¹ “The Female Brokers of the Period,” The Days' Doings (hereafter DD), 26 Feb. 1870; “The Monster Scandal,” DD, 20 Nov. 1872. No other individual or event received as much textual and illustrated coverage the sisters received in that paper. I discuss the trajectory of Woodhull's iconography more fully in Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On Woodhull's exposure of Beecher and the ensuing scandal see Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher–Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Altina Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982).

² The law passed, with little discussion in Congress, in March 1873. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 358–85.

³ Couvares, Frank, “The Good Censor: Race, Sex, and Censorship in the Early Cinema,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 7, 2 (1994), 234Google Scholar. Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998), 233–251.

⁴ David Rabban, Free Speech in the Forgotten Years, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On Comstock's framing of his moral crusade as the protection of innocence see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

⁵ Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young, ed. Robert Bremner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; first published 1883), 20.

⁶ Julia Ward Howe, “The Influence of Literature on Crime,” published in Papers Read at the Second Congress of Women, Chicago, October 15, 16 and 17, 1874 (Chicago, 1874), 13, 15. Comstock, however, felt that women should also be protected and did not welcome their contributions to his suppression project until the early 1880s. On the involvement of women in the obscene literature campaign in the 1880s see Beisel, 71–73, 132–34; Alison Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform and Pro-censorship Activism, 1873–1933 (Illinois University Press, 1997), 56–57, 60–63; Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 17–18.

⁷ L.B.D. to The Revolution, 22 July 1869, reprinted in Lana Rakow and Cheris Kramarae, eds., Revolution in Words: Righting Women, 1868–1871 (New York: Routledge, 1990), 224; Olive Logan to The Revolution, 15 Oct. 1869.

⁸ New Northwest, 6 Oct. 1871. Reprinted in Rakow and Kramarae, Revolution in Words, 185; Abigail Duniway, “Obscene Publications,” New Northwest, Friday, 21 June 1872.

⁹ Iconoclast, “Have We a Free Press?” Truth Seeker, Jan. 1874.

¹⁰ It is unclear whether Comstock arrested Lant for publishing a poem, which described the Beecher–Tilton scandal in humorous naval metaphors, or a letter discussing physiology. D. M. Bennett, “Case of John A. Lant,” Truth Seeker, 29 Jan. 1876. Correspondents also begged readers to support Lant's family during his imprisonment; A. S. Davis, “John A. Lant and Family,” Truth Seeker, 3 June 1876; Lewish Masquerier, “The Persecution of John A. Lant,” Boston Investigator, 9 Feb. 1876; and Editorial, untitled, Word, Sept. 1875. On Foote's arrest see D. M. Bennett, “Another Outrage,” Truth Seeker, 1 July 1876, emphasis in original; earlier editions of Foote's book gave advice on preventing conception, but he had removed the relevant passages in response to the 1873 Comstock law; Dr. Foote's Health Monthly, Oct. 1876, reprinted as supplement to Dec. 1876 issue. Foote likewise defended his work as educational, in opposition to “really obscene” publications; Horowitz, 409.

¹¹ For Bennett's views on sexual education, see his article “Physiology for Women,” in The Word, July 1872, 4. US v. Bennett (1879) established the Hicklin test as a precedent for subsequent prosecution under the Comstock law. See Horowitz, 433–35. Emphasis added.

¹² The paper's circulation peaked at 67,000 copies in 1872, after which its sales diminished rapidly to 25,000 copies in circulation by 1876, when it changed its name to the Illustrated Times (never rising again above 20,000 copies, it ceased publication in 1884). Geo. P. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, 1872–1900. N. W. Ayers & Sons' American Newspaper Annual, 1880–1909.

¹³ Frank Leslie's Illustrated News, Dec. 7, 1872.

¹⁴ Quote from Anthony Comstock, diary, 14 Jan. 1873. Entry quoted in Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1927). See also Josh Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 63, 280 n. 9.

¹⁵ For example, it is remarkable that her defiant lecture on 9 Jan. to a standing ovation, and subsequent arrest by federal marshals, did not make the paper's pages. After Comstock made his displeasure against Leslie known, the sisters never again received significant illustration in the tabloid. See Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution, chapter 3.

¹⁶ [Frank Leslie], “Special Notice,” DD, 1 Feb. 1873, 2. Most illustrated papers followed a convention of postdating their issues by one or two weeks to allow for the delays inherent in intracontinental delivery services; he probably wrote this around 20 Jan.

¹⁷ [Frank Leslie], “Special Notice,” DD, 1 Feb. 1873, 2.

