“Audacia Dangyereyes”: Appropriate Speech and the “Immodest” Woman Speaker of the Comstock Era

Abstract

In the 1870s and ‘80s, more women discussed sex to promote free love and sex education in speeches, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. Some of these women inspired the 1873 “Comstock law,” which banned materials deemed obscene. This essay uses the fictional figure of Audacia Dangyereyes to illustrate the constraints on women discussing sex in public forums. It identifies the rhetorical moves necessary to accommodate constraining audiences through close readings of the works of Victoria Woodhull, Tennessee Claflin, and Angela Heywood, all women deemed immodest by public standards and obscene by Anthony Comstock. To allay such charges, these women worked to redefine appropriate speech for women.

Notes

¹Jennie Willing spells the name of the character “Auducia” but the character's name is spelled “Audacia” in Stowe's novel. The term is obviously meant to portray the character as audacious and dangerous and might even be a play on the term “danger eyes.” No references to the term “Dangyereyes” exist except in reference to Stowe's character.

²John Spurlock's study examines the earlier, more transcendentalist incarnation of the nineteenth-century free love movement, and Hal Sears examines its later, anarchist version. Joanne Passet's study is most useful in exploring the feminist versions of free love.

³Several historians studying nineteenth-century free-love advocates have emphasized their importance in the history of free speech debates. See, for example, Mary Cronin, Amanda Frisken, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Molly McGarry, and Janice Wood, as well as the book-length studies by Spurlock, Sears, and Passet.

⁴Woodhull (1838–1927) came to support free love after moving to New York City with her second husband, Colonel James Harvey Blood, and meeting her future collaborator Stephen Pearl Andrews. Andrews influenced her political views and later wrote or helped to write many of her speeches. By the time of Tried as by Fire, though, the two were no longer involved, so we can assume that much of the writing of the speech was Woodhull's. One biographer notes that Tried as by Fire bears several distinct characteristics that indicate Woodhull herself wrote a majority of the speech (Underhill 259).

⁵In addition to the Beecher-Tilton scandal, Woodhull's scandals include a lawsuit for libel, a lawsuit brought against her husband by her mother, rumored affairs, and the discovery that she lived with both her first husband, the ailing Canning Woodhull, and her second husband. See Frisken and Underhill.

⁶Frisken observes that Woodhull “benefited from new trends in public speaking after the Civil War. The public lecture, once a forum for intellectual enlightenment, had gradually shifted into a venue for popular entertainment” (Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution 118).

⁷The reviews referenced here were collected by Woodhull herself and reprinted, which accounts for their more positive nature.

⁸McGarry explains that while not all spiritualists were free lovers, most free lovers were spiritualists. She notes that the free lovers’ focus on finding a “spiritual mate” connected the two ideologies (11).

⁹Tennessee Claflin (1845–1923) also published as Tennie C. Claflin.

¹⁰Historians studying nineteenth-century radicalism often ignore Angela Heywood (1840–1935) but some have noted her unique contribution to the movement, especially in debates on free speech in the Comstock era. Scholars who examine her work more closely include Martin Henry Blatt, whose biography of Ezra Heywood gives Angela Heywood her due in forming half of this radical couple; Wendy McElroy, who studies Heywood's contribution to individualist feminism; and Jesse Battan, who highlights Heywood as the most outspoken of the free lovers and examines her contribution to theorizing what he calls a language revolution.

¹¹Heywood defends abortion in her column “Body Housekeeping-Home Thrift” published in The Word in 1893. In another piece, she voices the argument used by many second-wave feminists, which attributes the invasion of privacy of abortion opponents to Comstockism: “By Nature & all legislation, previous to Comstockism, woman's womb is her own private property” (“The Woman's View of It” 2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Hayden

Wendy Hayden is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, West Building Room 1212, New York, NY 10065, USA. E-mail: [email protected]