Ms. Sohn...makes a very successful transition to feminist historian. There is irony but little humor in her compelling, well-researched exploration of these pioneers, who faced jail time because they promoted contraception, gender equality, sexual education and a woman’s right to sexual pleasure ... Of the eight women Ms. Sohn spotlights, the sexologist Ida C. Craddock gets the most attention ... After her death, Craddock was quickly forgotten, but Ms. Sohn has successfully resurrected her and her radical sisters.
By 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.
... fascinating ... Sohn’s book is not a biography, and that’s all to the good ... Comstock’s targets who feature in Sohn’s book are...like the outsider artists of activism, creating their own unschooled, florid, and enraptured works of protest. Reading Sohn, I grew quite fond of them ... Taken together, these tales of the unexpected also offer a fresh angle on the history of American free-speech activism. Many of us think of it as beginning with the founding of the A.C.L.U., in 1920, and its defense of political radicals hounded under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, not with dreamy, self-taught sexologists expounding on the delights of the body ... the language [Comstock] used to describe...the women he sought to arrest and imprison, was revealing. One anecdote that Sohn relates—she has a gift for summoning up such scenes—reminded me vividly of modern-day Internet trolls.
The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn’s lively new book, spotlights eight women who challenged Comstock with their writings and actions ... Sohn deploys a veteran novelist’s skills to animate Comstock and his antagonists.
Aside from offering a few perfunctory biographical details, Sohn mostly depicts Comstock as a nuisance or a cartoon villain ... Sohn doesn’t try to present Comstock as anything more complicated than a self-satisfied prig; nor does she sufficiently parse some of the more troubling beliefs of the women she calls 'sex radicals' ... The combination of the overstated and underdrawn reflects the awkwardness of this book: The Man Who Hated Women gestures at a gripping narrative and a profound argument while ultimately falling short of either ... Sohn isn’t wrong, but in her determination to flatten Sanger into a hero for our times, she ends by affirming a kind of girlboss feminism, unapologetically glib and individualistic.
Sohn’s treats sex radicals and reproductive rights with the aplomb of a former sex columnist ... This makes the book sound like a fun romp through progressive rights that tells us where we’ve been and how it can indicate where to go. It’s not. Nor is it an activist’s guide to girlbossing the future. Sohn skates over a variety of issues these white women themselves ignored ... It reads like a rebranding of Margaret Sanger’s work despite the fact that she and many free love advocates of her time held deeply racist and ableist ideas around population control ... If there is to be something drawn from Sohn’s book it is the way even activists like Sanger will throw someone under the bus for the sake of political purity. For his own part, Comstock seems like a man hellbent on destroying his own sexual thirst. Clearly he hated women but I’m not sure Amy Sohn proves this in her book. Instead he reads as just another man who wanted to outlaw desire, ghost sex and all.
...engrossing ... Bestselling author Amy Sohn vividly brings to life the activists who opposed Comstock’s efforts ... Sohn has unearthed a wealth of vivid historic detail about these women’s resistance to Comstock’s censorship ... Sohn places these mostly forgotten 'sex radicals' at the center of the history of the women’s rights movement. That this battle continues in our own time makes The Man Who Hated Women all the more important and enlightening.
... a fascinating look at a key historical moment for free speech and women's rights in the U.S. ... It's an engaging, sensational history, made more so by Sohn's effective writing ... Both entertaining and informative, this volume will appeal to readers interested in feminism, freedom of speech and the press, and U.S. history in general.
Throughout this immensely readable history, Sohn fashions sympathetic narratives of these women’s lives and underscores their invaluable sacrifices for a vital cause. Many readers will be appalled to learn that literature about birth control was once considered obscene. Stellar research in women’s history, especially crucial due to recent threats to abortion rights across the country.
... an engrossing account of U.S. post office special agent Anthony Comstock’s anti-vice crusade and the women who opposed it ... Blending colorful details of life at the turn of the 20th century with sharp insights into just how revolutionary these new ideas were, this fascinating history deserves a wide readership.
