57. Ida Craddock with Amy Sohn

KIM ASKEW: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers... 

AMY HELMES: ...including forgotten women writers of sex literature. I'm Amy Helmes, and, oh gosh, Kim you're blushing, aren't you? 

KIM: Yes, I am already. It's those puritanical ancestors! 

AMY: Okay, well, I know how you feel, but our "lost lady" for this week, Ida Craddock, would surely tell us both to just get over it. She was a self-taught Victorian sex expert, known for her complete candor when it came to discussing what happens between the sheets. 

KIM: That's right. And she believed so fervently in her message of healthy and happy sex lives for women that she made her erotic instruction public, even though it was downright dangerous to do so in the era, in which she lived. 

AMY: For those listeners among us who maybe consider themselves to be more demure, as it were, on topics such as this, I want you to just consider that Craddock was, from everything we can tell, a virgin — a lifelong virgin. 

KIM: Just don't tell her that. 

AMY: Right. We will clarify that in a bit. It's a crazy story. Needless to say, I found myself just saying, "Holy bananas!" when I was reading about Ida Craddock's personal life. 

KIM: Yeah, she was fascinating, and she's just one of the remarkable women highlighted in a wonderful new non-fiction title by author Amy Sohn. The book is called The Man Who Hated Women, and we've got Amy with us on the podcast today to talk about it and Ida Craddock, in particular. 

AMY: And we're going to try to keep it PG-rated, but no promises, people. So let's raid the stacks and get started!

KIM: So we're so thrilled to welcome author Amy Sohn to the show today. She is a New York Times' bestselling author of 12 books, including the novels Prospect Park West, Motherland, and The Actress. She's a former columnist about sex and relationships for The New York Press and New York Magazine. She's a real-life Carrie Bradshaw, you might even say. I'm sure you've heard that before.) Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Men's Journal, Playboy and other publications. And in July, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her first nonfiction book, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age. Oh, that sounds great. Kirkus Reviews calls it an "important work of biographical history" and The Wall Street Journal described it as "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."

AMY: And we are going to be getting into all of that in today's episode. Amy Sohn, welcome to the show! 

AMY SOHN: Thank you so much. I am so delighted to be contributing a "lost lady" to you!

AMY: This is a spicy one!

KIM: Yes. And let's get started with the title, The Man Who Hated Women. Your book highlights some of the most radical and important women of the late 19th century when it comes to female reproductive and sexual rights, but you frame their stories through the lens or the crosshairs, I guess you could call it, of one particular man who was determined to stop them all. Tell us about it.

AMY SOHN: So you want to learn about Anthony Comstock? 

KIM: Mmm-hmm.

AMY SOHN: All right. Anthony Comstock was born in 1844 in New Canaan, Connecticut. His mother was a direct descendant of the first Puritans in New England, and he was raised Congregationalist, but he was very much a product of his time. He served in the Civil War in the Union Army after his brother died at Gettysburg. And he didn't see much action, I've got to say. He was kind of disappointed. But he moved to New York in the late 1860s to try to make a living in dry goods. And when he moved to New York, New York was smutty, dangerous, bawdy, and there was sex everywhere in the form of literal streetwalkers -- "pretty waiter girls" they were called, which were waitresses who were really trying to sell you sex. And then also an incredible amount of obscene materials, both pictorial and, I guess you could say, literary. And the reason it was all exploding was well, there were a few reasons that kind of stuff was exploding in New York at that time: One, there were a ton of young men like Anthony Comstock moving to New York after the Civil War, and so this material catered to them. Two, printing changed, and you, for the first time, could have things that were small enough to be able to hide. That's very important when it comes to dirty, I call it smut, because there's just not, there's not one word for what this was. You needed to be able to hide things, because if you were a young guy like Anthony Comstock living in a boarding house on Pearl Street, which is modern-day Financial District in New York, you needed to be able to slip something into your pocket. And so he was just so basically assaulted by all of the sex out there that he became a part-time unpaid vice hunter, which meant that he went around to the smutty booksellers in lower Manhattan and ratted people out to the cops.

