the experience of reading in Britain, from 1450 to 1945...

Click check box to select all entries on this page:

Auguste Forel : Sexual Ethics

'Years of reading had made [Ruth Slate] tired of squabbling between competing religious sects, and it was Tolstoy's Resurrection that finally gave her the courage to plow her own furrow: "I must be different, or the best in me will die!"... With an evangelical zeal freed from the moorings of dogma, Ruth plunged into the post-Victorian 'sex question'. She heard lectures on eugenics and women's diseases and read Auguste Forel's Sexual Ethics, though she could hardly bear to glance through The Great Scourge, where Christabel Pankhurst insisted that the vast majority of men were infected with venereal disease. She was intrigued when a woman argued in the avant-garde New Age that the temple prostitutes of the East were a much better arrangement than the "unsanitary" way of ordering these things in the West. She gravitated to Francoise Lafitte and the Freewoman magazine, which agitated for the sexual emancipation of women'.

Century: 1900-1945     Reader/Listener/Group: Ruth Slate      Print: Book

Click check box to select all entries on this page: