you're familiar with this world at all, maybe you've read or seen Gangs of New York, New York at that time was only downtown. You know, we think of, we think of the length of Manhattan. He lived on a boarding house on Pearl Street, near your old apartment. This was where a lot of people were arriving by boat. There was shipping, you know, that was what downtown was all about at that time. And you had cigar shops. They were sometimes, sometimes they spelled it as S-E-G-A-R, but they were cigar shops, but you could also rent a room at lunch and take a girl up to a room upstairs. There were bookshops that sold all kinds of materials. You know, to give an idea of what this stuff was, some of which, by the way, is at the municipal archives in New York, where you and I have both also done work. Postcards that had kind of tricks, special ways of looking at images. Oh, I wish I could find the page in my book. I'll, if you find it before I do, we'll have to read. I mean, these books, one of them was called Women's Rights Convention, and just the idea of a pornographic work called Women's Rights Convention. Like, you know, that's all you really need to know. But it was really a combination. One thing that was fascinating to me is, Anthony Comstock is associated with the mail. And one of the reasons he's associated with it is because the mail and the way that paper was printed really changed what I call smut in the book because you could have, they often had these very small books of images and words, but you could hide them very easily. And so that was a really big deal to be able to print so small that you could have some kind of discretion. Because remember, all these young men that were engaging in this kind of sporting life, sporting culture, they were living in boarding houses with other men, and they were going out all night doing crazy things. And so, you know, they were living in close quarters with other men. And so these books would be kind of passed around. Walt Whitman, who was prosecuted under the, whose writing was prosecuted under the Comstock law, wrote to a common prostitute. I think one thing that's really shocking to people is that prostitution existed in many different forms from brothel houses to these waiter girls who would sell you drinks, but really they were trying to sell you sex, to street walkers. So the idea, meaning it was not behind the scenes, it was open. And you can imagine how shocking this would be to a congregation list from rural Connecticut. Can you give just sort of in concise form what that law was that he got passed because this is key to how he fights all of these women that then prop up his heroism? Yes, there was already an obscenity law before he went to Washington. But what made the Comstock law unique was that it criminalized the mailing of both obscenity and contraception, contraception information and abortion information with much steeper sentences and, with steep sentences and fines. And so what it did for the first time was it included in existing obscenity law information about and actual contraception. Okay, so and that's where he first gets into this, these fights with the women. And so which woman is he first going up against in terms of what information she's trying to get out there and then what he, you know. The first woman that he butted heads with in a public way, really biz. I mean, the first ones were wives of smut sellers. Because he started by seizing dirty books and burning the plates. So it's actually interesting to see that his very first interactions with women were women who were married to men who were making a living in the smut trade, which again, at that time, not that unusual. There was a lot of it. But the first high profile woman he came in contact with was Victoria Woodhol. And of course her sister, Tennessee Claflin. The sisters moved to New York within a few years of when Anthony Comstock moved to New York, which, you know, I love the parallel. They were close in age, a little bit older. But this idea of coming to New York to make it in these totally different ways. He wanted to be a dry good salesman, find a nice Christian woman, build a family. They wanted to take New York by storm. They, you know, wanted to eat at Delmonico's without a man, you know, to accompany them. They started a radical newspaper called Woodhol and Claflin's Weekly. They started the first female-owned brokerage house in, I believe it was 1870. And they were said to have, both have prostituted themselves before they came to New York. We don't know the details on that. We don't know how much of that is true. But what we do know is that they both made their living as clairvoyance. They were from a large family and their father capitalized on their incredible charisma. And, you know, as you've written about, you know, this was coming off of the Civil War when people were wanting to get in touch with dead relatives. And so clairvoyance was big business. And anyway, I'm trying to be concise because we got so much to cover. And he ultimately runs for president too, right? Of course, yes. Yes, not to mention that the first woman to run for president did so in 1872. And she did it while living with two husbands under the same roof. It's amazing. Also, I