Traps for the Young by Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock was a leading force behind campaigns to censor and control what people could read in the 19th century. He was a founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an inspector for the United States Post Office Department, and an evangelical Christian who believed that his vision of Christian morality should structure law and policy. After successfully pushing for a bill in New York state that prohibited “obscene literature” and rendered contraceptives, abortifacients, and their advertisements illegal for the first time by labeling them “immoral,” Comstock took his campaign to Washington. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, which suppressed the “Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” In the years after its passage, Comstock continued to advocate for censorship and articulated his views on the dangers of “evil reading” in Traps for the Young, published in 1883. The Comstock Act was never repealed, and opponents of abortion today are seeking to embrace the law again to prohibit sending pills for medical abortion through the mail.

Teach with this item from Unit 3 of the curriculum guide, Reading Dangerously: Censorship and the Freedom to Read in 20th Century America.