Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930s (Parts I & II)
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As far as the U.S. Post Office was concerned in 1930, birth control and pornography were one and the same. An 1873 federal anti-obscenity statue known as the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of both dirty pictures and “rubber goods.” According to scholars, this act, along with associated state regulations - collectively known as the Comstock Laws - were passed in part in an attempt to counteract the loss of community control over personal behavior generated by rapid industrialization and the rise of an unmoored labor class. By the mid-nineteenth century, an often violent and sexualized culture of alcohol, fistfights and prostitution had emerged in cities. Physicians and ministers, who held to nineteenth-century fears of the debilitating and insanity-producing effects of non-marital orgasms, came together with women seeking political authority and independence in a "purity" coalition to fight what both groups saw as a common locus of evil, prostitution (Lefkowitz Horowitz, 2002). As D'Emilio and Freedmen write in their foundational text,
Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930s (Parts I & II)
Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930s…
Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930s (Parts I & II)
As far as the U.S. Post Office was concerned in 1930, birth control and pornography were one and the same. An 1873 federal anti-obscenity statue known as the Comstock Act prohibited the mailing of both dirty pictures and “rubber goods.” According to scholars, this act, along with associated state regulations - collectively known as the Comstock Laws - were passed in part in an attempt to counteract the loss of community control over personal behavior generated by rapid industrialization and the rise of an unmoored labor class. By the mid-nineteenth century, an often violent and sexualized culture of alcohol, fistfights and prostitution had emerged in cities. Physicians and ministers, who held to nineteenth-century fears of the debilitating and insanity-producing effects of non-marital orgasms, came together with women seeking political authority and independence in a "purity" coalition to fight what both groups saw as a common locus of evil, prostitution (Lefkowitz Horowitz, 2002). As D'Emilio and Freedmen write in their foundational text,