Journal of Women's History

The United States in the 1920s and 1930s witnessed dramatic shifts in legal and popular attitudes toward sexuality and obscenity. Female antiobscenity reformers were at the crux of these transformations--simultaneously holding back some changes and urging others forward. This article examines the antiobscenity work of Catheryne Cooke Gilman and the organization over which she presided, the Minneapolis, Minnesota, Women's Cooperative Alliance (WCA). It uses Gilman's fluctuating alliances with sex educator Mary Ware Dennett and social purity reformer Reverend William Sheafe Chase to demonstrate how, why, and to what effect the WCA used explicit sex education as a tool for divesting obscene amusements of their allure. Among other things, the author concludes that the WCA inadvertently helped liberate the commercial forms of sexual expression it fought against. By extending protection to graphic educational information, even while continuing to suppress sexually explicit commercial material, Gilman and the WCA helped to dismantle existing obscenity law in ways that fueled the growing free speech movement and eventually undermined the law's usefulness for fighting obscenity.