United States v. One Package

The act was named after Anthony Comstock of New Canaan, Connecticut. Devotion to his mother--who died when he was ten--compelled him to "protect" women from smut, quack doctors, and other influences he thought harmful to them. In 1872, he joined a YMCA fight against pornographic literature. To persuade Congress to pass the federal obscenity act, Comstock displayed piles of pornography, along with contraceptives, and abortifacients (items that cause abortion), damning them all as equally immoral.

Comstock was a busy man. He founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to arrest "criminal offenders," a term that included writers, poets, painters (those who used nude models), abortionists, and advertisers of birth control devices. He prodded government agents to harass druggists and physicians who sold or distributed birth control devices. As special investigator for the post office in New York City, in 1905, he instituted legal proceedings against George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession. Shaw retaliated by calling his opponent's puritanical endeavors "Comstockery."