Connubial Hygiene

The U. S. is now sufficiently adult to study a book on connubial hygiene, Federal Judge John Munro Woolsey of Manhattan decided last month. Thereupon Putnam's rushed the printing and, last week, published Marie Carmichael Stopes's Married Love-- the first of her eight monographs on sex activity. Professionally she is a palaeobotanist and an authority on coal. In 1918 she married Humphrey Verdon Roe, who with his brother Sir Alliott Verdon Roe developed the Avro biplane. They live in Surrey with their two sons and cooperate on birth control campaigns. She first published Married Love in 1918. Since then she has sold 700,000 copies in England alone. Copies heretofore in the U. S. were smuggled or pirated (with inexact text). Its thesis is that procreation is but one function of marriage, that love activity benefits husband and wife mentally and physically, that wives should be as forward in the play as husbands.

A more scientific book recently published in the U. S. is Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology & Technique by Dr. Th. H. Van de Velde, retired director of the Gynecological Clinic at Haarlem, The Netherlands, But this book is too risky, culturally, for general distribution. Only doctors, lawyers, ministers, social workers and educators may buy it. The Dutch were among the first to make family control a general convenience. In his Ideal Marriage he analyzes and describes the minutiae of male and female physiological activities pertaining to sexual activities. Incidentally he defines a kiss "an irregular intermittent pneumatic massage."

--($2.) fCovici, Friede, $7.50.

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