"Our youth are in danger...Vile books and papers are branding-irons heated in the fires of hell, and used by Satan to sear the highest life of the soul. " Anthony Comstock.
It is very fitting that Adam Morgan's A Danger To The Minds Of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, And The Fight To Modernize Literature was published in 2025. Although about a century separate the events Morgan wrote about and today it seems sadly that in some ways not all that much has changed.
"Margaret Caroline Anderson wasn't proud of her origin story. 'I came from nowhere, out of nothing, into nothing,' she liked to think, as if she had sprouted--full-grown and motherless--from the forehead of Zeus like Athena. In reality, Margaret was born on November 24, 1886, in a city she would resent for the rest of her life."
Anderson was a rebel from the start. She was constantly locking horns with her proper bourgeois middle class housewife mother who was trying to raise her three daughters to follow in her footsteps. She found an escape in reading. As soon as she could she escaped to Chicago where she pursued a colorful and unconventional lifestyle...
...and started a magazine, the Little Review, which would bring her into escalating conflict with the patriarchy and its tools...
...in the form of the New York Society for Suppression of Vice, founded by Anthony Comstock who passed on the torch [literally--the bros were into book burning] to Anderson's nemesis, John Saxton Sumner...
...who would put her on trial in 1921--portraying her as a danger to the minds of young girls--for her serial publication of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Morgan brings the time, the players, and the events and issues vividly to life. A Danger To The Minds Of Young Girls is an excellent read for feminist scholars and for those like myself who see chilling echoes of this not too distant past in today's wave of censorship purportedly to protect the minds and psyches of young white children.
On a purrrsonal note, today in an online newsletter I was reading about people being arrested and being put in solitary confinement for being in possession of writings considered dangerous by those in power. Despite our nation's enshrinement of free speech, its history is riddled with periods of censorship, and not just in wartime. While the 1920s are popularly seen as the era of flappers, bootleg gin, speakeasies, and gangsters, the bigger picture was one of widespread fundamentalism, white supremecy (the KKK went mainstream), and massive censorship. It was followed by the McCarthy Era when people were encouraged to spy on each other and possessing the wrong reading matter ruined careers and lives. In this century following 9/11 we had the government trying to get librarians to turn over patron reading lists. Given the current political climate I'm pretty sure that our rights to write and read what we want and need are in increasing jeopardy. We can't just take them for granted.
A great big shout out goes out to our courageous librarians who refused to turn over those reading lists. In large and small ways they defend our rights to read controversial books even as they are targeted by book censors, banners, and burners. We owe them our loyalty, support, and heart felt gratitude.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