AMY: Which, speaking of, I hear sirens in the background right now. It's perfect, it's like we have a soundtrack.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY SOHN: You know what's crazy? I'm actually in lower Manhattan right now. And when I walk around here on these narrow streets, I imagine him all the time. So yeah, he basically realized that he was better at ratting out dirty booksellers to the cops than selling dry goods, and so he wound up getting the YMCA to pay him for these activities. And then in 1873, with the support, I should say, of extremely well-connected blue blood men, was able to go to Washington DC and pass what became known as the Comstock Law, which, in a sentence, is a law that criminalized the mailing of obscenity and this is very important and contraception, with very steep penalties and fines. We had had federal obscenity law before, but we had never had contraception linked to it. And so he was really the first one to create in the American mind this idea of birth control as dirty. 

AMY: So I'm curious about the genesis of your book then. So did you know that you wanted to tell the stories of these women in relation to him? Did you know that's the framework you wanted to use the whole time, or did you start off wanting to write something about Comstock first? 

AMY SOHN: I first learned about the woman who we're going to talk about today, Ida Craddock. I discovered her story while book hunting, looking for my next book project, wanting to do nonfiction after 20 some odd years of fiction, and became totally intoxicated by her and specifically intoxicated by this very ... what are the two characters in Les Mis? Javert and...? 

AMY: Valjean. Do you ...want me to sing? I can start singing.

AMY SOHN: This Javert and Valjean cat-and-mouse that spanned more than four states over nine years between her and Comstock. And then I decided that I really wanted my book to be more broad than that. I love Ida Craddock. Ida Craddock has had her own biography, which is quite good, by a guy named Leigh Eric Schmidt. I could write volumes about her. I could write novels about her, you know. In transitioning to the world of non-fiction you need kind of like a big idea. And I felt like Comstock was less interesting than the women, because the women that he pursued, although they made up ultimately a very small percentage of all the people he pursued because he went after so many dirty booksellers and most of those were men... The women just completely inspired me, because so many of them were writing about sex and contraception from a feminist perspective. And a lot of these women were denigrated for their sex writing when really what they were doing was using sex as a way of talking about other things, because sex is at the root of everything whether you have a lot of it, none of it, you know, like it, or don't like it, it's about power. It's about equality. It's about coercion. It's about pleasure. It's about social issues. And anyway, I just, I love these women so much. So my book is about eight women who went up against the Comstock Law. You would expect that just for pure public relations reasons, he would leave women alone and bother the men. When in fact, he had this very, very personal animosity to a specific type of woman, which was a smart, liberated, usually unmarried, complicated woman who was challenging perceived truths about religion and family and marriage. And this was at a time when, if you were a young married woman, you had very little information, depending on how you know, how good your doctor was. You might've had no idea what was about to happen when you went home after your wedding. And so, you know, Ida Craddock, who we're going to talk about, she was providing really, really valuable information. 

AMY: And I realized as soon as I started reading your book, that there is so much about this topic that I was woefully unfamiliar with. So, I basically only knew like the quick hits I knew Victoria Woodhall, who's one of the ladies in the book. I knew she was the first American presidential candidate who was a woman, right? I knew Margaret Sanger gave us birth control. I knew Emma Goldman was an anarchist. Those were like my, you know, "Jeopardy" facts, basically. I didn't know their full stories or the full historical context of what women of this era suffered at the hands of society's squeamishness about sex. Also, as you said, almost all of the women that you feature in the book were writers and they were getting published or they were self-publishing to get their points across. And it would be really fun to talk about them all, and that's why everybody should go read this book, but we're just going to focus on Ida Craddock. She is the woman that you start the book with, and she kicks the book off with a bang. I've got to get that pun in there.

AMY SOHN: Excellent.

AMY: I'm willing to guess not many of our listeners have heard of her.

AMY SOHN: Absolutely not. It's not a stretch to say nobody's heard of her. 

KIM: You begin your book with an anecdote about the Chicago World's Fair and why that was a pivotal moment in the turn Ida's professional career would take. Can you fill our listeners in on that? 

