Alice Bunker Stockham, Dress Reform, and "Karezza"

Alice Bunker Stockham (died 3 December 1912)

I first came across the name of Alice Bunker Stockham in connection with the Rational Dress Movement--a nineteenth-entury reform movement that I knew nothing about. (Which shouldn't be surprising, since, in my academic life, I was [I guess I still am] a medievalist--the nineteenth century is usually way too modern for my taste.)

Alice Bunker Stockham

Anyway, the movement to reform women's dress--to free women from the unhealthy and constrictive clothing in which they were imprisoned--began in the United States and in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, arising at the same time as and in connection with the suffrage movement.

It also involved many of the same women, including, in the United States, Sarah Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, for example.

The aims of the reformers were to free women from the dictates of fashion (which didn't--and doesn't--seem to have been successful, at least if you spend any time at all looking at the women in music videos, on the red carpet, or, for that matter, in college classrooms), but especially from the devastating physical effects of corsets and "tight lacing." 

Throughout history, western women have engaged in various ways of shaping their torsos through corsets and lacing--at the turn of the sixteenth century, in the lessons she writes for her daughter, Anne of France is already warning Suzanne about the dangers of tight-lacing, which, she says, is not only ridiculous but will damage her health! And lest you think we are way past that today, check out all the five-star Amazon reviews for this "double steel boned," heavy-duty "waist-trainer" corset--with its "26 . . . steel bones," "4 rigid steel bars," and “waist tape for waistline support."

Perhaps the most well-known name associated with the efforts to reform women's clothing is that of Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), who in 1849 introduced her trouser-like "bloomers" in order to free women from the excessive weight of their crinolines--the combined weight of a woman's skirt and petticoats meant that pounds, perhaps as many as thirteen pounds, were hanging off of a woman's waist. The development of the caged crinoline in mid-century did serve to reduce that weight (in 1857, Bloomer adopted it in favor of the garments she had devised), but that did not end the efforts to reform women's clothing. 

Despite the ridicule and hostility directed at those who had worn bloomers, a National Dress Reform Association was organized in the United States in 1856, advocating various modified, more freeing and "hygienic" dress styles for women. (Though even these reformed styles meant women were still wearing several pounds' worth of undergarments.) The group ultimately disbanded, since the idea of trousers seemed to present an insurmountable object.

But the reform movement reignited in the 1870s, principally in reaction to the introduction of the bustle, adding an iron cage and looped fabric in yet another distortion of the natural female body. In London, the Rational Dress Society was formed in 1881, promoted by Florence Pomeroy, viscountess Harberton, and the New Zealand feminist Eliza Mary King. Its stated goals:

The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movements of the body, or in any way tends to injure the health. It protests against the wearing of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise almost impossible; and of all tie down cloaks or other garments impeding on the movements of the arms. It protests against crinolines or crinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming. . . . [It] requires all to be dressed healthily, comfortably, and beautifully, to seek what conduces to birth, comfort and beauty in our dress as a duty to ourselves and each other.

(For a report on King's visit to Canada and the United States in 1884, reported in the New York Times,click here--the story is found on page 5, along with other important news like "Hot Days in Saratoga," "Chicago's Summer Races," and "A Priest's Study Robbed").

Now to Alice Bunker. Born in Ohio in 1833, she was certainly an advocate for dress reform--as I said, it was in the context of the nineteenth-century dress reform movement that I first ran across her name. But, wow! Reading just a bit about her, reforming women's clothing is the least of her many efforts on behalf of women.

Alice Bunker enrolled in and graduated from Olivet College in Michigan, founded in 1844 by Congregationalists and dedicated to promoting education to students regardless of sex, race, or financial means. (It was, at first, denied accreditation because of its support of the cause of abolition.)

Bunker then attended Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati, where she earned her M.D. in 1854, the fifth woman in the United States to become a doctor. ("Eclectic medicine" was a recognized branch of American medicine that promoted botanical remedies and physical therapy.) She married G. H. Stockman in 1857, then received more training at the Chicago Homeopathic Medical College, which opened in 1876. 

In her Chicago medical practice, Stockham focused on gynecology and obstetrics. Her 1884 Tokology, a Book for Every Woman (the title, tokology, from the Greek word for "obstetrics) was a practical book for women that recommended a high-fiber diet and exercise for pregnant women, that recommended pregnant women abstain from sex (such "continence" is good for their health), and that denounced women's corsets. 

Stockham acknowledged women's natural sexuality and denounced the sexual double standard:

When woman only is taught that virtue is the brightest jewel in her crown, when the popular verdict is that womanliness and modesty are synonymous for repression, when she lives in fear of maternity and believes restraint on her part prevents vitality of life germs, when, too, erroneous habit pervert every function, how can we tell what is natural for her?

Then, on the other hand, when man is taught that virtue is not synonymous with manliness, when the passions are stimulated by unnatural habits of living, by impure conversation, thoughts, books and practices, can we say this strength of passion is purely natural and healthy?

