Queer Places:
Angelus Rosedale Cemetery
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, USA
Alice Bunker Stockham (November 8, 1833 – December 3, 1912) was an obstetrician and gynecologist from Chicago, and the fifth woman to become a doctor in the United States. She promoted gender equality, dress reform, birth control, and male and female sexual fulfillment for successful marriages.
A well-traveled and well-read person who counted among her friends
Leo Tolstoy and
Havelock Ellis, she also visited Sweden and from her trips to schools there she brought back the idea of teaching children domestic crafts, thus single-handedly establishing shop and home economics classes in the United States.
Alice Bunker Stockham was born in Cardington, Ohio on November 8, 1833,[1] and received her MD from the Chicago Homeopathic Medical College in 1892.[2]
She lectured against the use of corsets by women, advocated complete abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, and believed in women's rights.[3] Stockham was a vegetarian. In 1893, she was a speaker at the Third International Vegetarian Congress in Chicago.[4][5]
Stockham was very concerned with the economic plight of divorced women with children and prostitutes who wanted to get off the street. She felt that these women had no marketable skills and would be unable to support themselves, so she had copies of her book Tokology, a layperson's guide to gynecology and midwifery, privately printed and gave them to "unfortunate women" to sell door-to-door in Chicago. Each copy came with a bound-in certificate signed by Stockham and entitling the bearer to a free gynecological exam.
She coined the term Karezza (from the Italian for "caress") and authored a book by this name in 1896. It refers to non-religious spiritual sexual practices that draw upon tantric techniques of body control but do not involve any of tantra's cultural or iconographic symbolism.
She promoted Karezza as a means to achieve:
birth control (she was against abortion but she wanted women to be able to control pregnancies);[9]
social and political equality for women (she felt that "Karezza men" would never rape their wives and would actually treat them "decently");
marital pleasure and hence marital fidelity (she advocated Karezza as a cure for "failing marriages").[10]
Stockham's interest in birth control could not overcome her fear that a mechanical sperm barrier would prevent "the complete interchange of magnetism" (a theory popular among 19th century sexual-spiritual teachers).[11] In part this stems from the biblical injunction against Onanism, but she also felt a failure of magnetic interchange was injurious and unnatural.
Thus she advocated "the Oneida method" (from the Oneida Society), then also known as "male continence", in which men refrained from ejaculation but women were encouraged to have contractive orgasms at will. In later writings she also began to promulgate the need for women to learn to control their orgasm responses in the same way that the men of Oneida did. Ultimately, Stockham rejected the "male continence" techniques of John Humphrey Noyes in favour of gender parity in orgasm control. She also rejected Noyes' polyamorous ideas and promoted Karezza as a way to strengthen marriage and monogamy.
Stockham's gender-parity version of tantra yoga, despite its somewhat anti-orgasmic, and thus apparently anti-hedonistic bent, serves as an important counterpoint to the male-centered aspects of traditional tantric sexual practices and later variants such as the "sex-magick" of
Aleister Crowley.
In 1905, a then 72-year old Stockham and her publisher were convicted of circulating improper literature under the Comstock laws.[6][7]
She died at her home in Alhambra, California on December 3, 1912.[1][8]
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