AMY SOHN: Yes. So Ida Craddock, in 1893, when she went to the Chicago World's Fair was a 36-year-old unmarried woman who lived in her mother's house. And she had tried unsuccessfully to become the first woman to receive an undergraduate liberal arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She had not been able to get in because she was a woman. She tried like four times. I always say she reminds me a little bit of myself. I was fortunate enough to get into an Ivy League institution by virtue of the year of my birth, but she was kind of bouncing around after she couldn't get into Penn living in her mother's house. Her mother was a widow. And she literally slept behind a partition in the living room and she called it "the cubicle." There's so many modern things about her story. So she basically, because of entrenched sexism preventing her from getting the education that she wanted, she was absolutely brilliant, she started reading about sex at the library, and she was able to find some pretty good, dirty stuff! And at the time she was in her twenties and thirties, there were also a lot of radical publications publishing stuff about sex -- safe or safer childbirth. Krafft-Ebing, his work was being translated into English. Even some of Freud was beginning to cross its way over. And so Ida became very interested in two thing:, sex and the devil. She became interested in the occult. And I've often wondered why she was so curious about different religions given that she went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia and her mother was a Unitarian, but she was living in these kinds of liberal free-thinker type worlds, and within those worlds was kind of a healthy skepticism about Christianity. Christianity was understood by radical thinkers to be connected to damaging systems of power, and she totally got that. So as she started exploring the occult, she went out and bought a Ouija board. The first Ouija board came out in the early 1890s, just a couple of years before the World's Fair in Chicago. And through this Ouija board, she encountered these spirits. One of them was an infant who had died before Ida was born, also named Ida. This was a very common thing, because people lost babies so early. Her father, she was very upset about her father's death. He had died when she was very young. This was one of the other spirits. And the most interesting one of all was called Soph. And Soph was the ghost of a handsome friend of her mother's who she had gotten to know when she was a teenager. He would come over to her mother's house and hang out with Ida and talk to Ida when Ida was a teen, and he had died very young of tuberculosis. She never revealed the man's true name. He was only Soph, which is Greek for "wise or shrewd." And first, they were just friends, but low and behold, in October 1892, maybe it was November, 1892,they were wed in the Borderlands, which was the space between the living and the dead. And he became her ghost husband. So when she went to the World's Fair... 

AMY: Okay, let's just hold on. You can't just casually throw that into the conversation. So listeners, Ida Craddock had a ghost husband.

KIM: A ghost lover.

AMY: A ghost lover. Soph! She was married to him. Okay.

AMY SOHN: What I'm trying to tee up is at the Chicago World's Fair the biggest attraction was the belly dances. And these actually happened at three or four theaters that were then called the Oriental Theaters. And these were 18 and 19 year old girls -- Egyptian, Tunisian, and they were bringing belly dancing to the United States. Which, you have to imagine how shocking this was. And so all of these Americans were going to the World's Fair and watching these belly dancers and completely losing their minds. One of these people was Anthony Comstock, because he was preaching at a religious revival near Madison and some guy came up to him and he's like, "I've been to the belly dances. It's horrifying. You have to do something about this." And so when Anthony Comstock went to see the belly dance, he became absolutely appalled, and he tried to get rid of them, but it didn't really work because the promoters were stronger than he was and in the end, the only modification he was able to get was a slight change in clothing. So there was like a thin, more gauzy material covering the navel, but basically he completely made a fool of himself and lost. But he got all this attention for saying that the belly dances were bad and immoral. And so Ida Craddock, at some point, I like to believe they were there at the same show, but, within weeks of Anthony's visiting the belly dances, Ida made the journey herself from Philadelphia. And when she saw these belly dancers, she was like, "This is everything I care about in one form." Sex. Symbolism. Phallic symbols. World religions. It was everything. And she realized that she was like an expert on belly dancing, because she had done some research into different religions. There was actually an area of scholarship called phallic worship. So she saw the belly dance and decided, number one, I want to write something about what I think about them. And number two, I want to shame Anthony Comstock. So she got a little essay published in Joseph Pulitzer's, New York World basically saying that belly dances should be used as a premarital educational tool, and that all women should learn to move their hips like the belly dancers. Which I think was an absolute stroke of genius, because under the guise of sort of positioning it within its symbolic and historic and cultural context, she was essentially telling women, "if you move your hips during sex, you might have an orgasm." And this was really, really important information. 

AMY: She's onto something, ladies. 

