Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists who raised their dissident voices in The Revolution had, in the late 1860s, begun to question the sanctity of the vows that permanently bound a wife to her husband. They challenged the concept of a woman finding her identity solely through the man she married, often when she was little more than an adolescent, and pointed out that too often a husband ended up not being his wife’s protector—but her abuser. Stanton went so far as to advocate that in cases of domestic violence, often the only viable solution was divorce.
In the 1870s, the reform-minded individuals who focused their attention on improving the union between husband and wife went the next radical step of proposing that wives and husbands should not be bound to an unhappy marriage until death did them part, but should be free to marry or divorce at will, according to the ebb and flow of their love for each other. This concept of a person being free to move in and out of marriage based solely on love—or the lack of it—led to the reformers being identified by the provocative label of “free lovers,” a term the iconoclastic crusaders eagerly embraced. “Yes, I am a free lover,” Victoria Woodhull shamelessly announced in 1871. “I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please. And with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”1
For three decades, the sexual reform press sought to convince the American public that marriage was not always a sacred institution but sometimes a profane one. The dozen sexual reform publications that existed during this period challenged the social mores that dominated American life by asserting that sexual intercourse should occur only when both partners were willing: A woman had the right to deny her body to anyone, including her husband. Choice rather than coercion or a sense of duty should be the only basis upon which a woman would have sex. Victoria Woodhull wrote in the journal she founded, “I believe it is my duty and my mission to carry the torch to light up and destroy the heap of rottenness which, in the name of religion, marital sanctity and social purity, now passes as the social system.”2
Although the dissident voices advocating free love began their conversation by articulating the weaknesses of wedlock, they soon broadened that discussion. In 1872, the sexual reform press used the details of a prominent minister’s affair to expose the hypocritical lifestyles of Victorian men, igniting one of the most sensational scandals in the history of American religion. After that incident, the publications continued to tackle ever more explosive subjects—explicit sexual language, sex education, abortion, promiscuity, and couples living together without being married.
One of the earliest of the sexual reform papers was Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, published by Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin in New York City from 1870 to 1876. Another leading publication was The Word, which played a key role in broadening the discussion to new topics; it was published by Ezra and Angela Heywood from 1872 to 1893 in rural Massachusetts. A third important voice was Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, published by Moses Harman from 1883 to 1907, first in rural Kansas and later in Chicago.
The story of the sexual reform publications must begin with the stories of the women and men who were the driving forces behind them. These social rebels dared to illuminate topics that polite society would not admit to discussing even in private, let alone in print. For choosing a road less traveled, the editors ultimately paid a high price—including being sent to prison and dying early deaths.
MRS. SATAN
Victoria Claflin’s colorful life began in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, where she was one of ten children born to shiftless parents who turned exploitation and petty crime into a way of life. While the comely Victoria and her equally lovely sister Tennessee were still adolescents, their father sent them into the work world as psychics, telling fortunes and communing with the dead at a dollar a hit. Sometimes he even starved the girls for days at a time because he thought the ill treatment heightened their spiritual powers.3
At the age of fourteen, Victoria tried to escape her miserable life by marrying a handsome doctor twice her age. After the nuptial knot had been firmly tied, however, she learned that “Dr.” Canning Woodhull was, in fact, a medical quack and an alcoholic who was incapable of supporting himself, much less his wife and the two children the couple soon brought into the world. So it fell to the winsome and resourceful Victoria to put food on the Woodhull table by plying her diverse talents as a clairvoyant, a stage actress, a public orator, and a prostitute.
Victoria Woodhull dressed in the rich fabrics that helped define the proper conventions of Victorian America; her ideas regarding sexual activity, however, were far from conventional. (Courtesy of Special Collections Department, Vassar College Libraries)
A twenty-six, Victoria Woodhull met Colonel James Blood, a Civil War veteran and fellow spiritualist. In short order, the two lovers divorced their respective spouses and married each other. For the next decade, Blood served as impresario for the various ventures undertaken by his wife—who retained the name Woodhull. Those endeavors veered in a new direction when the spirits who appeared at one of Victoria Woodhull’s séances told her to leave the Midwest and move to New York. So to the big city she went.
