First American Edition by the First Woman in America to Earn the M.D. Degree
Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children.
New York: Brentano's Literary Emporium, 1879.
Full Description:
BLACKWELL, Elizabeth. Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children. New York: Brentano's Literary Emporium, 1879.
First American edition. Small octavo (6 3/4 x 5 3/8 inches; 170 x 135 mm). [1]-160, [2, blank] pp. We could find no copies at auction and very few at libraries.
Publisher's full maroon cloth, over flexible boards Boards ruled in blind. Front board and spine lettered in gilt. Some rubbing to cloth and to extremities of spine and along the hinges. A few spots to front and back cloth boards. Previous owner's pencil signature on front free endpaper, dated 1880. Overall very good.
"When she graduated from New York's Geneva Medical College, in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to earn the M.D. degree. She supported medical education for women and helped many other women's careers. By establishing the New York Infirmary in 1857, she offered a practical solution to one of the problems facing women who were rejected from internships elsewhere but determined to expand their skills as physicians. She also published several important books on the issue of women in medicine." (National Institute of Health).
"In 1878 in Nice, France, Blackwell wrote 'Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of their Children,' a book on the moral responsibility of parents to teach their children about reproductive health and wellness." (Embryo Project Encyclopedia)
"Blackwell continued to write and lecture on moral reform. Her 'Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children' (1879) was rejected by 12 publishers as too controversial and had to be printed privately. In a plain and direct manner Blackwell argued that there was no physiological necessity for a double standard of morality, but Victorian England and America were shocked by her position." (Encyclopedia dot com).
"A subject of supreme concern to parents, yet one whose adequate treatment calls for a rare union of experience, insight, and delicacy, is discussed by Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell in a little treatise entitled 'The Moral Education of Children in Relation to Sex' (Brentano). No one can read this essay without cordial respect for the author's motives and abilities, or without a conviction that her just strictures and acute suggestions will be turned to large, immediate, and beneficent account by thoughtful men and women. Here is a book which examines in a sufficiently plain-spoken, yet clean and wholesome and profoundly earnest way, questions which perplex and occupy the mind of every mother—questions of vital import to the well-being of youth, and of decisive bearing on education and society. We know of no other work on the same urgent, but awkward, topic which combines so much substantial worth with such purity of form. It would be well for the community if the author's cautions and counsels could be pondered in every household."" (N. Y. Sun, Nov. 9, 1879).
Garrison and Morton. Norman Library.
HBS 69025.
$3,500.
Price: $3,500.00
Item #69025