AMY SOHN: Okay. 

AMY: So let's go back to her childhood a little bit more. Did she have ambitions as a girl to be a writer? 

AMY SOHN: It's very interesting. You know, she learned to read at two or three, supposedly. She was a star student at Friends Central, which is still a highly regarded Quaker school in Philadelphia. And she was just very, very bright and an avid reader. She wrote a couple of short stories and was able to get some of them published. And one of them was about this old maid who had kind of a boring life, but was trying to find her independence. And, um, she wrote these stories under the pseudonym Celanire, her middle name: C-E-L-A-N-I-R-E. I think she was literary. I think Ida was literary, and she had a little bit of a fantasy of herself as a fiction writer. And her writing was a very, very powerful force in her life. In yet another way in which she inspires me, she moved from fiction into non-fiction. Her marriage guides, which, I'm sure you have questions, and we can get into that in a little bit, are just incredibly well-written and funny. At one point she said that, um, if a man's penis was too big for his young bride's vagina, he should "make like you do with a glove that is a trifle too small," and she suggested various lubricants., which, you know, for it's time, she's telling these guys that there's ways to make things easier, but also what she's doing at the same time is making the sex better for the woman. Is this the dirtiest one you've ever had? 

AMY: Oh, yeah! 

KIM: I think I might have to put "explicit" when I upload it. No, this is great.

AMY: So after she published her article about the belly dancing at the World's Fair, she realized that there was this huge audience for Frank writing about human sexuality. And that's when she started pitching herself as an expert on phallic worship from a sort of anthropological standpoint. And that's when these sort of sex manuals started coming together, I guess you could call them sex manuals. They were kind of tracks that were advancing new ideas about a woman's rights within a marriage and including the right to say no to sex when you were married, which was a new idea.

AMY SOHN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Ida Craddock would have called them marriage manuals or marriage guides. She was not the only person who wrote them. There were a lot of them in the 1830s and 1840s, which was 30 years before the Comstock law was passed. And then once it was passed, it got harder to circulate them. It got harder to get this information. She wrote a book called The Wedding Night, but there were other books also called by other people. So a lot of it was "What do you do when you come home?" Another radical thing she said was that she was very concerned about the hymen on the wedding night and that sex could be painful to the woman. And this could also be very upsetting to the man. And so she advocated that you get your hymen snipped before your wedding, and then she said, "And if your husband believes that entrance is easier because you've been with another man, then you may as well find another husband." 

KIM: I love it. Radical. Radical thinking there. And the interesting thing is she was also writing for men and women. A few of her titles included Helps to Happy Wedlock, No. 1 For Husbands, Advice to a Bridegroom and Letters to a Prospective Bride. Can you talk about how her books were received and the backlash, particularly Anthony Comstock's response?

AMY SOHN: One problem she had was she had men coming to her office and asking for sex lessons who would then flirt with her, you know, the least harmful of which was asking her out to dinner. The most harmful of which was attempting to assault her. And that just goes to show you, to call yourself a lecturer in phallic worship or a marriage instructor an this kind of thing when you're an attractive woman, alone, you are very vulnerable to men misinterpreting what your intent is. She has these amazing case files where she talks about just constantly being hit on by men. In terms of Anthony Comstock, he caught wind of her fairly early on. She received a warning to stop selling one of her books in Philadelphia in 1898. And it appears that the postal inspector in Philadelphia had some kind of communication with Anthony Comstock even though at that point, Ida only received a warning. But he had her on his radar and he called her "lecturer of filth" in his arrest log book. And Ida wound up moving around a lot. I mean, Ida Craddock was one of many women who was trying to help other women, but also directly writing about Comstock in some of her marriage guides and calling him unctuous and, in one piece of writing, she said that the urge to describe what she viewed as clean writing, because this was all about purity and truth in positive relations between the sexes, to describe those things as unclean, that kind of Comstockism, she likened it to masturbation. I mean, that is an incredibly bold thing to do, to basically say he's the pervert. She was always turning it on him.

AMY: So we've got to get back to the ghost. 

AMY SOHN: Let's do it. 

AMY: Okay. So Soph is what she called him. Now she's not the only person who was communing with ghosts in your book. It's kind of a thing at this time, period. Correct? 