In 1868, Woodhull forged a lucrative friendship with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, a seventy-year-old widower with more money than sense. She ministered to the millionaire industrialist’s soul by putting him in touch with his dead mother and satisfied his lust by placing her sister Tennessee Claflin, and sometimes herself, in his bed. Woodhull gained so much control over Vanderbilt that he financed the creation of Woodhull Claflin & Co. Brokerage House. Leading newspapers, in turn, were so bedazzled by the novelty of the stunningly beautiful Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin becoming the first women on Wall Street—the New York World gushed about their “shrewd management and business acumen,” even though neither woman had any experience in finance—that the sisters attracted legions of clients and, therefore, were soon able to buy a mansion in the exclusive Murray Hill section of the city.4
It was in May 1870 that the sisters founded Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly as a champion for free love, proclaiming on its flag “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” The thrilling nature of the paper’s editorials and essays combined with the voluptuous sisters’ ability to charm reporters resulted in massive public attention. The New York Times praised Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly as a “sprightly, well-edited sheet,” and the New York Globe predicted that the women’s venture would “make many friends.” Aided by the positive coverage, the Weekly was able to boast, after only six months, that its circulation had reached 20,000—six times that of either The Liberator or The Revolution before it.5
Finances were not a problem for the Weekly because Commodore Vanderbilt acted as its angel, paying the printing and mailing costs while also sending free copies to major newspapers and influential people who traveled in his elite social circle. In return, Tennessee Claflin hand delivered copies of the paper to Vanderbilt and then stayed to read the articles aloud to him—while propped up on the pillows in his bed. Claflin also was the paper’s revenue “rainmaker,” using her seductive powers to secure advertising contracts from any number of major companies. Before long, the paper overflowed with ads for Tiffany watches, Steinway pianos, and Brooks Brothers suits.
Late in the spring of 1870, Woodhull made political history by becoming the first woman to seek the office of President of the United States. The Weekly promised to “support Victoria C. Woodhull for President, with its whole strength,” going on to detail her plan to run on a platform that promised female suffrage, divorce reform, and full support of free love. Woodhull’s announcement again catapulted her paper and her evocative ideas onto the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. The New York Herald alone ran ten Woodhull stories in the four months following the announcement of her candidacy.6
Woodhull had still more breakthroughs to make.
In early 1871, she told the U.S. Congress that it should legalize female suffrage under the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment, which had given African American men the right to vote. Woodhull’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee was a triumph—she was the first woman in history to address a congressional committee—that produced another round of flattering newspaper articles. Although the bill ultimately was tabled and then forgotten, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragists praised Woodhull for advancing the cause of American women.
The next round of news coverage that Woodhull received, however, was disastrous. The episode began when Woodhull’s mother filed a lawsuit against Colonel Blood, claiming that her son-in-law had threatened to kill her. During the trial, Victoria Woodhull was accused—in sensational testimony that played on the front pages of newspapers nationwide—of having ongoing sexual relations with both her current and her former husbands. When she admitted that she, Colonel Blood, and Canning Woodhull did, in fact, sleep in the same room, the ménage à trois horrified the nation. Harper’s Weekly captured—and contributed to—the nation’s collective gasp of moral outrage by depicting Victoria Woodhull as a disgraceful harpy. The caption for the cartoon pinned a label on Woodhull that she would spend the rest of her life trying to shake: “Mrs. Satan.”7
THE PROPER VICTORIAN COUPLE
Compared to Victoria Woodhull, Ezra and Angela Heywood lived a decidedly conventional life. In concert with the proper standards among New England families securely positioned in the middle class, Ezra earned a degree from Brown University in preparation for a career as a Congregational minister, while Angela developed the skills necessary to fulfill the domestic duties of wife and mother. The vital statistics of the Heywood marriage reinforced the couple’s success at filling the roles of Victorian husband and Victorian wife; they married in 1865, lived together in a monogamous relationship for twenty-seven years, and raised two daughters and two sons.
As other details about the Heywoods are added to this basic description, however, the image of nineteenth-century propriety quickly crumbles. Ezra opted not to use his talents as a writer and orator to keep a small congregation walking on the stairway to Heaven. Instead, he built the forty-room Mountain Home in the rolling hills of central Massachusetts to provide a resort where visitors from Boston and New York could rest their weary bodies while also giving him a captive audience for his lectures on the merits of free love. Ezra tried to convince his guests that the institution of marriage had to be abolished, insisting that lovers should not be bound by a legal contract or church vows but should have the right “to make and dissolve their own contracts” as they think best. He also called for “the unconditional repeal of the laws against adultery and fornication.”8
Angela Heywood, for her part, wrote long treatises arguing that women should be more than household drudges and sex objects. Angela was more radical than most feminists, however, as she also introduced several startling concepts. She defied Victorian America’s belief that sexual intercourse should be engaged in solely for procreation; she insisted that “sexuality is divine,” both for reproduction and for “personal exhilaration,” thereby endorsing what today would be labeled recreational sex. Angela also broke new ground by acknowledging that sexual activity was not pleasurable for men only, but for women as well; she wrote, “Woman may pretend she does not want anything of man, but her lady-nature knows it is the very great everything she wants to do with man.” The most memorable aspect of Angela’s writing evolved from her insistence upon using explicit language; she said, for example, that every man “should have solemn meetings with, and look seriously at, his own penis until he is able to be lord and master of it, rather than it rule as lord and master of him.”9
Ezra and Angela Heywood built their resort in Princeton in 1871 and began publishing The Word a year later. Their monthly sexual reform journal, like the dozens of books and pamphlets the couple produced, treated sexuality with a daunting degree of candor. The Heywoods were soon boasting that The Word’s circulation had surpassed 3,000. Profits from the Mountain Home covered the journal’s printing and mailing costs; advertisements were few, limited mainly to promotions for reform-oriented books.
