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biography
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1844–1915)
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| biography:
| Reformer, born in New Canaan, Connecticut, USA. A Civil War veteran, he worked as a shipping clerk and retail salesman (1865–73), eventually in New York City, and pursued legal actions against book dealers selling allegedly obscene material. In 1873 he won passage of federal legislation prohibiting the mailing of obscene material. As secretary to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (from 1875), he zealously opposed activities he considered immoral, often conducting sensational raids. His targets included writers and publishers, abortionists, dispensers of contraceptives, and art galleries with ‘indecent’ pictures;. In later years he also fought quacks and purveyors of patent medicines, and as such was a precursor of the consumer protection movement. He lost a legal battle to ban a production of George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs Warren's Profession in New York (1905), and it was Shaw who coined the word ‘comstockery’ from Comstock's name. Comstock boasted of having destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature in his lifetime and driven 15 people to suicide. |
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