About Amy Sohn

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.

In 1995 Amy graduated from Brown University. In 1996 she launched an autobiographical dating diary, “Female Trouble,” in the downtown weekly New York Press, which elicited loads of bitter invective from readers and shamed her parents at cocktail parties. She followed her stint at New York Press with a column at the New York Post in which she enraged management by comparing Mayor Giuliani to Hitler and writing an expose on the Yankees locker room.

Her first novel, Run Catch Kiss, was in 1999. In 2000, Amy co-created, wrote, and starred in one of the first original programs to air on Oxygen, “Avenue Amy.” In August 2001 she landed at New York magazine, where she was a contributing editor for six years, writing the columns “Naked City,” “Mating,” and “Breeding.”

In September 2004 her second novel, My Old Man, was about a May-December relationship between a rabbinical school dropout and an aging screenwriter. Prospect Park West, Run Catch Kiss, and My Old Man have been or will be translated into ten languages.

In 2009 her third novel, Prospect Park West came out.

In 2012 the sequel to Prospect Park West, Motherland, was published.

In 2014, her next novel, The Actress, received much acclaim.

As a freelance journalist she has written for the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Men’s Journal, Playboy, and many others.

Amy has written two screenplays, Spin the Bottle, which you can stream right now for $3.99, and Pagans, which premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival and probably will not be released. She has written television pilots for HBO, ABC, and Fox.

Her favorite writers are Laurie Colwin, Hilma Wolitzer, Charles Bukowski, Nathanael West, Susan Minot, Mary Gaitskill, and Bruce Jay Friedman. Her favorite films include Gregory’s Girl, The Landlord, The Apartment, and Together. As a child she was taken to the films Kramer vs. Kramer, Heartland, Splash, Heart Like a Wheel, The Magical Mystery Tour, and Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. She loves Loudon Wainwright. She has strong biceps but weak abs. She is aware that her inspiration for this list was the Kevin Costner speech in Bull Durham.

She dresses to the left. She believes that when it comes to hair highlights, cheap is expensive. Her favorite joke is, “What’s the difference between a Gentile and a Jew? A Gentile leaves without saying goodbye and a Jew says goodbye without leaving.” She also enjoys a very tasteless Katharine Hepburn joke whose punchline is, “How do you turn it off?” Her favorite candy is York Peppermint Patties and she always has a knot in the same section of her hair when she wakes up.

The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age

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 a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as civil liberty.

The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.

“The Man Who Hated Women,” the arresting title of Amy Sohn’s new book, would have been more fitting if the book were truly about the man who hated women. But Sohn’s narrative is less about Anthony Comstock — the self-styled moral crusader and chief architect of the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offense to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mail — than it is about the targets of his hatred, the women themselves.

Aside from offering a few perfunctory biographical details, Sohn mostly depicts Comstock as a nuisance or a cartoon villain — a pathetically obsessed figure who pops up now and again to make life horrendously difficult for the people he pursued. She earnestly pronounces him “the man who did more to curtail women’s rights than anyone else in American history.” More than anyone? Is she sure about that?

Sohn, the author of several dishy novels and a former columnist about sex and relationships for New York Press and New York magazine doesn’t try to present Comstock as anything more complicated than a self-satisfied prig; nor does she sufficiently parse some of the more troubling beliefs of the women she calls “sex radicals.” As she explains in her conclusion, in which she takes a swipe at “victim-oriented feminism,” Sohn intended this book to drive home a point.

“Greater historical awareness of the sex radicals can make them provocative role models for women emboldened by today’s #MeToo movement and outraged by the 21st-century rise of nativist, sexist demagogues who want to turn back the clock to the Comstock era,” she writes. The combination of the overstated (“turn back the clock”) and underdrawn (“greater historical awareness”) reflects the awkwardness of this book: “The Man Who Hated Women” gestures at a gripping narrative and a profound argument while ultimately falling short of either.