¹⁸ Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Volume I, 1873. Entry 51, Page 16, 28 Jan. 1873. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. A brief report of the indictment appears in “New York,” New York Times, 29 Jan. 1873, 8: “The Grand Jury of the Court of General Session before adjourning, yesterday, presented several important indictments, among which was one against Frank Leslie, charged by Mr. Comstock with issuing obscene publications.”

¹⁹ [Frank Leslie], “Notice to Advertisers,” DD, 15 Feb. 1873, 2.

²⁰ For example, DD, 1 Feb. 1873, 15 (and most preceding issues).

²¹ DD, 8 Feb., 15; DD, 15 Feb. 1873, 15.

²² “The Aviary,” DD, 22 July 1871, 13. See also “Musidora,” DD, 28 Sept. 1872, 6; “The Charmer,” DD, 12 Oct. 1872, 13. On Comstock's suppression of the nude for a popular audience see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents, 178.

²³ “Leap Frog by the Sad Sea Waves,” DD, 27 July 1872, 8. See also “Behind the Scenes,” DD, 21 Sept. 1872, 1; “An Athletic Phenomenon,” DD, 28 Sept. 1872, 1.

²⁴ “A Lady in Charleston, Va.,” DD, 28 Sept. 1872, 9.

²⁵ “Impromptu Stilts,” DD, 25 Jan. 1873; “A Conductor's Gallant ‘Passage at Arms’,” DD, 1 March 1873, 13.

²⁶ “A Pike County Hunt,” DD, 22 Feb. 1873, 1; “A Woman Whips a Wolf,” 22 Feb. 1873, 5; “The Susquehanna Flood,” 1 March 1873, 4.

²⁷ “Episode of the Spanish Revolution,” DD, 22 May 1873, 13. On the perception of late nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon Americans that national Others, including Spaniards, were racially distinct, see Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapter 2.

²⁸ Sales had dropped drastically from about 28,000 copies in 1872 to below 6,000 in 1874, slowly rising back from this low to about 20,000 copies by 1878 before it revamped production and climbed to new heights in the next decade. According to Geo. P. Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, 1872–1900, sales for the National Police Gazette hovered around 20,000 copies until 1882 when they jumped to 50,000 and then to 100,000 in 1883; they hovered in the range of between 75,000 and 100,000 until 1898. N. W. Ayers & Sons' more robust estimates of circulation statistics, which began in 1880, showed a higher range of 100,000 to 150,000 between 1884 and 1902. N. W. Ayers & Sons' American Newspaper Annual, 1880–1909.

²⁹ Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Volume II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 328–31. Fox emerged as an important promoter of prizefighting; when he died in 1922 the paper took on a new form as a confessional magazine.

³⁰ Records of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 16 Feb. 1877, Volume I, 83. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.

³¹ Apart from the American Periodicals Series collection of the National Police Gazette on microfilm (and its “supplemental” reel), I have scoured all larger archives for stray copies from 1877, including the American Antiquarian Society, the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Boston Public Library. I have also consulted rare-newspaper sellers and eBay. Copies abound for the years following Fox's dramatic adaptation and introduction of the pink pages in 1878.

³² “Shooting of Mollie Hickey,” National Police Gazette (hereafter NPG), 18 May 1878, 8; “A Parisian Romance,” NPG, 18 May 1878, 16; “A Tramp Horror,” NPG, 18 May 1878, 16; “Miss Stuart Murdered by Three Negresses,” NPG, 18 May 1878, 5.

³³ “The Negro Crime,” NPG, 21 May (possible typo in original – likely date 25 May), 1878, 9; “Brutal Outrage on Miss Carrie Wayne,” NPG, 27 July 1878, 8. An editorial praised lynching as the “virile” solution to the alleged crisis of black rapists. “A Travesty of Justice,” NPG, 18 May 1878, 2. On the political significance of interracial sexuality during Reconstruction see Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” 3, 3, (Jan. Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1993), 402–417. See also Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 176, 205–6.

³⁴ Mott, A History of American Magazines, 331.

³⁵ On physiognomic distinctions in the mainstream illustrated press see Brown, Beyond the Lines. On the racialized Irish immigrant in mainstream illustration see Jacobson, especially 52–55.

³⁶ Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987), 158.

³⁷ Heywood defended English reformers Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, arrested in 1877 for selling Charles Knowlton's physiology work, Fruits of Philosophy. See his editorial, Word, Aug. 1877. He also defended Josephine Tilton, sister of Angela Tilton Heywood, arrested in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for selling his own critique of marriage, Cupid's Yokes. Heywood, “The New Inquisition,” Word, Nov. 1877. Bennett protested his good intentions in “It Has Come at Last!” Boston Investigator, 28 Nov. 1877. Mattie Sawyer, “Invasion of Liberty and the Common Right to Knowledge,” Word, Jan. 1878. Added emphasis.