never realized until I read your book that Frederick Douglass, although he was on the ticket as the vice president, hadn't been alerted that he was. Yeah, that whole story is bizarre. I mean, they've created this equal rights party which had a lot of incredible ideas in it, but I think he was used essentially as a publicity ploy and never consented to his nomination and never campaigned with her. But the way she butted heads with Comstock was they, in their newspaper, Woodhill and Claflin's Weekly, they published these two really scandalous articles, one about an alleged gang rape that had happened resulting from a masked ball and involved teenage girls and a prominent businessman named Luther Chalice and the other that involved the well-known Smith Church preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, who was having an affair with the wife of one of his acolytes. And in the scene issue of this newspaper, they published these two explosive articles, one which contained the term, the red trophy of her virginity to refer to the hymen and the other that was writing about one of the most revered religious figures in New York at the time and saying that he was in an adulterous relationship with the adulterous affair. And so Anthony Comstock lost his mind and wanted to ban this newspaper. And the short version is that when the Comstock Act was passed in 1873, it included the term newspapers specifically to cover Woodhill and Claflin's Weekly. He, I feel like this isn't often written about, he passed this law, the specifics of this law were for the direct purpose of getting Tennessee and Victoria into prison. Yeah. I find it so interesting that, you know, it's like sex is not just sex. I mean, that the way this crops up as an obscenity issue is through actually a fight over political power on a certain level, right? I mean, it's these, the women that you're writing about for the most part are they get entangled because of, you know, either issues about women's rights and their rights to their bodies or what have you or, like you said, you know, they're taking down one of the biggest, you know, celebrity preachers sort of, you know, guide to the moral fiber of the country. And that's the kind of thing that gets them in trouble. I mean, yeah. And they were representatives of a kind of womanhood that was deeply offensive to him. Yeah. Which was they were taking the Victorian ideal, which was that women should be wives and mothers and devoted to family and to God. And completely upending it, saying that some marriages were worse than prostitution, writing about, as you said, high-powered political figures and taking them down. There were rumors that Comstock was paid off by Beecher and Beakers associates to go after them. I mean, even if that's not true, they all knew each other and that world of, you know, kind of the WASP elite was starting to form at that time. And he was incredibly well connected. Oh yeah. I mean, I wrote about him in my book because he was one of Abraham Lincoln's, you know, advisors and supporters and may have won him the election in New York. So the, now the other thing that's fascinating this is that Comstock isn't content to just do this from a distance. He's frequently really in the thick of it. And so can you talk a little bit about his sting operations? Yeah, I mean, this is, there were many Americans who agreed with him from a religious perspective, believed that reading or looking at porn could lead to terrible things. So he was not that unusual in kind of his upbringing and his rationale, but he walked around with a revolver. He in his spare time tried to shut down saloons. During the Civil War, he would take his whiskey ration and dump it out. So no one else could drink it either. It's one thing if you're not going to drink it. You know, he was like such a spoiler, a party pooper. What he was very controversial for among free lovers and free thinkers, his antagonists, his radical antagonists was he would decoy people. He used these crazy names like E. Edgewell and he pretended to be teenage girls. Frankie Streeter was another name. He concocted entire families. And he would send decoy letters from post office boxes, some in state and some out of state. But when he sent them out of state, it was so that he could get interstate mail. He could mail people for that. He walked into abortionists and women's health practitioners' offices to buy contraceptives under false names, false premises, and then revealed himself as Anthony Comstock. And he would wave a white handkerchief across the street to the waiting officers. Frequently, he took reporters with him. Now, as I'm saying all this, I'm talking about fake names using the press. Yeah, it seems so- Manipulating, it might be reminding you of someone, especially that idea of using false names. But he was very aware of his power. And so many people who agreed that, even people who agreed that abortion was wrong and contraception was wrong, didn't think that the way he went about getting these prosecutions was right. And decoying was illegal. And they tried many times to get him on that and it never went anywhere. Yeah. Now, of the women that he tangled with, which of them do you find the most heroic or- Should we talk about idocratic? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. The last character. Yeah, so as I mentioned before, much of my book, maybe about a quarter of it, is about this woman, Ida C. Craddick, who, my mother's family's from Philadelphia. And also there was an incredible flourishing, radical scene in Philadelphia in the 1850s, 60s, 70s, I think in part connected to the strong Quaker tradition and the liberalism of Quakerism. So Ida C. Craddick went to Friends Central, which is still a highly regarded Quaker school in Philadelphia. And she was a star student, very brilliant. And she wanted to go to Penn and be the first woman in the undergraduate program at the University of Pennsylvania and they would not accept her because she was a woman. So what did she do? She turned to sex writing. And the reason she did that was she was really interested in world religions. And she had taken a trip to Alaska where she saw these very phallic looking totem poles. I always, I feel very connected to her because, you know, I went to Brown University, which specializes in semiotics. And she reminds me of myself. Did you also? Oh, well now I know why we like each other so much. I don't need to tell you about semiotics. You had there in the peak of semiotics, but she became obsessed with sex and symbolism. And she went to the World's Fair in 1893 and saw the belly dancers at this time that she was really interested in sex. And, you know, as you mentioned before, history comes in these waves and the stereotype that, you know, Victorian era women were repressed and never had orgasms and hated sex. Well, there was this flourishing sex lit in the 1840s. A lot of it coming out of, for example, Croft-Ebbings' work was making its way to the United States. He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis. Freud wouldn't be that many years before Freud's writings were starting to make their way across. There were books on childbirth and how to have less pain during pregnancy. So it was everything from marital advice to free love treatises, which we can get into. But idocratic over a period, I'll try to do like the digest, over a period of about nine years, went to Washington, DC, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York and was told not to mail her marital sex manuals and ultimately went head to head with Comstock in New York. But I think what you and I both like about her the most is she claimed never to have had a human living lover and she claimed that all of her sex information contained in these kind of marriage guides that she wrote came from her ghost husband, Soph, who was the ghost of a businessman she had met as a teenager who had in real life died young after tuberculosis. And no one knows whether she said this because it would be scandalous to claim to have sex knowledge as an unmarried woman or whether in fact this relationship she had with a ghost did teach her some amazing things. But you know what's crazy, there's like she didn't always have orgasms with a ghost. I know. I mean, I thought her writing about her ghost was really interesting because it's so nuanced. Yeah, it's not like everything is the best it could possibly be because she's imagining it. She's got all sorts of levels to it. But also I find it fascinating that so few people seem to have even given her a hard time about the whole idea. They were like, yeah, she has this ghost husband. Well, that's not true. I mean, I think I write about this. This was a little bit later in the early 1900s. In the liberal world, I like to, I usually use the word progressive or radical to describe the world she was in. She did need a lot of very rationalist guys. Who believed she was delusional and insane. And so what I like about her, she was kind of an outcast in every world that she was in because she, I mean, her mother was a Unitarian. So then the daughter is having sex with a ghost. Then among the rational people, they're like, ghosts don't exist. And then even within the spiritualist world, she was kind of controversial because she liked her alliances with religious, with other religious groups. She wasn't a separatist as other spiritualists. So she was just a mass of contradictions. But her marital guides, she sold pretty well, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't have good, I don't have sales figures on her books. Similar writers of that time sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their books. A woman, Alice Stockham, who was an Evanston gynecologist wrote these kind of pregnancy and childbirth guides that did very well. Cupid's Yolks by the Haywoods, these very well-known free lovers. Yeah, I mean, when I was looking at these sales figures, like you and I, to have hundreds of thousands copies of our books sold, I mean, we would just be partying every night. So it's really incredible to think that, there was no traditional publishing, as we know it today. Books were sold through canvassing agents. And the way that you found out about these books was from reading radical publications that advertised them. And what was interesting is there was a whole network of support where Ida Craddock would sell Alice Stockham's books and the Haywoods would sell all these