AMY SOHN: Spiritualism was a very popular movement both before and after the Civil War. Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, communed with the dead. Spiritualism is very confusing, because some people feel that it's aligned with hucksterism. But what I know from my reading is that people at that time in the 19th century had a very different relationship to the dead than we do today. It was common to have ongoing relationships with dead relatives. Some historians Civil War, you wanted to continue to have a relationship with your dead husband or your dead son or your dead nephew. So, yes, I think what you're getting at that's very important is that she wasn't that unusual in having a relationship with a dead person, but perhaps a little bit unusual in having a nine-year orgasmic, sexual relationship with a man who she married in the Borderlands. 

KIM: That was a perfect explanation. I love that. And I'm so glad that we're getting to the heart of the matter here. I mean, whoa, literally, she is writing this incredible advice for people and allegedly it's coming from a fantasy relationship with a ghost lover.

AMY: And it was hot. 

KIM: It was hot, yeah.

AMY: She describes some of it, and it's like, she got into details. 

KIM: She learned a lot!

AMY SOHN: It's it's but it's interesting that you say fantasy relationship because one of the things I'm careful to do in my book is, I don't guess for the reader what I think her mental state was. I really believe in taking Ida at her word, and what I know from what I read is that she had a total ability to distinguish reality from not reality. So for example, she didn't talk to herself while she was walking down the street. He only visited her at night and in private, which is also significant, because it means that maybe these interactions were like you say, in some gray area between sleep and wakefulness. We just don't know. We don't know if she was masturbating during these sessions. We don't know what she was hearing and seeing, but I'm telling you, she wrote about this guy for seven and a half years, and it feels very real. They argued. She didn't always have an orgasm, which as I write in my book, you would think that ghostly sex would be by its naturen perfect, but it wasn't. It makes you wonder what was going on. She was concerned when she did have orgasms about whether they were what she called astral or physical, which today we might call G-spot or clitoral. This is mind blowing stuff. 

KIM: It is, on the other hand, I think in some ways, you know, when you're hitting puberty and like, I mean, I guess I'm speaking for myself here, but your brain kind of works like that. It's just, she's, you know, an adult woman having these, but she's not having these other experiences because you know, she doesn't have another relationship nor is she may, well, I guess she could, in her...

AMY SOHN: She swore that all of her knowledge came from Soph, and there was no other man 

KIM: On some level, given her circumstances, it does seem believable. It just goes on for a really long time. And there are a lot of details. 

AMY SOHN: Someone that interviewed me said she was living in such a repressive time that she basically had to conjure an egalitarian boyfriend. 

KIM: Yeah. And that makes sense. 

AMY: I mean, sometimes your fantasy lover can maybe be better than the real thing. 

Yeah. And to your 

KIM: point about earlier about the religious idea, you know, you think of the famous saints or women authors from historical, um, that were having ecstatic relationships and those were, you know, celebrated. 

AMY: Yeah. She already had sort of a complicated relationship with her own mother. 

AMY SOHN: Mommy dearest is how I describe it.

AMY: Yeah. So her mother and other people were already thinking that Ida was not all together there. And then, so a ghost lover was not necessarily helping her cause you know, with those, with those sorts of people.

KIM: Well, yeah. I mean, we didn't really talk about her mom trying to have her institutionalized. 

AMY SOHN: Her mother was not supportive of Ida wanting to have a literary salon, an intellectual salon in the home. So that was an initial point of tension, is that Ida, and she said, basically, if I'm going to be living in my mom's place, I want to be able to have radical, cool people over so we can talk about stuff. But at one point, um, in Philadelphia, her mother succeeded in having Ida institutionalized, sent to an asylum because she believed that otherwise Ida was going to be imprisoned for her writings. Um, I can't imagine anything more horrifying, first of all, than being institutionalized against my will. And then by probably the person closest to her, aside from Soph. And when she went to the asylum, she was asked whether she had sex with a dead man, and she was kind of cagey about it. She knew that they were trying to set her up. And she did eventually get out with the help of a woman lawyer, um, a woman named Carrie Burnham Kilgore, who basically said to Ida, "Get away from your mother as fast as possible." But yeah., talk about Mommy, Dearest. And then while Ida was in the asylum, she went with an assistant district attorney and took all of Ida's books and pamphlets from her office and handed them over to the assistant district attorney. So she was in constant conflict with her mother about this. And, you know, the most generous interpretation is that she believed because of Soph, that Ida wasn't well, and that an institution was a better place for her to be than prison. But I think her mother was also very troubled. Her mother was in the women's Christian Temperance Union and she was just way more conservative than Ida. She wanted Ida to have a very traditional life, get married to a proper gentleman. 