The Heywoods met their fellow free love advocate Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and immediately pledged their support to her crusade against conventional marriage and the various abuses that too often accompanied that institution. Ezra and Angela Heywood then helped found the New England Free Love League in 1873 for the purpose of sponsoring lectures by Woodhull, as the crowds eager to listen to Mrs. Satan had grown so large—often surpassing 2,000—that there were few indoor spaces large enough to accommodate them. The Heywoods also reprinted many items from Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly in The Word.10
But unlike Woodhull and her publication, the Heywoods and theirs were vilified in the mainstream press. The Boston Globe called The Word “a flow of filth,” and another Massachusetts paper, the Worcester Press, told readers that the Heywoods were publishing “smut” and called for Princeton’s townspeople to close down The Word.11
THE SEX RADICAL
Moses Harman’s early life was every bit as conventional as those of Ezra and Angela Heywood, except that as a young boy growing up in Missouri he suffered a farming accident. The incident seriously damaged Moses’s right leg, and for the rest of his life he walked with a pronounced limp. Confined to the indoors, he became an inveterate reader.
At twenty-one, Harman began teaching at a rural high school, and his first questioning of the institution of marriage came in the late 1860s when he was preparing to wed Susan Scheuck. Before the ceremony, the groom insisted that he and his bride repudiate all powers legally conferred on married couples by the state and, instead, base their relationship solely on love and individual commitment. The Harmans then settled on a Missouri farm and had two children. Moses continued to teach and to read, with his tastes moving steadily to the left on the ideological continuum.
In 1877, Susan Scheuck Harman died while attempting to give birth to her third child. Distraught and desperate to escape the memories of the past, Moses Harman secured a new teaching position and moved with his son and daughter to the frontier town of Valley Falls in eastern Kansas.
It did not take long for the new school teacher to develop a reputation as an abrasive zealot. When the local newspaper found Harman’s letters to the editor criticizing Victorian mores too radical to print, he decided to create his own publishing venue.
So in 1883, at the age of fifty, Moses Harman launched his career as a dissident journalist. He named his bi-weekly newspaper Lucifer, the Light-Bearer after the archangel who was cast out of Heaven for leading a revolt of the angels. By this stage in his life, Harman looked the part of the social revolutionary he had become, standing tall and thin with stern facial features and a shock of flowing white hair.
One article that appeared in Lucifer captures Harman’s particular stripe as a publishing provocateur. The Department of Agriculture was mailing, to anyone who requested it, a book about how to treat ailing horses. If descriptions contained in the book were applied to human organs, Lucifer argued, postal authorities would have censored them. Why should the federal government be allowed to distribute medical facts about horse procreation, Harman’s editorial asked, but a private citizen was prevented from distributing similar facts about human procreation? To bring home the point, Harman published an extract from the book. “As the result of kicks or blows,” the quotation began, “the horse’s penis may become the seat of effusion of blood from one or more ruptured blood-vessels. This gives rise to more or less extensive swelling, and the penis should be suspended in a sling.” The postmaster in Topeka confiscated all copies of the issue of Lucifer containing the editorial, and the next issue screamed across page one: “Published under Government Censorship.”12
Such controversial articles caused financial difficulties for Lucifer, as content so inimical to Victorian sensibilities meant that only the publishers of a few radical books were willing to advertise in it. Subscriptions did not produce much revenue either; circulation peaked at 1,500. Moses Harman sought a solution to his revenue problem in Edwin Walker, who agreed, in exchange for the title of co-editor, to travel around the country to raise money for Lucifer by giving speeches on free love.