Stockham was also an advocate of masturbation as healthy for both men and women.

Stockham distributed her privately printed book to poor women and to prostitutes in order to promote their well-being and, if possible, to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Each copy of her book came with a certificate that entitled a woman to a free gynecological exam at Stockham's clinic. Stockham's book was translated into French, Finnish, German, and Russian (with a preface by Leo Tolstoy).

Her book also included lots of practical advice for women, including recipes, patterns for baby clothing, and lists of items necessary for childbirth, including an "abundant supply" of soft rags, "large and clean," as well as "two yards of rubber cloth for protecting the bed, a fountain syringe, a hot water bottle, safety pins, antiseptic, absorbent cotton, glycerine, arnica, ammonia, carbolic and castile soap, calenduline, olive oil and cosmoline."

In 1896, she published Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (the title, karezza, from the Italian word for carezza, "caress"), in which she laid out "a theory of conjugal life, in which there is a love communion between husband and wife from which results a mastery of the physical": "Karezza signifies 'to express affection in both words and action,' and while it fittingly denotes the union that is the outcome of deepest human affection, love's consummation, it is used technically throughout this work to designate a controlled sexual union." It is not a matter of self-control, but of mutual control. Karezza did not necessarily result in orgasm ("Unless procreation is desired, let the final propagative orgasm be entirely avoided"); rather, the goal was sexual desire and pleasure.

Stockham developed her ideas after a trip to India and her own study of Tantric sex. The goals of karezza, as she devised her plan, were to help women control their reproduction without mechanical methods of birth control, to promote women's equality (women were not to be reduced to passive objects who had to submit to their husbands' sexual desires), and to result in marital pleasure and fidelity.

In 1905, when Stockham was seventy-two years old, she was arrested on obscenity charges by Anthony Comstock, the U.S. Postal Inspector.* Under the Comstock Law, passed in 1873, 

whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States . . . shall sell . . . or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section . . . can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof in any court of the United States... he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.

Under this law, Comstock pursued all those who, like Stockham, distributed any kind of material about reproductive health--even anatomy books could be kept from distribution by mail.

Although she was defended by no less an advocate that Clarence Darrow, Stockham was convicted and fined, her books were banned, and the publishing house she had established was forced to close. 

  

Although Stockham did not promote the use of contraceptives, her theory of karezza was condemned in a series of letters and attacks by the Catholic church, culminating in the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office's 30 June 1952 monitum, or "solemn warning," published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which condemned what it called "a reserved embrace."

The Sacred Congregation forbade the faithful to practice and priests and spiritual directors even to suggest that "a reserved embrace" was acceptable. Karezza was condemned because promoted “hedonism outside of a true marriage act." 

For an account of women's clothing and the efforts to "reform" it, the topic that drew me to Alice Bunker Stockham in the first place, I recommend Patricia Cunningham's Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art.

*Update, 30 July 2023: For Grace Haley's informative piece on the Comstock Act and the way it is being deployed by forced-birth activists and politicians today, here is a link to the essay, published at Jessica Valenti's Abortion, Every Day.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Imagining a World of Our Own

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (born 3 July 1860)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a noted social activist and reformer, a writer and a lecturer, a sociologist and economist. Although she wrote plays and poetry and published major works on economics (Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, 1898), ethics (Social Ethics, 1914), and employment (The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903, and Human Work, 1904), today she is best remembered for a single short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and for her utopian novel, Herland  (1914). 

Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman),
c. 1900

Charlotte Perkins was the daughter of writer and librarian Frederic Beecher Perkins (who was Harriet Beecher Stowe's nephew) and Mary Fitch Wescott.

While the Beecher connection makes Frederic Perkins worthy of his very own Wikipedia entry, there is little information available about Gilman's mother. Charlotte Perkins Gilman would later write that Mary Fitch Wescott was the "darling of an elderly father and a juvenile mother, petted, cossetted, and indulged," and that she was delicate, "beautiful, well educated, musical, and what was then termed 'spiritual minded'"--in short, she was "femininely attractive in the highest degree."

This pairing did not work well--Perkins abandoned his wife and children, leaving them in poverty. Charlotte seems more or less to have raised herself and to have educated herself, principally from reading (she attended a series of schools, was considered a poor student, and ended her formal education at the age of fifteen).

Notably, however, the abandoned Perkins family spent time with their Beecher relations, including Isabella Beecher Hooker, a key figure in the suffrage movement, Catharine Beecher, who published more than twenty books on education, slavery and abolition, families, and women's roles in society, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Charlotte Perkins married Charles Walter Stetson in 1884, gave birth to her only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, a year later, and separated from Stetson in 1888. In between the birth of her daughter and her separation, Gilman experienced a trauma that would result in "The Yellow Wallpaper."

