New laws limit access to abortion and threaten doctors with prison. Religious zealots and opportunistic politicians team up to ban books about sex and to “protect” children from their “corrupting” influence. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in the late 19th-century under the Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the distribution of information about sex, contraception, or abortion through the U.S. Mail.
SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner, tells the story of one woman who dared to challenge that law, and its namesake, the puritanical “vice-hunter” and U.S. postal inspector, Anthony Comstock. Ida Craddock was a late-Victorian feminist, scholar, and sexual mystic who defied Comstock, face-to-face. Defending the right of a woman to “control her own person,” Craddock risked everything by publishing frank instructional pamphlets about sex. Though arrested multiple times, sentenced to prison, committed to an asylum, and forced to turn over her books for burning, Craddock was undeterred in her fight for women’s sexual equality and her own First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. The feminist icon, Emma Goldman, called her “one of the bravest champions of Women’s Emancipation,” and Craddock’s was the very first case to be taken up by the Free Speech League, a forerunner to modern civil liberties groups like the ACLU and PEN America.
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