Large crowds turning out for lectures did not mean, however, that Lucifer received positive appraisals in the mainstream Kansas press. The Osawkee Times called Lucifer a “rotten concern,” and the Winchester Argus dubbed it a “fearfully demoralizing sheet”; both papers demanded that the sexual reform paper be suppressed. The influential Kansas City Times said Lucifer was an “abomination” and “a disgrace to the state of Kansas. Its permanent destruction will be a thing to be thankful for.”13
ATTACKING THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE
The central issue propelling free love advocates was the unjust treatment of married women. According to the social mores of the nineteenth century, husbands were expected not merely to provide financial and physical security for their wives but also to dominate every aspect of their being. Free lovers adamantly opposed this concept. They did not believe a woman should be required to submit to her husband’s every demand. In particular, they argued that sexual relations in a marriage should occur because of mutual attraction, not forced obligation. They envisioned an equal partnership in which neither participant would rule or be ruled.
Victoria Woodhull’s opposition to marriage was rooted in her own life experience. As a young girl, she had dreamed of falling in love and marrying her Prince Charming. “I supposed that to marry was to be transported to a heaven not only of happiness but of purity and perfection,” she wrote. By the age of sixteen, however, Victoria faced a very different reality. She was married to a drunkard who had lied to her about being a doctor and was incapable of supporting his wife, daughter, and retarded son—Woodhull was convinced that the boy’s affliction was a result of his father’s drinking.14
In the pages of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, Woodhull insisted—clearly informed by what she had seen of the world—that myriad social problems were rooted in bad marriages. Crime, poverty, intemperance, abortion, and disease all evolved from ill-fated matrimony, she argued, and her definition of personal freedom centered on the right to end a bad marriage without being condemned as a social pariah. “It is simply nobody’s business what anybody eats, drinks, or wears,” she wrote, “and just as little who anybody loves, or how he loves, if the two parties to it are satisfied.” Her solution to the problem was nothing short of what most Americans—a century ago as well as today—considered heresy: the obliteration of the institution of marriage. “The old, worn-out, rotten social system will be torn down, plank by plank, timber after timber, until place is given to a new, true and beautiful structure, based upon freedom, equality and justice to all—to women as well as men.”15
The other sexual reform editors also denounced marriage. The Heywoods wrote in The Word that the husband/wife relationship was like that of master/slave, saying, “As masters quoted law and gospel over their slaves, so husbands emphasize their claim to wedded chattels.” The Word branded marriage “coerced consent” and insisted that people should not make love because of legal statute but only in response to their own desires. “The belief that our sexual relations can be better governed by the state than by personal choice is,” Ezra Heywood wrote, “as barbarous and shocking as it is senseless.”16
Moses Harman used the pages of Lucifer to document the sexual bondage that many wives had to endure. In 1886, Harman published a letter he had received from a Tennessee reader named W. G. Markland. When Harman printed the letter, he added an editor’s note reading: “Prudes and statute moralists had better not read this letter.” Then followed the item that would soon become legend: “‘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 brought her home and had Dr.——operate on her, and she was getting along nicely until last night, when her husband forced himself into her bed, and the stitches were torn from her healing flesh, leaving her in a worse condition than ever.’” After relating the details of this disturbing example of a brutal husband, Markland went on to ask a volley of poignant questions: “Was the husband’s conduct illegal? Can there be legal rape? Does the law protect married women? 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?”17
Never before in the history of American journalism had an editor had the audacity to publish such graphic testimony to the sexual abuse that husbands were legally allowed to commit against their wives. The Heywoods applauded Harman’s decision to publish the letter as a powerful “protest against rape in marriage.”18
But Moses Harman was not finished. In another defiant move, he printed a letter from New York physician Richard O’Neill. The angry doctor stated that he had witnessed many cases of injury and even death caused by abusive husbands—O’Neill compared such men to elephants—like the man Markland had described: “Thousands of women are killed every year by sexual excesses forced on them. I know of several women who slowly perished from this cause.”19
The Heywoods again praised Harman’s courage in publishing material that exposed marital abuse. They called Dr. O’Neill’s letter “wise & timely,” saying that it provided irrefutable proof that many marriages were nothing short of legalized “sex abuse.” The Heywoods also reprinted the letter verbatim in The Word.20
EXPOSING THE HYPOCRISY
OF THE VICTORIAN MAN
Part of the reason the editors were so outraged by the sexual bondage that wives had to endure was that proper Victorian society ignored the duplicitous lives of upper-class married men. It was common knowledge that leading male citizens publicly stated that all respectable persons must adhere to a strict moral code of behavior, even though these same pillars of society were privately having sexual relations with either prostitutes or the wives of the same men who belonged to their elite men’s clubs. When a larger-than-life leader of the free lovers—Mrs. Satan herself—decided to expose this hypocrisy, she ignited a national scandal.
