Previews

Our first two articles examine a shift in American regulation of sexuality in the late nineteenth century, one focusing on written law, legal thinking, and culture, the other on the actions of businesspeople, prosecutors, judges, and juries. They offer contrasting visions of the extent and significance of the shift.

In 1872, when Anthony Comstock provoked the arrest of Victoria Woodhull for sending "obscene" literature through the mails, he exposed the fault lines rumbling beneath the surface of America's sexual culture. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz uses that exposure to reveal, not a polarized debate between old and new, but a complex, fluid conversation about sexual representation. New understandings of the body and of desire raised questions about public discussion of sex: What should the law allow? What should the courts censor? Reinterpreting the law of obscenity, Horowitz relates changes in it to a rising distrust of the commercial urban male culture that sustained racy literature and vice. The clash between Woodhull and Comstock, Horowitz shows, was the last major gasp of a multivoiced nineteenth-century American conversation about sex, before censorship forced it into narrower boundaries. . . .