Dr. Brett Gary's book offering a rich account of 1920s to 1950s New York City, starring an eclectic mix of icons like James Joyce, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey―all led by an unsung hero of free expression and reproductive rights: Morris L. Ernst.
Scholars’ Endorsements
This impressive book sheds light on the entangled, age-old relationship of laws, progress, and morality. Gary has written a compelling tour de force.
Nadine Strossen, Former President of The American Civil Liberties Union
How did sexual freedom become the law? In this marvelous history, Brett Gary returns to the sexual revolution of the early 20th century and introduces us to the long-forgotten courtroom hero, Morris Leopold Ernst. If you think you know who broke the chains of Victorian sexuality, this book will make you think again.
Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
In Dirty Works, Brett Gary offers an original, insightful and compelling analysis of the evolution of American obscenity law from the 1920s to the 1950s. Focusing on the remarkable achievements of the famous lawyer Morris Ernst, Gary traces the complex and courageous legal battle to move our nation forward from the oppressive Christian morals of the Comstock era to a world in which the courts gradually came to recognize that there was no necessary harm in adults becoming sexually aroused. As Morris Ernst himself put the point, his work was a project of “sex enlightenment” that enriched our nation’s commitment to individual liberty.
Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Professor, The University of Chicago
In this well-researched, beautifully written book, Brett Gary provides a compelling account of the struggles over censorship, sex, and morality in an age of explosive technological, economic, and social change. Focusing on the ground-breaking legal arguments, defense strategies, and trial work crafted by Morris Ernst and his colleagues in defense of feminists, birth control advocates, sexologists, booksellers and modernist writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, Gary details how Ernst and allies helped to alter the state’s role from paternalistic protector of childlike citizens to arbiter of markets in information and entertainment. In doing so, they defended citizens’ rights to sexual knowledge and reproductive control. This is a fascinating story that opens up new perspectives on the changing status of women and the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.
Janice Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies and Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University
The powerful pages of this mind-opening book contain stories of courage inspired by a fighting faith in freedom warring against tyranny energized by an oppressive morality. In the process, Brett Gary brilliantly resurrects the histories, at once depressing and stirring, of those who championed the censorial cause with brutish force and those who battled against it with exemplary determination. It all tumbles together in this engagingly written, impressively researched, and thoroughly remarkable book that provides a salutary lesson of what can go terribly wrong when the eyes of beholders are closed to please the warped minds of censors.
Ronald K.L. Collins, co-author of We Must not be Afraid to be Free and editor of First Amendment News
The fascinating story of how the brilliant strategies of one small law firm changed American life. An essential addition to the literature of sex and censorship.
Marjorie Heins, director of ACLU Arts Censorship Project and author of Not in Front of the Children: ”Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth
Never before has the nearly century-long legal effort to overturn the nation’s infamous antiquated obscenity laws been told with such verve, passion, and insight. In Dirty Works, intellectual and cultural historian Brett Gary simultaneously offers a penetrating legal history of efforts to challenge “Comstockery” with the power of expanding First Amendment jurisprudence, a rich account of the fascinating personalities who risked fame and fortune to overturn prudish restrictions on free expression, and a history of ongoing struggles to expand the realm of sexual freedom and reproductive autonomy for women and men alike. Gary’s deeply researched narrative sparkles with the stories of larger than life figures, including birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, novelists James Joyce and Radclyffe Hall, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and above all, their brash defender, Morris Ernst. Rigorous and yet highly readable, Dirty Works will make readers confront anew the ever-clashing imperatives of desire and morality at the heart of mass-consumption society and human sexuality even today.
Alex Lichtenstein, Professor of History, Indiana University and Editor, American Historical Review
Brett Gary’s study of censorship in the modern U.S. is not afraid to announce itself “a study of progress.” Notwithstanding older religious or newer feminist insistence that women need to be protected from the harms supposedly inflicted on them by certain kinds of sexual knowledge, Gary shows in great detail that struggles over pornography and birth control – from the little known cases of Mary Ware Dennett and Marie Stopes, to the famous ones involving Margaret Sanger and James Joyce’s Ulysses -- are part of a checkered, but ultimately noble history of the advance of “the right to be an informed, educated, free sexual being.”
Francis G. Couvares, E. Dwight Salmon Professor of History & American Studies, Amherst College
Attorney Morris Ernst relentlessly pursued a mission to secure legal protection for sexual expression in literature, in sex education, and in medical provision of contraceptive information and contraceptive devices. From the 1920s into the 1950s, he defended clients ranging from the publishers of James Joyce’s Ulysses to birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Historian Brett Gary recounts legal strategies and courtroom dramas in an original and important work, both authoritative and compelling
Michael Schudson, Professor of Journalism and Sociology (affiliated faculty), Columbia University
Morris Ernst may be the most important figure in modern American culture who has never been the subject of a major study. He fought and won several historic legal battles for free sexual expression: his clients included Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, Radclyffe Hall, James Joyce, and Alfred Kinsey. Today, when free speech is under attack from all ideological quarters, his story is more relevant than ever, and a sobering reminder how arbitrary and oppressive censorship can be.
Jonathan Rose, founding president, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), author of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor
For more than a century, battles over the power to curb free speech have been tied to efforts to control human sexuality. And at the center of the contemporary legal struggles over free expression was the historic but now-forgotten figure of Morris Ernst—New Dealer, ACLU lawyer, confidant of FDR, and, most surprisingly, ally of J. Edgar Hoover. Historian Brett Gary’s deeply researched, important new book gives us a fresh, thorough, and pathbreaking history of the fights that Ernst waged on this terrain—fights that helped place anti-censorship at the heart of American liberalism. This book should find an eager audience among history readers, free-expression advocates, the legal community, and anyone concerned with the fraught connections between sex, society, and the law.
David Greenberg, Professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies, Rutgers University, and author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency and Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image