The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was, in the 1870s, the country’s most celebrated clergyman. The brother of renowned author Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rev. Beecher was a superb orator who drew several thousand people to Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church every Sunday morning. He was so popular, in fact, that special vessels known as “Beecher boats” ran across the East River to ferry his fans over from Manhattan. But Rev. Beecher was, at the same time that he was preaching morality, having an affair with the wife of his parishioner and close friend, Theodore Tilton. When Elizabeth Tilton became pregnant by her pastor, she was so tormented with guilt that she confessed to several female friends.
One of the women Elizabeth Tilton confided in was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who passed the tale onto Victoria Woodhull. Still smarting from the accusations that had been leveled at her own domestic arrangements with her former and current husbands, Woodhull published the edition of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly that ultimately became as notorious as Woodhull herself—no easy feat. The headline set the sensational tone: “The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case.” Woodhull then related the sordid details of the affair, including divulging that Elizabeth Tilton was by no means the first married woman to share the esteemed clergyman’s bed: “Henry Ward Beecher preaches to at least twenty of his mistresses every Sunday.”21
When the Weekly hit the streets of Manhattan on November 2, 1872, thousands of people clamored to get their hands on the paper that—they had heard but could hardly believe—had the temerity to accuse a distinguished clergyman of having multiple sex partners. Woodhull, knowing full well that her revelations would produce a maelstrom of public attention, printed 100,000 copies of the scandal issue, but still newsboys hawked them for as much as forty dollars each. Overnight, Mrs. Satan’s sexual reform newspaper had become the publishing sensation of the day.
The scandal issue and its aftermath again thrust Victoria Woodhull onto the front pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. Details of the exposé and her previous escapades made for spectacular stories. Among the headlines: “Spicy Developments” and “An Outrage Upon Public Decency.”22
Ironically, coverage of the scandal coincided with the November 5, 1872, presidential election in which, for the first time in history, a woman sought the White House. It was hardly the kind of publicity, however, that Woodhull would have liked. Nor had other aspects of her campaign gone as well as she had hoped. Because she was a woman and, at age thirty-four, not legally old enough to run, her name did not appear on the official ballot, meaning that supporters had to write in her name. She received so few votes that no one even bothered to tally their exact number.
EXPANDING THE SEXUAL VOCABULARY
While Victoria Woodhull was the most adept of the sexual reform editors at making headlines, Moses Harman and the Heywoods were the most committed to revolutionizing the text of the American newspaper. Frank discussion of sexuality, they argued, required the use of explicit words, and, more important still, the First Amendment guaranteed free speech to all citizens.
Harman promised his readers that he would not reject any contribution they sent to Lucifer merely because of the words they used, and his free love followers needed no further invitation. Markland’s letter included the terms “rape,” “genitals,” and “penis,” and Dr. O’Neill’s added “intercourse,” “private organ,” and “semen”—all terms that Victorian America condemned as unacceptable for publication.
Ezra Heywood campaigned for the use of explicit language as well. “The sex organs and their associative uses have fit, proper, explicit, expressive English names,” he wrote. “Why not have character enough to use them and no longer be ashamed of your own creative use and destiny? Why giggle, mince, simper, skulk and dodge about?”23
But the writer who set the pace when it came to expanding the sexual vocabulary was Angela Heywood. With a disarming level of comfort, this Victorian wife and mother wrote in a tone that was open, bold, liberating—and graphic. Extolling the beauty of the male sex organ, Angela described the word “penis” as “a musical word” and celebrated the organ’s singular function in the circle of life—“What mother can look in the face of her welcome child and not religiously respect the rigid, erect, ready-for-service, persistent male-organ that sired it?” She also insisted that the word “cock” should be fully accepted into the language as a synonym for penis. “In literature we have cocks as weathervanes, cocks as fowls, cockel hats, cocked rifles,” she argued, so “Cock is a fowl but not a foul word.”24
Nor did Angela bristle at the word that many people, still today, speak of only as “the F word.” She argued that the phrasing “sexual intercourse” was too cumbersome to define an activity “commonly spoken of in one word of four letters that everybody knows the meaning of.” So Angela casually used the word “fuck” in her articles, saying in her whimsical style: “Such graceful terms as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking, throbbing, kissing, and kin words are telephone expressions, lighthouses of intercourse centrally immutable to the situation; it is as impossible and undesirable to put them out of pure use as it would be to take oxygen out of the air.”25
CENSORING THE SEXUAL REFORM PRESS
Victoria Woodhull’s scandalous revelations about a venerated man of the cloth combined with Moses Harman and the Heywoods’ shocking ideas about sexual reform and explicit language provided the kindling that set ablaze the most savage crusade against pornography in the history of American publishing.