Those “provocative role models” include the stockbroker, suffragist, and presidential candidate Victoria C. Woodhull; her sister Tennessee Claflin; the sexologist Ida C. Craddock; the anarchist Emma Goldman; and the birth control activist Margaret Sanger. They violated the Comstock law by dispensing information about sex or birth control or providing actual contraceptive devices. Some of the women in Sohn’s book were free lovers; a few of them were spiritualists. Almost all of them were advocates of hereditarianism and eugenics. Craddock insisted that giving women control over reproduction would make for a more harmonious social order because children who were wanted by their parents were “superior” to those “who are the result of an accident or of lust.”

The book begins at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, with Craddock watching a dazzling belly-dancing performance at the Cairo Street Theater. Where Craddock saw a sublime manifestation of phallic worship, an ode to “self-controlled pleasure,” Sohn writes, Comstock would recall that he only saw “the most shameless exhibition of depravity.”

Ever since he had successfully lobbied for the Comstock Act two decades before, he had been serving as a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service. He seemed to enjoy this federal extension of his powers; he had started out as a puritanical vigilante — a dry-goods shop clerk in New York City who took it upon himself to conduct pornography raids — before he obtained official sanction as a secretary for the Y.M.C.A.-created New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Comstock’s attempt to shut down the “Oriental dances” at the World’s Fair didn’t succeed, but he continued to pursue his other targets with a monomaniacal zeal and drove a number of them to suicide, including Craddock herself. (When, earlier in his career, Comstock was told that he had worried several publishers to literal death, he was chillingly unrepentant: “Be that as it may, I am sure the world is better without them.”)

Despite the attention Sohn lavishes on Craddock’s life and work, the “vibrant, comely sex teacher” remains a bit of a mystery. Craddock, who was technically single, identified herself on her business card as “Mrs. Ida C. Craddock”; she maintained that her in-depth knowledge of sexual techniques came from the sex she had with her secret husband — a ghost named Soph. Aside from the spiritualism and her frank depictions of sex, Craddock’s views on relations between women and men were almost fanatically traditional. Vaginal orgasms were useful because they helped make babies; most divorces were caused by wives failing to satisfy their husbands.

About those qualities of her role models that today we might call problematic, Sohn is mostly circumspect; she doesn’t try to hide them, but she doesn’t offer much by way of penetrating insight either. Woodhull, who took multiple lovers and prided herself on being what was known as a “varietist” as opposed to a monogamist, lashed out at her rivals in the suffragist movement by threatening to publish their sexual histories unless they paid her. When she ran for president in 1872, Frederick Douglass was named as her running mate, but as Sohn writes, “Douglass was never consulted.”

As for Comstock, he became such a hated figure that a homeopathic physician named Sara Chase advertised a feminine hygiene product she called “the Comstock Syringe.” Nor was the derision limited to the women he targeted; in the press, he was increasingly depicted as ridiculous and wholly out of touch with the times. (Under one cartoon of a portly Comstock dragging a woman before a judge’s bench, the caption reads: “Your honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child!”) The art historian Amy Werbel published a solid academic book about Comstock in 2018; Sohn, somewhat mystifyingly, doesn’t mention it anywhere, thereby depriving “The Man Who Hated Women” of certain telling (and unforgettable) anecdotes like Comstock becoming so widely despised that someone sent him smallpox scabs in the mail.

Some of the knottiest complications get relegated to Sohn’s epilogue, where she offers capsule summaries of what happened to her role models after their encounters with Comstock. Woodhull, for instance, moved to England and “rewrote her past,” extolling the benefits of monogamy and “denying that she had been a free lover.” Sanger endorsed the forced sterilization of institutionalized people, what Sohn calls “an appalling position that nonetheless had mainstream support.”

Sohn isn’t wrong but in her determination to flatten Sanger into a hero for our times, she ends by affirming a kind of girl boss feminism, unapologetically glib and individualistic: “A woman’s ultimate duty, she believed until the end, was not to the state,” Sohn writes. “It was to herself.”