The Comstock Act was named for Anthony Comstock, a leader of the anti-obscenity movement. It grew out of his effort to stifle the influence of Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in 1872. More than 150 years later, it may take Americans electing Vice President Kamala Harris as the first woman president to prevent a return to the crusade embodied by Comstock, which sought to curtail reproductive rights and reinforce an unequal social structure that legally gave men control over women.
Woodhull was one of the most vibrant and magnetic public figures of her time. She raised herself up from her extremely abusive childhood and young adult life. She and her sister Tennessee Claflin became the first “lady brokers” of Wall Street, where they attracted the powerful support of railroad and shipping magnate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the wealthiest men in America. In 1870, the sisters started publishing an unflinching reform newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, which embraced radical labor politics, women’s suffrage, and critiques of the gendered hierarchy of marriage.
In early 1871, Woodhull entered the women’s rights activism scene that had been growing for decades. Woodhull gave a formal presentation to the House Judiciary Committee highlighting a new approach to women’s suffrage. The plan was for suffragists to push Congress to pass a declaratory act stating that women as “persons” under the 14th Amendment already had the right to vote. The hope was that this approach would offer a quicker and easier route for securing women’s right to vote at the federal level than the arduous constitutional amendment process.
Following Woodhull’s presentation, she quickly gained influence among the members of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright Davis, and Isabella Beecher Hooker. Although Susan B. Anthony expressed concern about Woodhull’s work, the radical Woodhull would not be deterred from boldly attacking the gender inequality embedded in the traditional model of family and state. As a proponent of free love, a movement that espoused the right to sexual self-determination, Woodhull steadfastly criticized the 19th century legal paradigm of marriage in which husbands held legal rights to their wives’ domestic labor and sexual services. (Marital rape was legally permissible in the U.S. until the 1970s.)
By the spring of 1872, Woodhull had decided to launch a presidential campaign to strengthen the push for social change by uniting various groups of radicals, including suffragists, socialists, labor activists, and greenbackers (advocates of paper money) under the banner of the “Equal Rights Party."