In "The Man Who Women," Sohn's first work of narrative nonfiction, we meet Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice crusader behind the Comstock Law, passed in 1873, which made it illegal to mail contraception—or even information about contraception—punishable by long sentences and steep fines. Sohn highlights the struggles of eight remarkable women charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws before 1915. Each would fight back in her own way and, in the process, risked imprisonment and even death, as they charted new ways of understanding birth control access as a civil liberty.

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