The knight errant who led the crusade was Anthony Comstock. The drygoods salesman turned moral vigilante undertook his crusade to avenge the corruption of a friend who had been, in Comstock’s words, “diseased by reading a filthy book.” By the early 1870s, Comstock had founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice and had become a Christian warrior whose name would forever be linked to the crusade to repress what he considered obscene material.26
In 1872, Comstock was looking for a high-visibility case to expand his New York City crusade into a national one; at precisely his moment of need, like manna from Heaven, came Victoria Woodhull’s scandal issue. Comstock gained so much free publicity from leading the moral charge against the “notorious Victoria” that he received sufficient financial backing from such wealthy men as financier J. Pierpont Morgan and soap magnate Samuel Colgate to create his very own censoring operation. They paid Comstock a salary to stamp out vice and strengthen anti-obscenity legislation nationwide.
In early 1873, “St. Anthony,” as the free lovers called him, went to Washington to lobby for federal laws. The anti-obscenity bills were taken up during a frenzied all-night session that was made all the more chaotic when Comstock unveiled his traveling exhibit of pornography. At 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, Congress passed legislation that quickly became known as the Comstock Acts. The statutes dramatically broadened previous laws, stipulating that anyone found guilty of mailing or receiving “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material—Congress did not define any of the terms—would be sentenced to ten years in prison. Comstock ensured that the laws would be carried out by having the congressmen name him a special post office inspector charged with identifying and confiscating unmailable material.27
NO HOLDS BARRED
Despite the powerful forces of censorship that Comstock brought to bear, the sexual reform editors did not slow their campaign; they accelerated it. By the 1880s, it was clear that the dissident editors would allow no holds to be barred in their assault on sexual repression.
One of the most controversial topics the editors promoted was promiscuity. Victoria Woodhull expressed her support of multiple sex partners in the way she lived her own life. While married to Canning Woodhull, she worked as a prostitute and had an affair with James Blood; while married to Blood, she had affairs with Cornelius Vanderbilt and other men of wealth and prominence—including Theodore Tilton, the husband of the woman she exposed as the lover of Rev. Beecher. In 1874, Woodhull publicly endorsed multiple sex partners, announcing: “I am a very promiscuous free lover.” Moses Harman and the Heywoods also defended promiscuity, but in less personal terms. Harman denounced laws against adultery as “unwarranted invasion of private and personal right,” and the Heywoods argued that lust was such a grand and marvelous force that it was selfish for a person to reserve all of its gifts for only one other person.28
Moses Harman’s most strident act of defiance against Victorian morality came when he advocated what he labeled “free marriage”—men and women living together as husband and wife without the sanction of church or state. In 1886, the editor orchestrated a ceremony between his golden-haired daughter, Lillian, who was sixteen, and Lucifer co-editor Edwin Walker, who was thirty-seven. During the ceremony, Lillian said, “I enter into this union with Mr. Walker of my own free will and choice.” In the next issue of The Word, Ezra and Angela Heywood staunchly supported the bride and groom, calling them “brave exponents of Progress.”29
The Heywoods adamantly believed that a woman’s individual rights fully entitled her to abort a fetus. They wrote that a woman had to be “mistress of her own person” and, therefore, her justification for ending a pregnancy “is as unquestionable as her right to eat, breathe, or walk.” This was a radical stand at the time, as having an abortion was a crime punishable by death.30
To a modern-day audience, one of the most shocking arguments put forth by the sexual reform editors evolved from their belief that conventional marriage was tantamount to sexual bondage. The fact that wives were forced to have sex with their husbands was so damaging, the editors argued, that babies born to unwed mothers were, in fact, superior to babies born to married women. Ezra Heywood first raised this radical idea in 1875, arguing that single women should be encouraged to have babies. “The marriage institution is a State Intrusion which destroys love, hinders intelligent reproduction, causes domestic discord, and corrupts and poisons the sources of life,” resulting in babies who are ugly and of weak character. Moses Harman agreed, telling his readers that children born from a husband forcing himself upon his wife carried the psychological scar of being “born under protest” throughout their lives.31
Another controversial topic—today but far more so in the nineteenth century—supported by the radical papers was sex education. The Heywoods dramatized American children’s need for straightforward information about sex by printing an anonymous letter from a New York mother. “The other day,” the woman began, “my little girl, who is in her twelfth year, came to me and said, ‘Mama, what does “fuck” mean?’” When the woman asked where her daughter had heard the word, the girl answered, “‘ Today at school, Willie said to me, ‘Mamie, won’t you fuck me?’” The mother took this response as a cue that it was time to explain the facts of life to her daughter; she then provided the girl with a full description of intercourse and the sex organs, including comparing her breasts and genitals to those of her daughter. The mother also described how she and her daughter had examined a photograph of an erect penis. The mother went on to say that she had engaged in sexual intercourse for the first time at age twelve—“I was fascinated with it,” she wrote.32