kind of medical advice books. And so they really created a system of alternative publishing that seems to me like it was working. I mean, many, many people, this was how most people were getting their books. Yeah, I mean, it helps that there was no TV or anything else. But the, and then, so then how did some of these women actually toward his efforts? I mean, I thought one of those interesting things was the way that they were circulating the syringe, you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Well, it's become stocky and syringe. Oh yeah, well, so one of the women who he went after was a doctor named Sarah Chase, Dr. Sarah Blakesley Chase. Unclear whether she provided abortions or just sold contraceptives, she claimed only, she claimed never to have done an abortion. But he decoyed her, pretended to be this guy named Mr. Farnsworth. And she was publishing a health magazine called The Physiologist and Family Position. And she wound up not being imprisoned under any Comstock law, but was so furious at him for raiding her home and searching her home. And she believed cut off clients, that she lost clients as a result of all of this, that in The Physiologist and Family Position, she started to advertise something called the Comstock syringe. And what that was, is syringes at the time were very cheap. They were used for hygienic purposes. And but they could also be used for contraceptive purposes following intercourse. You could put all kinds of substances into them that were said to be spermacidal. And they were somewhat effective. It's very hard to get statistics about any of this. But what I love about the Comstock syringe is she month after month's advertising, you know, the world famous, you know, gift to humanity, the Comstock syringe. And then the Haywoods, these free lovers in Worcester County, Massachusetts, they picked up on it, started calling at the Comstock syringe, selling it themselves. He wound up going after them for an issue of their newspaper that included these advertisements. They wrote things like, if Comstock's mother had had a syringe and known how to use it, what a world of woe it would have saved us. And I can just only imagine the fury that he felt reading this. And it reminded me of the way that, I don't know how old the people listening to this are, but the way that Rick Santorum's name was used, you know, just look it up. Well, let's just look it up. Yeah. No, well, and so in the diaries that you found of his, because you said there, you found out a diary, did I get that right? Oh, you mean Comstock's Civil War and early marriage diaries? Oh, okay. They don't go all the way. I got them from secondary sources. Yeah, they appear to be lost. Yeah, and he didn't, we don't have them beyond a couple of years after the passage of the law. Okay, I was curious how far into his life they go because it would be so interesting to hear. Everyone wants to get their hands on them. I know, that's the, but the, so, but I was, you know, so can you talk a little bit about like how intensely he fought some of these things to the point where some of these women ended up in jail? Well, yeah. I mean, you know, again, the title of my book is tricky because he didn't believe that he hated women. And if you look at just the statistics in his arrest law books, which now are online, but when I was researching this, we're at the Library of Congress, he went after many, many, many more men than women. That has something to do with who was publishing dirty books. Abortionists were notoriously very difficult to get in court because witnesses did not want to testify. Women who had gotten abortions, even if bad things happened, didn't want to talk about it. Two of the women in my book, I guess I won't try to give too much away, but Madame Rastell, who was one of the most famous abortionists in the entire country was 67 when he tried to put her in prison for what would have been, I believe, the second or third time at the first time he had come into contact with her. And on the eve of her sentencing, slit her throat twice in her bathtub because she was certain that she was going to be sent to the women's workhouse on Blackwell's Island and die in prison. And there were rumors for many, many years that it wasn't actually her body and that it had been switched. So her, and there's a wonderful fiction book about this called My Notorious Life by Kate Manning, which is imagines, imagines what might have happened, but she was not the only woman in my book who took her own life. And Comstock was said to have bragged of the suicides that he caused at one point saying that he had caused 16 suicides. I think then you can safely call your book, The Manning, based on that. I mean, I also just want to say to everyone who's listening in, you can post questions on the chat and we will answer the- Oh, and also the National Archives Foundation is selling a book. I don't know exactly where the link is, but that's something that maybe someone can put it in the chat that if you wanna support my work, but also the National Archives, you can buy it from the National Archives. Well, I think everybody needs to buy this book because the other thing I found really interesting is it's almost a primer on