The Relations of the Sexes.
New York: Wood & Holbrook, [1870s?]. 7½” x 5”. Publisher's red cloth, spine gilt. Pp. [9], 10-320 + 4 pages of publisher advertisements. Very good: moderate wear and scuffing to boards; leaves toned; light dampstain to top edge of most leaves, not affecting text.
This is an undated edition of an important and overlooked work on sexuality written by a woman. According to the first page of text in this book, “in matters pertaining to the most important instincts of human life—the sexual instincts, with their functions—ignorance has long been regarded as innocence, and lack of interest for purity of character. The writer of this book disputes these points. She seeks to show how an enlightened understanding is alone able to cope with problems which our complicated social systems for upon us.” Not a lot is known about the book's author, Eliza Bisbee Duffey. According to the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society, in addition to being a vocal feminist she was an artist whose works were exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the co-founder and editor of a Vineland newspaper and a medium. Her first book was a sex education manual for women published in 1873. The following year she published, “No Sex in Education.” It was written in response to Edward Clarke's “Sex in Education,” which argued that women's physical makeup prevented them from receiving as rigorous an education as men. Clarke went so far as to state that co-educational classes could harm women's reproductive organs. In “No Sex in Education,” Duffey publicly argued that physiology had nothing to do with it: ignorance and prejudice were preventing women from equal educational opportunities.
The preface of this book is a poem by Duffey which begins, “only a woman, and weak,/And ignorant too, yet wise in a womanly way,/I will not keep silent because forbidden to speak!/Why should I, pray?” According to her introduction, the book discussed the most important question of the day: “the true relation of the sexes one to the other, the duties and obligations which these relations impose, and the privileges which they confer; the existing relations which are at variance with the true ones, and how these wrong relations may be righted.” Chapters included discussions of sexual physiology, polygamy, free love, prostitution, marriage and more. She also managed to write a 37 page chapter on birth control despite the 1873 Comstock Act which made it a crime to publish anything “intended for preventing conception or producing abortion.” She never gave explicit direction, but instead focused on the morally sound reasons one should not have a child and commented that,
“physicians know, as no other class of persons can do, the need of this knowledge [of contraception]. They know the dreadful effects of ignorance and uncontrolled lust. There is not one of them who has not upon his hands a list of patients . . . who might have been saved from crime and invalidism if they had known what it is every woman's right and duty to know.”
Further espousing the need for birth control in a marriage, she wrote, “they should have it, that they may not have offspring forced upon them before they are ready for them; that the little ones may be welcomed with love, and desire, and joyful expectancy.”
The book has been cited in scholarly works related to feminism, medical metaphors used for women's bodies, histories of birth control and both sides of the abortion argument.
The book was first published in 1876 by three different publishers with no priority established and one of them was this publisher. This particular edition is not not found in OCLC, and per OCLC some version of the Holbrook publishing firm issued editions in 1885, 1886, 1889, and 1898.
A courageous work by a feminist who merits deeper scholarly investigation. Very good. Item #9010
Price: $850.00