1892 was a banner year for feminist medical fiction. In January, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper” in The New England Magazine, exposing S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure as a fake therapy for a fake diagnosis of hysteria that masked a very real mental illness. Later that year, Annie Nathan Meyer debuted her first novel, Helen Brent, M.D., with Cassell Publishing Company in New York. Not only was her titular protagonist the first gynecologist in a work of fiction, but Meyer scandalously defended sex education for women in the wake of a syphilis epidemic in New York City. Writer and orator Francis Ellen Watkins Harper rounded out the year with her publication of Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, which tells the story of a freeborn mixed-race woman sold into slavery after the death of her father. During the war, the titular heroine Iola Leroy is emancipated as contraband of war, serves as a Civil War nurse, and finds herself caught in a love triangle between a white physician and a Black physician. It is unclear why, nineteen years after the passing of the Comstock Law, women writers of medical fiction picked up the pace in production. Likely, the effect of censorship weighed on women writers, as they fought to be taken seriously as professionals and struggled against the “disability con” that places a burden of proof upon people with disabilities. Amy Werbel finds that by 1887—and specifically, after the arrest of Edmund Knoedler for displaying in his gallery photographic reproductions of paintings foregrounding the nude female body—Comstock began losing the war against obscenity even as he won some battles in court. Comstock’s attempts to convict his defendants for the production or distribution of obscenity in literature, drama, and art backfired as each subsequent court case led to greater publicity and higher volumes of sexually risqué material disseminating into American culture.

Importantly, Comstock’s personal arrest records, legal court records of obscenity cases, and historical examinations of the Comstock Law era exhibit a glaring absence of discourse concerning race. None of the legal cases that Werbel examines involve Black defendants. Indeed, Comstock’s most high-profile convictions primarily implicate white middle- to upper-class men, as well as a handful of white women: Victoria Woodhull, Ezra Heywood, Edward Bliss Foote, D. M. Bennett, Thomas Eakins, Edmund Knoedler, and Margaret Sanger, among others.