On this day in 1878, according to the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, “several thousand supporters of Ezra Heywood held an ‘Indignation Meeting’ at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. They were protesting his conviction and imprisonment on obscenity charges. Educated for the ministry, he had come to reject all forms of social control. He was an ardent abolitionist and, after the Civil War, a strong supporter of woman’s rights. He sought not just suffrage for women but their right to be free from the ‘sexual slavery’ he believed marriage entailed. Together with his wife Angela, he published a journal and pamphlets that advocated free love and birth control. In doing so, he knowingly violated federal obscenity laws. He paid for his beliefs with his own freedom, spending two years at hard labor in a Dedham jail.” Just goes to show that what once was radical may later become mainstream. A prison sentence in 1878 for advocating birth control in Boston; today, available to teens in high school (although not easily enough even today, so far as I am concerned, and I dare say old Ezra would agree with me).
Thanks for posting this — it prompted me to read up a little on Heywood and add a bit to his wiki page including a link to this Mass Moments page. I wonder if he was related to the Heywoods who built the huge furniture business in Gardner — since Ezra was from Princeton and could afford to go to Brown it seems likely.