Tokology.
Signed By An Early Feminist And Sexual Health Radical
[Health issues]. Stockham, Alice, M.D. Tokology: A Book for Every Woman. Chicago: Sanitary Publishing Company, 1883.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph of Alice Stockham; decorated endpapers; hinges tender; brown cloth, stamped in gilt, brown and blind; covers lightly used, few spots of unobtrusive staining.
First edition of this early and radical women’s health guide, apparently a later printing; this copy is signed by the author on the frontispiece just below her portrait.
Tokology, an overtly feminist work—it is dedicated “First: to my Daughter whose faith in the physical redemption of woman by correct living has been a constant inspiration in its production; Second: to all Women who follow the lessons herein taught, will be saved the sufferings peculiar to their sex”—instructs women about conception; fetal development; diseases of pregnancy; hygiene; birth control; and other necessities. The most notable aspects of Stockham’s guide, then as now, have to do with her remarks on female sexuality: Stockham urges female sexual independence, defends a wife’s right to abstain from relations with her husband, and advocates “karezza...which encourages husbands to withhold orgasm until their wives have been sexually satisfied and then ejaculate outside the vagina” (Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, by Ellen Chesler, NY: Doubleday, 1992, p. 112). Although she has faded into relative obscurity, in her time Alice Stockham was a well-known figure whose admirers included Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger.
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