activism, like effective activism. And I thought, I mean, where there are a few things in there that you were particularly impressed by in terms of the organizing or the tactics that some of these women use to try to move their agenda forward. Because I did think that people might not understand how much brilliant work went on in the political arena before maybe the more modern times. Yeah, I mean, this was essentially activism through writing, which is probably another reason I was so attracted to these women's stories is that almost all of them were writers. Meaning someone like Ida Craddock, she wrote these marriage manuals, these sex guides, but also in revisions of her own books, talked about Anthony Comstock being a sadist and saying that anyone who thought that sex was unclean must be Comstockian. And so many of them were fighting the Comstock laws through writing about them in the radical press. And this is sometimes called the free thought world or the free thinker world. And what this was was a series of, I was about to say hundreds, I would say at least 1,000 publications from around the 1830s to 1880s, 1890s was sort of the heyday of it who advocated for civil liberties. Some of them were health oriented and had a combination of health writing and political writing. They had huge circulations and their letter writers sometimes became columnists, which remind, I had this column in New York press in the 1990s and some of our best letter writers, they would just hire them. Yeah, yeah. Not me. It's the opposition. Yeah. And so what really inspired me was the idea of radical, and they would sometimes include petitions and circulars and things like that in these publications. They do have like radical action through radical publishing. It's really fascinating to me. Yeah. And so when you're talking about the publications, first of all, I'm very curious how many of them you were allowed to see in the archives, like how many are still available. But also just if you could talk a little bit about we're getting into a era where it's actually appreciated to write about women in history. And yet it's very difficult. I think we both have found to find the source materials. And can you talk a little bit about that challenge and trying to bring these women's work to life? Yeah, absolutely. Most of these publications exist at such places as medical libraries like a Harvard's medical library called the Countway. Oh, let's see if I can get this right. The New York Academy of Medicine Library here in Manhattan. With all these things, you have to go to weird places to get them and you can get like a couple of issues at a time. Some of them are in the National Archives because they are in the postal records. So for example, the Word, which was this free-love publication out of Worcester County, you can read issues of it in the postal records at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. We were talking about women's history. Yeah, I've often said, I don't know if you make these jokes too, but that you have to be a total masochist to write women's history because it is the hardest research in the world. I mean, I should add research about underrepresented groups of any kind is incredibly difficult because people tend only to leave records when they were involved with someone famous. And you and I and narrative nonfiction authors were always trying to get personal materials, and I really did the best I could with these women in terms of shading in the personal details of their life. In not every case was I able to get diaries and letters. And so in some cases I had to rely on court transcripts. As you said, sometimes newspaper articles or smaller newspapers could be instructive and contain personal details in them. So you might hunt down a first-person story that existed in one of these newspapers. But it's the real tragedy of women's history, which is the more unconventional lives that these women led. Frequently, the less likely they were to marry and have children and kind of have the maybe... The women in my book were not wealthy, they were not well connected, and many of them had unconventional romantic lives. So it's tough to find letters and diaries. Angela Haywood, I was really happy to be able to find about 30 or to 40 letters in the Wellesley Historical Society because there happened to have been a prominent Wellesley radical whose own archives were there. So a lot of our work, as I'm sure you agree with, is working backwards. Who did they correspond with who was famous and then getting that person's archives? I know, and you always with the women, I find that I, in desperation, I'll even go on to eBay or something and be like, please let some descendant try it, have been selling their postcard. Exactly, yes. No, I've done the same thing right when you're trying to get the postcard. But then the nice thing is like, Angela Haywood's great-granddaughter just contacted me last week. Amazing. Yeah, but I don't know at this point whether I know more than she does. She's trying to put together her family history, but it is really incredible to also think that that's not that many generations down that her great-granddaughter is still alive. This is not that long ago. I mean, that's the one positive about US history is that because it's so young, you still have that hope that there's some archive somewhere that are holding these letters or diaries or what have you. And can you talk a little bit about the National Archives itself? What kinds of things did you find there that were useful in the research for this book? I got a tip from someone, a woman named Aimee Werbel published a book having to do with Comstock's, the visual world that Comstock went after. And she gave me this tip. You want to look into the postal records. I don't even remember exactly what she said, but I walked into the National Archives in Rajumman, D.C. and the postal records are pretty wonderful and exhaustive there. And using the help of an archivist, an independent archivist I met there named John Dice, who I hope is listening today, I was able to figure out where to get these files that were individual postal records related to people prosecuted for doing things connected to the mail. And they're basically like FBI files. There was a predecessor to the FBI called the Bureau of Investigation and it may have even had a different name in the time period I was researching. But they are these, they're the size of a mailing envelope. They're all stacked in these boxes like that and they have the person's name and case number on the front and you open it up. And in some cases, these files contain the actual seized material. That's incredible. So you're sitting there in the National Archives, this storied hallowed place and let me tell you this, you're reading about sexual scenarios. You know, I'm like this with my scanner. I hope the booth is like, yeah. Who knew you could find these things? But I'm telling you, if you want scandalous material, start with postal records. No, I mean, I think we both are, you know, extremely grateful for the work of the National Archives because first of all, those archivists, you need them when you go in there. When you walk in with a vague, you know, if you just start out saying, give me everything you have on Anthony Comstock, it's a beginning, but it's just the beginning and you have to know how to look. Yeah. And that's what they were able to help me with. But that preservation work is just so crucial. I mean, you never know when one of those documents that's hidden in there is going to reveal something really crucial to how we understand history going forward. And it's the best feeling because you're kind of like a detective. I mean, that's how I always feel is when I see something that no one else has written about or, you know, when I was able to read Anthony Comstock's own arrest reports of idocratic, it's just so immediate. And of course, I don't know if you've discovered this, but also when you rely on, you know, you read these secondary sources when you're kind of new at this work, you think, oh, this all must be correct. And then you start tracing their research and you go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It really requires going back to the source and then you have to battle it out after that to say like, no, I found the document. And then, you know, in terms of, so this is going out to the audience of readers now. Hopefully there are going to be many young readers of the book because it's such an important history. But what is, what would you hope would be their main takeaway from it? Yeah. And in any aspect, whether it's, you know, the activist or the history. Well, it's twofold. You know, as you and I have talked about, reproductive rights are under assault in our country right now and they have been for about 15 years in a serious way. In about half the country, you may only have one abortion clinic within a close distance of your home. So that is very scary and upsetting to me. And I think that young women, I mean, what I was going to say is, don't take your reproductive rights for granted. But I also feel strongly that they already don't take their reproductive rights for granted depending on where they live and where they've already been stripped away from them. I think what I'm proudest about in the book and the takeaway that I really want people to have is that I started out thinking I was going to be writing about birth control and I realized that ultimately I was writing about pleasure, which is you can't enjoy sex if you're terrified of having your 12th pregnancy that could kill you either while you're pregnant or while you're having a baby and cripple you economically. So as I started to learn more about this, I realized that what these women were writing about was sure women's liberation, but it was women's right to pleasure in the context of not feeling that sex could lead to death. And that's really what we're talking about because of just the history of pregnancy and childbirth in our country. Is that it was dangerous, especially with each repeated pregnancy and childbirth it became more and more dangerous. So I think what I want young people to think about a lot is you weren't the first radicals. There's such an incredible radical history and radical women's history and I feel that sometimes people that write narrative nonfiction about leftism, a lot of times they don't include women even though leftism includes so