About the Book:

Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery.

Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose Comstock, and his views that reproductive rights threatened the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to life, and shows the enormous impact they made on the society we know today.

Amy is the New York Times-bestselling author of twelve books, including the novels Prospect Park West, Motherland, and The Actress. Her books have been published in eleven languages and on five continents. THE MAN WHO HATED WOMEN, was published in July 2021 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It is her first work of historical non-fiction. Much of her research for the book was done at the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society.

About the Author:
In 1995 Amy graduated from Brown University. In addition to her novels, she has written two screenplays, several children’s books, and her articles have appeared in New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Men’s Journal, Playboy, and many others.