PAYING A HIGH PRICE
By the mid-1870s, Anthony Comstock’s crusade against the editors of the sexual reform press had become relentless. He believed that God had chosen him to silence the men and women he described as “Satanic editors” who were “foul of speech, shameless in their lives and corrupting in their influences.”33
Victoria Woodhull was his first target. After being indicted on obscenity charges for the Beecher story, Woodhull was in and out of jail for a year and a half between the publication of her scandal issue and the trial that decided her fate. There was no question that the details of the Beecher-Tilton affair violated the sweeping concept of obscenity as Comstock defined it. But as the trial began, Woodhull was visited by a group of Plymouth Church parishioners who were eager to put the scandal behind them. By the end of the visit, Woodhull had struck a deal; she would give up any evidence she had against Beecher—she had nothing but hearsay, but the parishioners didn’t know that—in exchange for escaping punishment on the obscenity charges. Two days later, as if ordained by God Himself, the judge dismissed the case because of insufficient evidence.
In spite of the courtroom victory, Woodhull’s life was in shambles. She estimated that the legal case had cost her, when personal losses were combined with business losses, $500,000. She also had been evicted from her mansion, had been forced to close her brokerage firm, and had been divorced by James Blood—not such a committed free lover after all, Blood took none too kindly to his wife’s multiple affairs. Commodore Vanderbilt’s declining health ended his financial support, so Woodhull’s only source of income was the public lectures that she often had to cancel because of respiratory problems. In June 1876, she was finally forced to give up the enterprise that she had clung to the longest; Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly ceased publication.
But Victoria Woodhull was a woman of resilience. When Vanderbilt died in 1877, he left the bulk of his $100 million fortune to his son William while giving only small amounts to his other nine children. William was so terrified that Mrs. Satan might testify that the Commodore had been unduly influenced by spirits, and therefore of unsound mind when he signed his will, that the junior Vanderbilt paid her $100,000 to leave the country. She then settled in London and promptly married shy millionaire bachelor John Biddulph Martin. Victoria Claflin Woodhull Blood Martin then became the picture of domestic bliss, dedicating her life to her husband and her two grown children. When Martin died in 1897, he left his wife a million dollars, allowing her to live out her life in the comfort of the Martin family estate to the venerable age of eighty-eight.
Ezra Heywood’s life was not so charmed. Comstock called the editor of The Word “the chief creature of this vile creed” of free love, and for three decades the censorship czar pursued Heywood with a vengeance. Comstock had Heywood arrested five times and convicted twice—leading to sentences of four years in prison. With Ezra in jail and Angela struggling to feed their four children, the Heywoods lost the Mountain Home resort to foreclosure and had to suspend publication of The Word. After Ezra completed his second prison term—this one at hard labor—he tried to revive his sexual reform journal. His body could no longer sustain the heavy workload, however, and he died a year after leaving jail, in 1893 at the age of sixty-four. The Word ceased publication with Ezra’s death. During her old age, Angela—the woman who was once led the effort to expand the English language with regard to sexual terminology—worked as a cleaning woman.34
Moses Harman’s final years were sadly reminiscent of Ezra Heywood’s. Lucifer’s first clash with the law came the morning after Lillian Harman and Edwin Walker consummated their free marriage in 1886. The arrest warrant charged that they were living together “unlawfully and feloniously,” and they were taken to jail to await trial. The case of the Lucifer lovers, as Lillian and Edwin became known, created front-page headlines in newspapers nationwide. The Topeka Daily Capital said the lovers were “fools” seeking “cheap notoriety,” and the Kansas City Times stated that free marriage, free love, and Lucifer were all “absurd, subversive and untenable.” Most far-reaching in its impact was the coverage that the Associated Press sent to the country’s major dailies. The wire service routinely referred to Lucifer by the inflammatory labels “social vampire” and “national menace,” while incorrectly telling the nation that Walker was married and had deserted his wife and five children—Walker, in reality, was legally divorced and continued to support his two children.35
The citizens of Kansas were so outraged by Moses Harman’s ungodly acts that court officials moved the trial along at breakneck speed, the jury quickly found Edwin and Lillian guilty, and the judge sentenced Edwin to seventy-five days in jail and Lillian to forty-five. In addition, he said both defendants would remain in jail until they paid the court costs. After Edwin and Lillian served their full sentences, they stayed behind bars because they refused to pay the fees, saying that doing so would be admitting that their relationship was illicit. So they remained in jail for six months, finally agreeing to go home only when Moses Harman insisted that they were desperately needed to produce Lucifer because he was about to be carted off to jail himself.
