Tuesday, February 28, 2017

The significance of Chapter 4 of the book "Voices of Revolution," by Rodger Streitmatter, is the embracing of moving freely between marriages based on true love, and the importance of consensual intimacy as well.
     Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly became one of the first sexual reform papers — published by Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin (her sister). They discussed sex education, promiscuity, abortion, sexual language, and couples living together without the title of married. This began the onward creation of even more publications, including The Word and Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, which fought to bring to light conversations that weren't exactly dinner-table appropriate, but were ones that still needed to be had.
     These topics  fought the typical Victorian couple lifestyle, including marriage and at-home life, and challenged it by putting forth the newfound double standard of how men also committed scandalous sexual acts, but never paid for any of them. Additionally, it was possible for sexual abuse to occur between a wife and husband if the sex was non-consensual, marriage was just a label, while love and level of comfort played a more important role in a woman's mental health. Additionally, it fought a lot of the traditional views of censorship and what is okay to be discussed. For example, in his bi-weekly newspaper, Moses Harman wrote an article discussing the ability to discuss procreation involving horses, but the inability to discuss human procreation without censorship. He questioned the censorship behind distributing important information involving human procreation that isn't easily attainable, by arguing that it is alright, though, for animals to be discussed in this way.
    These publications were important for paving the way toward discussing controversial topics and laying down everything that had to be said out on a big open table.

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