Lois Waisbrooker was an editor, free lover, anarchist and spiritualist who was indicted twice under the Comstock law when she was 68 and 76 years old.
Born Adeline Eliza Nichols in Catharine, New York, in 1826, her father was a day laborer and her consumptive mother had seven children and died at 36. After two forced marriages and years of poverty, she became an activist for abolition, free love and spiritualism. In 1863 she took the name Lois Waisbrooker, in deference to a spirit husband who had the last name Waisbrooker.
In her books she advocated for suffrage and other free love causes, and dedicated a novel, “Helen Harlow’s Vow,” (1870) “TO WRONGED AND OUTCAST WOMEN ESPECIALLY.” In 1872 at a spiritualists convention, she suggested that every adult woman receive a stipend from the government to free her from dependency on men.
In 1892 a Kansas publisher named Moses Harman was imprisoned for obscenity under the Comstock Act of 1873. Waisbrooker moved to Topeka edit his journal, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer.
Postmaster bans issue of journal edited by Waisbrooker
In 1892 the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been mailing a book called “Special Report on Diseases of the Horse,” which contained descriptions of horse penises. A bill to strengthen the Comstock law was in Congress at the same time, and Waisbrooker decided to publish a paragraph from the horse report in the journal. She wrote that it would give Comstock “spasms.”
The Topeka postmaster banned the issue. In Lucifer issues following the ban, Waisbrooker ran a headline: “Published under Government Censorship.”
Though she stepped down as Lucifer editor, she remained in Topeka and relaunched an earlier journal of her own, Foundation Principles, which supported some Populist Party ideas. In the June 1894 Foundation Principles, she published a letter from a lawyer who was having an affair with a good woman friend and who asked Waisbrooker what he should do. She instructed him to divorce.
Waisbrooker put on trial for publishing letter about man’s affair
A few months later, a U.S. marshal came to arrest her. She believed she had actually been targeted because of the journal’s populist ideas, and speculated that the original letter had been a decoy, possibly written by the postal inspector, Robert McAfee himself – who had also decoyed Virginia atheist Elmina Slenker. After Waisbrooker was informed that the obscene content was the letter, not her response, she reprinted her response.
As she awaited trial, readers offered emotional and financial support, ordering her books or donating money. She got off with no sentence or penalty after her lawyer secured her a plea bargain. At that point she was 71 and in poor health.
Waisbrooker arrested for article on sex between people in love
Several years later, she moved to Home, Washington, an anarchist colony on Puget Sound. It had about 100 residents in 25 houses, a schoolhouse, crops, and a printing office, and published its own anarchist newspaper, Discontent: Mother of Progress.
After President William McKinley was assassinated on September 6, 1901, by an anarchist, anti-anarchist sentiment flared. Within weeks, the Discontent publishers were arrested and charged with violating the Comstock law for a free love article. The judge found in favor of them.
That December, Waisbrooker sent out an issue of her journal Clothed With the Sun (a new name for Foundation Principles) containing an article called “The Awful Fate of Fallen Women.” In it she wrote that sex between people in mutual love was not a sin or a crime.
Postal Inspector Confucius Wayland got wind of the issue. A postmaster in Ballard, Washington, sent a decoy letter to the Home postmistress, Mattie Penhallow, complaining that he had not received the December Clothed issue. Waisbrooker brought another copy to Penhallow, who sent it along with a note to the Ballard postmaster.
Post office in anarchist colony closed for ‘obscene’ material in mail
Waisbrooker and Penhallow were charged with sending obscene material. Furious Home residents began fundraising. Wayland recommended that the grand jury order that the post office be closed, and the grand jury agreed.
Penhallow received notification from Washington, D.C., to return all the Home post office equipment. Home residents had to go to Lake Bay to do their mailing. By the end of April, the Home post office was shuttered. The Comstock law’s reach had extended into distribution of the mail, which was necessary for freedom of the press. Home agitators protested the closing and the grand jury report to no avail. Discontent suspended publication but returned, under another title, sent from the Lake Bay post office.
Jury finds Waisbrooker guilty, but judge gave minimum penalty
The trial for the women opened on July 15, 1902. The indicted article was read. The jury decided immediately to acquit Penhallow but convict Waisbrooker. The judge said he disagreed with the verdict and sentenced Waisbrooker to the minimum penalty: a fine of $100. In the next session of the Washington State legislature, a strong anti-anarchism statute was passed. It made it a felony to speak or mail doctrines of criminal anarchy (“the doctrine that organized government should be overthrown by force or violence, or by assassination”). The Immigration Act of 1903, also called the Anarchist Exclusion Act, prevented anarchists from entering the country and deprived them from the right to naturalization.
Waisbrooker moved to Denver, lectured and sold books and pamphlets. In her final article, “The Curse of Christian Morality,” she wrote, “Woman has a natural, an inherent right to herself, a right which church and state refuse to allow her to exercise; but the time is coming when she will take that right and refuse to be crushed.”
Amy Sohn is the award-winning author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age.