Sex Radicalism.
“The average puritan woman’s highest ideal of married life is of a settled home, social position and good upholestry”
Forster, Dora. Sex Radicalism as Seen by an Emancipated Woman of the New Time. Chicago: M. Harmon, 1905.
Slim 8vo.; contemporary ownership signature on title-page (“Luther M. Nellis / Nov 12 1918”); orange printed wrappers, stapled; covers stained; loss of paper from spine, fragile.
First edition; one of two editions printed with the 1905 date; one has 48 pp.; this one has 48 pp. plus an 8 pp. addendum, 1 p. on the Free Love journal Lucifer, and 5 pp. of advertisements. OCLC lists only five copies. The “Addenda,” is written by various authors, including R. B. Kerr, Dr. E. B. Foote and Edward Carpenter, all of whom have works published by M. Harmon. The publishers advertisements relate to the Free Love movement, including: The Wholesome Woman; Borning Better Babies; The Abolition of Marriage; Marriage in Free Society; and Love’s Coming of Age.
The ten chapters include, “Sex as a Social Force,” “Puritan Sex System as it actually is,” “Sex Denial under Bondage and under Freedom,” and “An Ideal of Sex Life.” Annotated throughout in pencil.
Moses Harmon, in his “Publisher’s Preface,” explains that he published this book to add “a little to the fund of knowledge of sex – which ‘lies at the root of life’” (p. 6). He blames Christendom for general ignorance of the “sex-relation,” as well as the poor treatment of “womanhood and motherhood” (p. 5). He quotes Havelock Ellis as saying, “we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex,” but Harmon takes this thought a bold step further: “If we can not ‘reverence life’ without a knowledge of sex, then the murders…for which Christian nations are conspicuously notorious, are directly traceable to a lack of knowledge about sex” (p. 5). Harmon, a woman’s rights activist, and the publisher of Lucifer and of other books and pamphlets like this, was jailed and put to hard labor in 1905 for distributing obscene material through the mail.
Forster was, apparently, an early free love enthusiast; she shares Harmon’s view of a need to dispute traditional views on sex, and begins her book saying: “The movement for sex radicalism is still so young that I believe it may be useful to outline briefly the ground which the sex reformer must cover, suggesting our sources of knowledge, and pointing out the largest of the lies with which we must do battle and who are the champions of these lies by choice or necessity” (p. 7). Forster bases part of her arguments on anarchist feminist Lois Waisbrooker and the “complex marriage” practices of the Oneida community.
Forster believes that the medical and religious fields need to change their views on sex, especially in regard to women, and begin plainly and unashamedly informing them about sex; she is scornful of the fact that, “knowledge is still looked upon as wicked, and special praise is accorded to the girl or woman who is quite ignorant of sex, her state of mind being described by the term ‘innocent’” (p. 10). The owner who annotated this book highlights a similar sentence, “it was necessary to preserve the theological dogma intact that sex is the invention of the devil” (p. 10). (A google search suggests that Nellis may have been a school teacher in Winfield, Kansas in the 1880s.)
Forster also adheres to the idea that not only quantity and quality are important in one’s sexual life, but also variety; “My own belief is that the one-only lover idea has had a most unfortunate effect on the minds and lives of all of us” (p. 20). According to Forster and other free love followers, women, like men, should be allowed to choose their sexual partners.
Research yielded no further results on Forster.
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