PositiveWashington MonthlyBy any standard, this is a fascinating group of women. Sohn is a vivid writer with an eye for detail, and she is clearly inspired by her subjects’ fervent beliefs and dramatic lives ... Sohn clearly revels in the double-sided shock value of the stories she tells, detailing both the audaciously explicit sexual advocacy of her heroines and Comstock’s ham-fisted retaliations. But her book would have been more powerful if she had pared down some of the lengthy (if spicy) details and instead offered readers a broader vision of the political landscape in which Comstock flourished for so long ... the lesson we should take from this book is that, in the American political world, no battle is ever permanently lost nor permanently won.
