Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg (review)

In Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality, Judith Giesberg sets out to investigate Union soldiers' interactions with commercial sexual materials during the Civil War. She also seeks to shed light on the asserted "Civil War origins of American antipornography" (p. 5).

This slim volume, based on a series of lectures delivered at Pennsylvania State University, begins with a review of the findings of recent works in cultural, legal, and print history, which have called attention to a dynamic antebellum trade in licentious literature. As Giesberg reaffirms, pioneering publishers and dealers of erotica were centered in New York City and began to mobilize the U.S. mail to build national markets for their wares during the mid-nineteenth century.

The heart of the book lies in its perceptive exploration of the impact of mail-order pornography during the Civil War. Giesberg mines the U.S. Army court-martial records to illuminate the role of erotic print and images in the sexual culture of Union camps. She vividly describes the many ways obscene materials were shared among soldiers and depicts how some superior officers employed erotic literature as a method of bonding with their troops.

Giesberg then turns to the wartime experiences of Anthony Comstock. Often ridiculed by his fellow soldiers, Comstock later became the leading postwar crusader against obscenity. Giesberg traces the origins of Comstock's anti-smut career to his anxiety about not taking part in battle. Enlisting in late 1863, Comstock was stationed away from enemy lines in occupied St. Augustine, Florida, where army life was often sedentary and monotonous. At once frustrated by being sidelined from combat and tormented by the pervasiveness of erotic goods around him, the unusually pious Comstock responded by conflating the purveyors of sexual materials to northern soldiers with the hostile forces of the Confederate army.

The final chapter moves beyond Comstock's "personal crisis in masculinity" to an interpretation of the Reconstruction-era campaign against obscenity as an element of the "postwar surge of interest in … regularizing and regulating marriage and, in so doing, stabilizing a gender order that the war had upset" (p. 84). When Congress, building on a more modest 1865 statute, passed the Comstock law in 1873, it created a sweeping regulatory apparatus to stamp out obscenity in the mail. In particular, it enabled Comstock, a special agent to the U.S. Post Office, to prosecute not only commercial pornographers but also providers of sex education, advocates of free love, and sellers of devices for contraception and abortion. As Giesberg concludes, the Comstock law, in seeking to control women's sexuality by restricting birth control and abortion, demonstrates that "war does more to sustain gender hierarchy than to upset it" (p. 7).

Though much of this ground has been covered elsewhere, Sex and the Civil War offers a concise, engaging chronicle of the history of pornography and censorship in the nineteenth century. In addition, Giesberg's study of the sexual culture of U.S. Army camps makes a valuable contribution to our existing understanding of the erotic print trade and obscenity regulation during the Civil War.