many wonderful, vibrant, exciting women. I just had this love affair with Emma Goldman through writing this book. And I guess the second thing is direct action works and getting control of the narrative through writing and media is one way to affect change in addition to the vote. And I think another thing I probably should mention is that all of the women in my book lived before they could vote and were tried by all male judges or all male juries. This was a different world. The whole legal system was poised against them. Can you imagine standing in front of 12 men talking about your sex writing, trying to make them understand it? Anthony Kompstein didn't even know the difference between contraception and abortion and he found that very confusing. Yeah, I think that that's what's so striking is the imagination that allowed them to just be certain that they should have these rights when there was nothing in law that was suggesting that they should have their equal rights. I think it's very, very impressive to see what they were willing to do, the courage of many of these people. Do you think in some ways not being enfranchised with a vote made the world seem more full of possibility? It's a very good question. I mean, I don't think that traditionally that's how it works, right? The less you feel part of the system, the more hopeless you usually feel, I think. And particularly you don't get the feeling, you know, the suffragettes are a little bit later in terms of their full force. So it's not like this is like a group of people marching in the streets. But Seneca Falls is 1848. Yeah, but that was, but it felt a little bit as if that kind of, that amazing moment happened and then it just, you know. Yeah, kept having these kind of, yeah, these kind of first. I guess what I also wonder is, why was radical publishing so strong in these years that we don't really associate, we don't tend to, like you said earlier, we don't tend to associate with radicalism from slightly before the Civil War to the end of the 1800s. Yes, I mean, it's amazing to think that there are people all across these small towns who are buying these publications. So it can be, you know, a woman who's got five children, but she's reading this radical publication. Yeah, and I think to just to circle back to like why it all connects to Anthony Comstock, the mail also, you know, which allowed men in the Civil War to get smart and pornography and this kind of thing. Also allowed radical minds to share ideas and exchange opinions because railway service and cheap paper really changed things in this country. And so, you know, obviously you could liken it to the internet to the early days of the internet in terms of mail was a connector and, you know, was a force of good. Yeah. And that's what he knew better than anyone, was he understood, Anthony Comstock understood the power of the mail. Yeah, yeah. No, it's really fascinating. Well, I hope everyone goes out and gets the book and then we can all have larger conversations because it really is tremendous work, Amy. And the fact that you, I mean, I don't know exactly how many years or what have you, you put in on this, but it's clear that you really... Five. Yeah, you dug into the research and we're all grateful. And so I think we're out of time. Out of time? Yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. I hope we can have more conversations about this in the future. And we would love to thank everybody at the National Archives and Doug Swanson and all the rest for putting on this program and all the programs that they do produce because it's a real gift to the country to have people speaking from their deep research like you. So thank you, Amy. Thank you. And I should say one other thing, the book is available through the National Archives Store. If you would like to support... Let's see what message are we getting here. If you would like to support the National Archives Foundation, meaning that some of the money you pay for the book will go to support its work. You can buy it in their store. I think we're waiting to be... Why don't you say the name of your most recent book? It's Lincoln's Lied, which is a true Civil War paper through fake news Wall Street in the White House. Thank you. It is amazing that... Yeah, this idea... So far I haven't managed to say our former president's name, but this idea of things being so cyclical and the use of the media, we think of it... It began in the 1990s. Yeah. And then our work shows there's nothing new under the sun. In fact, what does it say when you enter the National Archives past its prologue? Yeah, I always find that quite moving. Okay, I'm getting a message to say also, I am encouraging people to buy this book at independent bookshops, which have really, really had a hard time over the past 15 months and are starting to open their doors again to physical shoppers. So bookshop.org is a way you can get it online and support independent bookstores. But of course, wherever you live and are watching this from, walk in and order it there because they need you and books like this need independent stores so that people like Biz and myself can keep writing our books. Thank you very much. Are we released? Are you getting a message?