Here's Why The Creation Of The Post Office Was So Controversial

It is perfectly reasonable to blame the banal marketing of Silicon Valley for people's inability to differentiate a new way to add middlemen into their lives, and the creation of a truly radical space. Next to the public library, the birth of the post office dramatically usurped the foundations of how people access information.

In the nineteenth century, various nosy gentlemen expressed concern about the propriety of women being able to retrieve their post without supervision. In Lapham's Quarterly, Angela Serratore quotes one person's column about the newly-constructed post office in New York City: "[She] has the privilege, if she chooses to exercise it, of her own private box or pigeon-hole at the post-office of the town where she resides, where she can have her letters addressed, and whither by a 'Ladies Entrance' she can resort when she pleases and unlock her box from the outside, and take away her letters without observation." It must be reiterated, the tone with which this piece was written emphasizes that this was a bad thing. Essentially, of a male guardian could not control the letters a woman receives, it was believed, her all-important virtue could be compromised. 

Here, then, is the radical point of a public postal service: Anyone can send and collect a letter, in a space uncontrolled by private hands. Such a freedom, as Serratore notes, inspired in men visions of unspecified but certainly illicit pleasures, which reads more as a fear of losing control than anything else.