Eliphalet Kimball, “Suggestions,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 8, 3 (June 20, 1874), 4.
SUGGESTIONS.
The reasons are many and powerful why husband and wife should not sleep in the same bed or even the same room. It is a familiarity that in time extinguishes love. Even by day, absence a good share of the time is necessary to the life of love. What is the cause that brother and sister have no love for each other? It is not because they are brother and sister; it is because they have lived from earliest childhood in the same family. Sleeping in the same bed is too much temptation to intemperance in sexual intercourse, the most ruinous to the constitution of all kinds of intemperance. That kind of intemperance is very common with men and their wives. It is an arrangement of Nature that the night should be devoted entirely to sleep and rest. At night, after the fatigues of the day, the body and mind are in an unsuitable condition for sexual intercourse, and especially for begetting children. If the parents are fatigued at the time of conception, their child is born fatigued. Never should a child be begotten in darkness; the light of the sun at the time and a full view of each other by the parents are necessary to the perfection of the child. Men should go to the beasts and learn wisdom.
Sexual cohabitation without love has the ruinous effects of masturbation, although in a less degree. It exhausts the system without satisfying the mind. When people are obliged to live on food they don’t like, they never feel satisfied and don’t know when to leave off in eating. They are more apt to eat too much than when they have food that suits them. Intemperance is more likely without love than with it. If promiscuity is cohabitation with or without love indifferently it is condemned by free love, because free love is love always. No wonder that the people are old at seventy years, and so many die in childhood. It is according to Nature that people shall live four or five times as long as it takes them to grow, which would extend human life to about the age of one hundred and twenty-five years. If they were born right and always lived right, they would undoubtedly reach that age in health. In that case nobody would die in childhood and there would be no orphans.
The fools that make the laws have made one to punish for indecent exposure of the person. If nature produces anything indecent, then of course she is guilty of obscenity; if she does not then the authors of that law are guilty of libel upon her. The custom of exposing the whole person, each sex to the other, is not only modest and decent, but is necessary to morality. It s the intention of nature and a proof of her wisdom, that men and women shall see each other naked. Concealment causes morbid contemplation and curiosity which stimulates passion. People have a propensity to find what is hidden. Freedom of bodily exposure causes indifference; undoubtedly if it was the custom to go naked, there would be less of lust and less of sexual cohabitation than there is now. If Nature produces anything that ought to be consealed she is not much of a workman.
ELIPHALET KIMBALL.
OXFORD, New Hampshire.