Harman’s 1887 arrest on obscenity charges led to a sentence of five years in the Kansas penitentiary. After he served his time, the censors still pursued the seventy-year-old editor. Harman was then sentenced to another year in jail, this one at hard labor; the elderly man who had walked with a limp since childhood broke rocks for nine hours a day. Lillian kept the journal alive until her father was released and returned as editor. But the years in jail had sapped his last reserve of energy, so he was forced to cease publishing Lucifer in 1907. He died in 1910. Lillian, who had lived separately from Edwin Walker for many years, then quietly wed another man and left the public arena for a life of domesticity as a wife and mother.
LIMITED LEGACY
It would be an overstatement to suggest that the sexual reform press of the late nineteenth century changed American society. Unlike The Liberator, these dissident journals were not a key factor in ending an institution as powerful as slavery; unlike The Revolution, they did not set an agenda for an unyielding crusade for social change such as the Women’s Rights Movement. The sexual reform press, in fact, never even succeeded in spawning a social movement that was larger than itself; there never existed—in the sense of membership and ongoing activities—a sexual reform movement per se.
Most fundamentally, the sexual reform press failed utterly in its central goal of destroying the institution of marriage and replacing it with a system in which women and men were free to create and dissolve sexual unions at will. Nor were other proposals adopted—promiscuity continued to be condemned, proper society did not embrace explicit sexual language, and abortion remained illegal for another 100 years. In fact, the sexual reform press very well may have worsened the very situation it was trying to improve. By fueling Anthony Comstock’s vitriolic censorship campaign, the dissident papers unleashed a savage attack on sexual expression; “St. Anthony” died in 1915, but the federal law that bore his name was not substantially revised until the 1930s—some states still had lingering Comstock laws in effect into the 1970s.36
And yet, the editors of the radical journals should not be dismissed, as some authors have done, as members of a “lunatic” or “infidel” fringe. Although the scale of the sexual reform press was small and its impact limited, its intensity and ambition were great. The scrappy journals flouted the Victorian code of respectability that condoned sexual activity only as a necessary but unspeakable means of reproducing the species. Likewise, the publications challenged the powerful and pervasive social consensus that enforced the code of silence in all things sexual.37
Challenged indeed. Like the dissident publications that preceded them, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, The Word, and Lucifer, the Light-Bearer provided a venue for a conversation that the mainstream press of their day refused to hear. Some of the topics the sexual reform papers discussed are still considered beyond the pale of polite discourse today—among them promiscuity and the superiority of babies born to unwed mothers. Other of the topics sound dauntingly contemporary—graphic language, sex education, abortion. Perhaps what is most curious about the list of topics is how few of them have progressed to the point of widespread acceptance; only the marriage contract no longer allowing wives to be subjugated and adults being allowed to live together without being married seem to fit into that category, and many Americans will disagree even with that limited assessment.
What can and should be credited to the sexual reform press is that it allowed many contentious conversations to begin. For the four decades between 1870 when Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly was founded and 1907 when Lucifer ceased publication, this intriguing genre of the dissident press offered a platform for the discussion of sexual reform that establishment journalism refused to grant. By the early decades of the twentieth century, general-circulation publications were beginning to make room for some of these topics—the need to rethink the legal limits of the marriage contract and to reform the nation’s divorce laws—but that dialogue may not have commenced when it did had it not been for the efforts of Victoria Woodhull, Ezra and Angela Heywood, and Moses Harman.38
What also most certainly can be said is that these defiant women and men paid an exorbitant price for their dissidence. They dared Victorian society to rethink its view of sexual behavior despite censure, repression, denunciation, and the dark shadow of public disgrace. To a range of degrees and for various lengths of time, each sexual reform editor suffered public disrepute and personal deprivation, including being condemned as criminals and serving time behind bars. In the case of Ezra Heywood and Moses Harman, their confinement to jail extended for many years and ultimately destroyed their health and undoubtedly hastened their deaths. In the final analysis, then, the story of the sexual reform press is a story of ideas before their time and of social insurgents who dedicated their talents, their resources, and—in some cases—their very lives to a provocative brand of dissident journalism.