Male Continence [or; Self-Control in Sexual Intercourse]

32 pp. Printed wrappers, sewn binding. A discussion of reproduction by the founder of the Oneida utopian community, who coined the term 'free love'. Hoolihan 2652. "Male continence was probably never widely practiced in the United States except at Oneida, but it received considerable publicity and was far from unknown. Noyes first described it in a chapter of his book The Bible Argument in 1848. In 1866 the Perfectionists decided that American society would benefit from a wider knowledge of male continence, so Noyes published as a four-page leaflet a letter he had written to a young medical student who requested detailed information on how the community controlled reproduction. They mailed the leaflet... only in response to specific requests for information, but even so it went through four editions. In 1872 rather than issue a fifth edition, Noyes revised and enlarged the leaflet, adding twenty pages on the history of his discovery of male continence."