³⁸ [Angela Heywood], Editorial Notes, Word, Jan. 1878. Ezra Heywood, “The Impolicy of Repression,” Word, Jan. 1878; Lucinda Chandler, “Correspondence,” Word, Jan. 1878; [Angela Heywood], “Editorial Notes,” Word, Aug. 1878; see also Elizur Wright, “Clandestine Publications,” Word, Feb. 1878.

³⁹ Elizabeth Blackwell, “Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children” (1879), quotations at 109, 116, and 148 respectively. Blackwell's chief concern was that such literature implanted images in the young mind that encouraged masturbation.

⁴⁰ “Seeds of Vice,” Alpha, 1 June 1877. On the campaigns to suppress “impure literature” in the 1880s see Parker, Purifying America, 56–63.

⁴¹ Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 421.

⁴² Seaver, editorials, “Charles Bradlaugh's Difficulty,” Boston Investigator, 2 May 1877; “Obscenity and Blasphemy,” Boston Investigator 28 Nov. 1877. As he wrote in early 1878, “The law against obscenity … was meant, no doubt, for those publications and pictures that are really obscene. We have seen such, and we agree most fully … that they ought not to be mixed up with Liberalism, as if it encouraged obscenity.” A Western Friend and Reply by Editor, “D. M. Bennett's Case,” Boston Investigator, 16 Jan. 1878, emphasis added. See also Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, “Obscene Literature” (clipping from the Boston Journal), Boston Investigator, 27 March 1878.

⁴³ On the perils of “blood-and-thunder” literature see Seaver, editorial, “Preamble to Dime Novel Heroes,” Boston Investigator, Jan. 23, 1878. Underwood, “Free Thought in Sympathy With No Kind of Indecency,” Boston Investigator, July 3, 1878. Abbott, quoted (and critiqued) in “Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!,” Word, Oct. 1878. The Free Thought convention in Watkins, NY, gathered to defend and support Heywood and Bennett, resolved in similar language that “[The association] hereby declares its emphatic approval of the use of all such means as may be within the legitimate scope of the Government to secure the repression both of the issue and circulation of such matter by the press.” Freethinkers Association of Western New York, “Freethought Issues,” Word, Sept 1878. On the internal split of the National Liberal Association and the formation of the NDA, see David Rabban, Free Speech in the Forgotten Years, 38; Horowitz, Rereading Sex, 410, 420, 422, 435–6; Beisel, Imperiled Innocents, 87, 92. Emphasis added.

⁴⁴ Seth Hunt, “Correspondence,” Word, Dec. 1877. E. H. Heywood, “The Outlook,” Word Jan 1878. C. Waite, “A Visit to Mr. E. H. Heywood,” Boston Investigator, July 17, 1878. Reformer Parker Pillsbury compared the Bible to “Cupid's Yokes” in his “‘Cupid's Yokes’ and the Holy Scriptures Contrasted: in a letter from Parker Pillsbury to Ezra H. Heywood” (Princeton, Mass.: Cooperative Publishing Company, 1878); as described in A. J. Grover, “Inspired Obscenity,” Word, Dec. 1878. Editorial by “B” [Benjamin Tucker], “The New Battle,” Word, Sept. 1878. Tucker, who had split from the Word in late 1876 because of the Heywoods' emphasis on free love, returned to help edit the paper while Ezra Heywood was in jail, from Aug. 1878 through Jan. 1879. He subsequently launched the longest-running paper devoted to radical individualism, Liberty, in 1881 (until 1906). See Levitas dissertation, “The Unterrified Jeffersonian.”

⁴⁵ Wright, “Clandestine Publications,” Word, Feb. 1878. Seaver, editorial, “The Obscenity Law, &c.,” Boston Investigator, 20 Feb. 1878.

⁴⁶ Seaver, editorial, “The Three Arrests at Watkins,” Boston Investigator, 11 Sept. 1878. Wright, “Correspondence,” Word, Jan. 1878. Seaver, editorial, “Obscene Literature,” Boston Investigator, 5 June 1878. Seaver, editorial, “The Case of E. H. Heywood,” Boston Investigator 3 July 1878.

⁴⁷ On the lasting significance of the Bennett decision see Horowitz, 433–35; Beisel, Imperiled Innocents, 176, 178.

⁴⁸ Bennett, “Free Speech, Free Mails,” Word, Sept. 1880.