KIM: And you also explain in your book that she did try a work around, initially to legitimize her sex teachings, that she founded a church. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

AMY SOHN: After she had run into trouble with the postal authorities in Chicago and received what was called a suspended sentence she reinvented herself as pastor of the Church of Yoga. And she, in the same office where she'd been doing her sex teaching, she began giving lectures on yoga. And Ida Craddock's actually been written about in a couple of books that deal with the history of yoga, which is really fascinating. She's one of the first kind of high-profile examples we have of an American really wanting to bring the teachings of yoga. to The United States, more incredible still that she was a woman, um, and, and a single woman doing this. So, yeah, she was, in her mind, I guess I should make this clear. She felt that religious speech was constitutionally protected, as anyone who reads the Constitution would be right to assume. And yet it didn't really serve her when she was tried at various times for violating the Comstock laws. When she expressed her writings as part of religious belief, the prosecutions were just not fair and they weren't interested in the overall context of the teachings. They were only interested in the obscene passages. 

AMY: And so speaking of those obscene passages, let's get to this book she wrote called The Wedding Night, which is basically the one that, just bold-faced bright red flashing lights said to Comstock, "Come get me, come get me." Would you say that is the most explicit of her books? 

AMY SOHN: Yes, but also the most likely to offend him because it named him. I want to see if I could read some of these portions. 

AMY: Oh, yeah. I think this is the moment our listeners have been waiting for. 

AMY SOHN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. These explosive passages. Okay. So let's see if we can do this. Um, okay. One section of the wedding night was on how a groom should enter a virgin bride without causing pain. In case you're wondering, "kiss and caress at the throat and bosom." Um, another section suggested that when the woman got excited enough, "her genitals would become well lubricated with an emission from her glands of Bartholin." I mean, this is the 19th century! Then she had a passage in here where she said that the habit of using a wife as a convenience, when men used their wives as conveniences was "responsible for the widespread idea that the sex relation is unclean and for the growth of Comstockism with its baneful efforts at suppression of all enlightening literature upon the details of coition as being obscene, lewd, lascivious." So she was taking his attitudes about sex and linking that to men who use their wives as sexual conveniences. And then the third really insane passage was that women should perform pelvic movements during sex. So it was all going back to the belly dance and she said, this is so radical to me: "these movements will add very great to her own passion and her own pleasure." So in other instances she had written about pelvic movements as an aid to kind of like marital harmony or making it better for the man, but here she's saying women should do it for themselves. The first edition of the wedding night was printed in August 1900. So just put all that in the context of its time.

KIM: Wow. Yeah. And you mentioned Craddock turning the tables on Comstock and saying he was basically the one with the filthy mind, but a lot of Americans also didn't like this guy, right?

AMY SOHN: Oh yeah. I mean, even though he was living in a different time, there were people who basically felt like, you know, live and let live. Like, why is he so concerned about other people's stuff and other people's problems? He was inserting himself into other people's privacy. He was both a man of his time and he was just born a zealot.

KIM: Zealot's the perfect word. 

AMY: I don't want to give away the ending of this "Javert, Jean Valjean" competition here, because I think it's too good. I think people need to read about it in your book. It definitely surprised me. I did not see it coming. Um, but at the end of the day, we need to just remember Ida as somebody who was really a pioneer. Yeah, she was a maverick, but she was doing something that even today... I guess I'm thinking about what's going on right now in our country and just realizing how far we've come, but how far we still have to go.

