Amy Sohn is the author of several novels, including Prospect Park West and Motherland. A former columnist at New York magazine, she has also written for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, The Nation, and The New York Times.
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Angela and Ezra Heywood
Angela Tilton Heywood and Ezra Heywood were 19th-century editors, publishers and writers who founded the free love journal The Word. Ezra was prosecuted under the anti-obscenity federal Comstock Act for sending writings deemed to be obscene, some of them by his wife Angela. Ezra had attended Brown University in Rhode Island and entered its […]
Elmina Drake Slenker
Elizabeth “Elmina” Drake was born in December 1827 to Quaker parents in LaGrange, New York, near Poughkeepsie. The Drake home was a haven for abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and other radicals. By 14 she was making notes about parts of the Bible that she found ridiculous. She scribbled “infidel” (atheist) sayings on the eggs the […]
Ida Craddock
The 1873 Comstock law criminalized the mailing of contraceptives and contraceptive information, and was passed by a young Civil War veteran, Anthony Comstock. Over the course of more than 40 years, he charged 4,000 people, including Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, under the law. For nearly nine years he pursued a self-taught sexologist, Ida C. […]
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger, mother of the birth control movement, was also a free speech activist prosecuted for publishing articles on birth control. She and her husband, Bill Sanger, moved from Westchester, New York, to Upper Manhattan with their two children in December 1910 so he could pursue a career as an artist. They joined their Socialist […]