Reading Experience Database
1450-1945

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Record 3843

Reading Experience:

Evidence:
'Years of reading had made [Ruth Slate] tired of squabbling between competing religious sects, and it was Tolstoy's Resurrection that finally gave her the courage to plow her own furrow: "I must be different, or the best in me will die!"... With an evangelical zeal freed from the moorings of dogma, Ruth plunged into the post-Victorian 'sex question'. She heard lectures on eugenics and women's diseases and read Auguste Forel's Sexual Ethics, though she could hardly bear to glance through The Great Scourge, where Christabel Pankhurst insisted that the vast majority of men were infected with venereal disease. She was intrigued when a woman argued in the avant-garde New Age that the temple prostitutes of the East were a much better arrangement than the "unsanitary" way of ordering these things in the West. She gravitated to Francoise Lafitte and the Freewoman magazine, which agitated for the sexual emancipation of women'.
Century: 1900-1945
Date: Between 1897 and 1917
Country: England
Time: n/a
Place: n/a
   
Type of Experience (Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Type of Experience (Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Reader/Listener/Reading Group:

Reader:Ruth Slate
Age Adult (18-100+)
Gender Female
Date of Birth 1884
Socio-economic group: Labourer (non-agricultural)
Occupation: packer, became clerk
Religion: Methodist
Country of origin: England
Country of experience: England
Listeners present if any:
(e.g. family, servants, friends, workmates)
n/a
Additional comments: n/a

 

Text Being Read:

Author: Auguste Forel
Title: Sexual Ethics
Genre: Social Science
Form of Text: Print: Book
Publication details: n/a
Provenance: unknown

 

Source Information:

Record ID: 3843  
Source - Print  
  Author: Jonathan Rose
  Editor: n/a
  Title: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
  Place of Publication: New Haven
  Date of Publication: 2001
  Vol: n/a
  Page: 216
  Additional comments: n/a

Citation: Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), p. 216, http://can-red-lec.library.dal.ca/Arts/reading/recorddetails2.php?id=3843, accessed: 28 March 2024

Additional comments:

See Tierl Thompson, 'Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897-1917' (London, 1987)

 

 

Reading Experience Database version 2.0.  Page updated: 27th Apr 2016  3:15pm (GMT)