In 1887, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was prescribed a rest cure. The specific nature of the illness from which she was suffering is not at all clear. Describing it some twenty-five years later, Gilman wrote, “For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” The twenty-seven-year-old Gilman consulted the physician Silas Weir Mitchell, widely recognized in the United States as the foremost authority on women’s health, and entered his sanitarium in Philadelphia. 

Describing her treatment there, she later wrote, “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.” Gilman says that, like a good patient, she “went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came . . . near the borderline of utter mental ruin. . . .” 

She realized that doing nothing was the cause of her illness, not its cure and so, “using the remnants of intelligence that remained,” she ignored Mitchell’s orders: “I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again—work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite.” Returning to work, she wrote, meant “ultimately recovering some measure of power.” It is this very situation—suffering from the lack of work, with nothing to do all day, spending day after day in an isolated bedroom and night after night lying awake and aware—that we first encounter the unnamed narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Cover of an 1899 edition of
"The Yellow Wallpaper"

The second of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s most well known works is the novel Herland. Herland is an ideal female state that has developed parallel to but completely isolated from the “real” world, dominated by men. There is no strife, no bloodshed, no violence, and no “plunder” in Herland, for the simple reason that there are no men.

In this peaceful, harmonious land, there are no male gods either; rather, there is a Maternal Pantheon of female gods and, in particular, Mother Earth. The women live in harmony with their land, eating only the “fruit of motherhood”—eggs and seeds. Nor do the women of Herland need men for reproduction; the continued existence of Herland is due to parthenogenesis, or “virgin creation,” one generation of women giving birth to the next without any need for male assistance whatsoever.

But, after two thousand years of isolation and independence, Herland is suddenly invaded by three men, and what once was an all-female Paradise is changed forever.

Charlotte Perkins married Houghton Gilman in 1900. After his death in 1934, she moved to Pasadena, California, where she had lived after her separation from Stetson in 1888 and where her daughter was then living. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932; on 17 August 1935, she committed suicide, noting in the note she left behind that she "chose chloroform over cancer."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is widely available online, but in different versions. I recommend reading the original publication, from the 1892 New England Magazine (you can access by clicking here*). This text obviously shows the spelling and punctuation of Gilman's original title, "The Yellow Wall-Paper." Less obviously, it preserves her breaks in the text--these sections breaks are sometimes eliminated in reprints, especially those found online, but I think they are essential to the story. Gilman’s brief essay, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” written and published in the October 1913 issue of her Forerunner magazine, is available by clicking here. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is also available online, accessible through Project Gutenberg, for example. There are several affordable paperback editions, often published with other Gilman texts, especially short stories. I like the very affordable Signet Classic edition edited by Barbara H. Soloman, Herland and Selected Stories. Soloman’s introduction to Gilman’s life and work is excellent, and this Gilman anthology also contains "The Yellow Wallpaper." 

It's important to note, however, that Gilman did not publish Herland as a stand-alone novel, complete in itself. Rather, she published "Herland" serially in twelve installments in The Forerunner, beginning in January 1915. The narrative of Herland is followed immediately, without a break, by "With Her in Ourland: Sequel to 'Herland'" in January 1916. The twelve installments of "Ourland" are completed in December 1916.

The first time "Herland" was published as a "novel" was in 1979--and it appeared separate from its "continuation." This publication history answers the most persistent questions raised by my students in the course of teaching this novel over several years: why would Ellador, the main female protagonist, ever decide to leave the all-female community of Herland? Why would Van have wanted her to leave rather than staying with her in Herland? What did she encounter in "our" world? 

There are various print-on-demand versions of With Her in Ourland available on Amazon, but I recommend the carefully prepared edition of Mary Jo Deegan--it has a great introduction. (You can get a new copy, but there are also used copies available). 

And, one more note: "Herland" was preceded by "Moving the Mountain," published serially in 1911 and in book form, Moving the Mountain, in the same year. While Moving the Mountain shares a utopian vision with Herland and is sometimes referred to as the first novel in Gilman's "trilogy," it has no connection with the characters and world of Gilman's more famous utopian Herland.

*This link connects you to an entire issue of the magazine--"The Yellow-Wall Paper," by Charlotte Perkins Stetson," begins on p. 647.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Best-Selling Novel of the Nineteenth Century

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (published in book form, 20 March 1852)

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously influential anti-slavery novel was first published serially in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era (in forty weekly installments, beginning with the 5 June 1851 issue), Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in book form by publisher John P. Jewett on 20 March 1852.

Title page of the 1852 first edition
of Uncle Tom's Cabin

The book was an enormous success, running quickly through several printings. By late spring of the next year, Jewett reported that he had sold more than 300,000 copies of the novel. But at that point, the novel went out of print, and by 1860, Jewett was out of business, the rights to the novel transferring to the publisher Ticknor and Fields. 

Although we associate Stowe's novel with the Civil War, surprisingly few copies of the novel were published during the 1860s. For a discussion of the novel's publication history, you can read Michael Winship's excellent essay, "Uncle Tom's Cabin: History of the Book in the 19th-Century United States" online by clicking here.