I am pleased to announce that THE MAN WHO HATED WOMEN, my twelfth book and first work of narrative non-fiction was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on 7/6/2021. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and other great reviews in Washington Monthly, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal.

Completed before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the book is about Anthony Comstock, special agent to the 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 harsh sentences and steep fines; his name was soon equated with repression and prudery.

Between 1873 and the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, eight remarkable women were tried under the Comstock Law. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and a woman’s right to sexual pleasure. They took on Comstock in explicit, bold, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, sex, and love for a new era.

The Man Who Hated Women tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and the press. They were publishers, editors, and doctors, including the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the birth control activist Margaret Sanger; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to go against a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, they paved the way for modern-day feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined contraceptive access as a human civil liberty.

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

For praise from peers (blurbs), click here.

For reviews and media where I talk to journalists about the book like Terry Gross!!!!, click here.

For events where you can see me read from and talk about the book, click here.