Creative Sex.

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd,, 1936. First edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: "Margaret G. Joice. With best wishes from the author. Christmas 1939". Hutchinson's controversial work, which advocated for sex education, contraception, and more lenient divorce laws, is scarce signed. "Evaline Hutchinson never went to prison for her beliefs, nor was she a militant feminist like Sylvia Pankhurst, but neither was she a typical upper-middle class homemaker... The book is a curious one, at least from a contemporary viewpoint. It is clearly a book about married sex, but even so it must have surprised, perhaps shocked, some of Evaline Hutchinson's Cambridge friends. She must have been aware of this likelihood since she used only her initials, not her first name, and had a clergyman write the introduction. The book includes New Testament quotations and references, but other references are to Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, A. N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Needham (The History of Embryology), the Census of India, and Rathbone's Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur. Such a list indicates Hutchinson's wide reading and also her concern about maternal and infant mortality. She wrote extensively about sex as a creative force in marriage, but also in the arts and elsewhere, and gave advice to young engaged and married couples. She argued against premarital sex and trial marriages - but also against long engagements. She condemned prostitution ('vice'), legal or otherwise, and masturbation, although here she warned that its evils had been exaggerated. She was, however, in favor of contraception. Married women, she felt, should have a wider sphere than motherhood, and she cited evidence in both England and India of the toll of repeated childbearing. She argued for easing the divorce laws, particularly within the Anglican Church. At the time it was harder to have an Anglican marriage dissolved than a Catholic one" (Slack, pp. 21-3). The introduction was written by Charles Earle Raven, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge (1932-1950) and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge (1939-1950). Octavo. Original grey boards, title to spine in blue. With dust jacket. Spine a little toned, faint foxing to edges, contents clean and free from marks. A very good copy indeed in the like jacket, spine panel a little faded and marked, ends nicked, else bright, unclipped. Nancy G. Slack, G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology, 2010.