AMY SOHN: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's most upsetting about the Comstock law, it wasn't just that it was cutting off the flow of physical contraception, which was bad enough because contraceptives were frequently ordered through the mail, but he was cutting off the flow of information. And you really have to look at these things as pieces of the same thing. In other words, when you prevent young people from knowing what it means that their bodies are changing, you know, teaching them what sex might feel like the very first time you have it, you are cutting off knowledge that ordinary, and when I say ordinary, I mean, Christian married people among them, you know, needed. And it was particularly dangerous for young women, because so often, they didn't have other sources of information. And also, remember, there was a ton of misinformation out there. So, in terms of what's going on today, that's so scary is that, you know, I call my book, the man who hated women. And it's a little bit of a trick title because ultimately it's about these eight women far more so than it is about Comstock. And also because I don't really believe that he thought that he hated women. He believed that women needed to conform to a certain mold, which was putting husband and family first. And that mold, which has been called the Victorian ideal, was the dominant American model for women for his time for many, many years. But when you read about what's going on in Texas right now, it just feels like we're going so far back. And one of the things that was enlightening to me in researching this book is that we actually had pretty good abortion rights in the United States until. Around the time of the Comstock law. In fact, some of the first state laws that placed restrictions on abortion did it to protect women from bad practitioners. They were aimed at protecting the woman's life, the woman's body. They were not around conceptions of when life began, no pun intended. And so when you look back at history, you realize that Greg Abbott in Texas is taking us back to a time before the 1840s. I mean, in other words, you're thinking to yourself, "I'd rather live in the 1840s right now. My rights would be more protected." Um, and some of the language, you know, around women's bodies and women's autonomy is very, very frightening because we're just going backwards. And I should also add that the Comstock law was passed in 1873. And the two cases that really overturned the birth control provisions of the Comstock Act, which were Griswold versus Connecticut and Eisenstadt versus Baird ... EIsenstadt Baird was passed in 1972, 99 years after the Comstock law was passed. Happens to be one year before I was born. And when you think about a 99-year law, that just had the impact that it had on women's access to information and birth control, which then as now, most people believe that families should make these decisions for themselves. And one of the reasons it's so frightening what's going on in Texas right now is that it's so out of step with what most Americans believe about abortion, which is that it should be protected and then it should be a woman's choice. And so, yeah, we're going backwards and there are many Comstocks out there, but that's why we need more. We need more Ida Craddocks! 

AMY: And also, I think it's important that as women, we do know this history. I mean, like I said, at the beginning, I didn't know so much of this and yeah, we can kind of poke fun at the fact that Craddock had this ghost lover and it's all silly sounding, but really she, and all these women in your book, they were the ones that were trying to pull society out of all these sexual hangups and, you know, doing something to help and giving women agency over their bodies and their relationships. 

KIM: Yeah. And sadly, as you pointed out, it's still up for debate somehow.

AMY SOHN: And I think,, also what I try to point out in the book that I think is very important is that, um, you know, what these women were doing, it was not just about women's bodily autonomy. It was about women's pleasure. And one of the things that I think is really a shame today is that we're still afraid to talk about pleasure, and we are very afraid to talk about the women's experience of it and in advocating for women's pleasure as a tool. towards autonomy. I think they were doing something really radical, the women that I write about in my book, which was, they were saying, if we're living in constant fear of pregnancy and childbirth, which has all kinds of health and economic effects that tend to punish women more severely than men, how are we ever going to be able to enjoy sex? So just the simple idea, you know, Ida Craddock said that babies should be spaced three years apart. She was a little cagey about how, but basically through withdrawal. But I'm saying Ida Craddock, you know, just the radical idea that women should have their babies spaced a couple of years apart for the benefit of their own health, that was a radical idea. It was saying that it's not good for a body to get pregnant right away. And we now know this is scientifically born out, that there's all kinds to me. 

AMY: And speaking of pleasure, albeit a different kind of pleasure. It's been a pleasure having you on the show and talking to us about all this. 

KIM: Yes. It's definitely not been anticlimactic. Let's put it that way.

AMY SOHN: You guys are great. Thank you. We loved talking to you

AMY: Thank you so much for joining us and telling us all about your book and congrats on it again. 

AMY SOHN: Thank you!

AMY: So that's it for today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. 

KIM: Thanks for listening, everyone. And until next week, visit us on our podcast, lostladiesoflit.com 

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.