CONDEMNED BY COMSTOCK
BUT COMMENDED BY INTELLIGENT CRITICS EVERYWHERE.
Anthony Comstock condemns “Woman, Church and State”.[1] In a letter written. Feb. 26, 1894, but only recently made public, he says: “In reference to whether this is a proper book to put in a school library for children to read. I unhesitatingly say no, it is not a proper book for children to read. . . . . The incidents of victims of lust told in this book are such that if I found a person putting that book indiscriminately before the children I would institute a criminal proceeding against him for doing it.”
This letter was in answer to an inquiry from a Catholic member of a school board at Fayetteville, N. Y., the author’s home. She had presented the work to the school library, and the member in question, objecting to Mrs. Gage’s straightforward statements of fact in her chapters on “Celibacy,” “Canon Law,” etc., sent the book to Anthony Comstock for his opinion.
Commenting on this letter, the Boston “Investigator” says: “The only question to be asked and answered regarding the work of Mrs. Gage is this: Does she tell the truth? That is the point. If Mrs. Gage has stated what is false, has given to fictions the face and form of facts, let her be corrected; let her be shown up as a falsifier; but, if she has told the truth, if she has bodied forth in her volume the ugly wrongs of church and state against her sex, then they who
- ↑ Woman, Church and State, a historical account of the status of woman through the Christian ages; with reminiscences of the matriarchate. By Matilda Joslyn Gage, Chicago. Charles H. Kerr & Company, 175 Monroe Street. Cloth, gilt top, 554 pages, $2.00 postpaid.
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