HUTCHINSON, Evaline.

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Creative Sex. First edition, first impression, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: "Margaret G. Joice. With best wishes from the author. Christmas 1939". Hutchinson's controversial work, which advocated for sex education, contraception, and more lenient divorce laws, is scarce signed."Evaline Hutchinson never went to prison for her beliefs, nor was she a militant feminist like Sylvia Pankhurst, but neither was she a typical upper-middle class homemaker... The book is a curious one, at least from a contemporary viewpoint. It is clearly a book about married sex, but even so it must have surprised, perhaps shocked, some of Evaline Hutchinson's Cambridge friends. She must have been aware of this likelihood since she used only her initials, not her first name, and had a clergyman write the introduction. The book includes New Testament quotations and references, but other references are to Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, A. N. Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Needham (The History of Embryology), the Census of India, and Rathbone's Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur. Such a list indicates Hutchinson's wide reading and also her concern about maternal and infant mortality. She wrote extensively about sex as a creative force in marriage, but also in the arts and elsewhere, and gave advice to young engaged and married couples. She argued against premarital sex and trial marriages - but also against long engagements. She condemned prostitution ('vice'), legal or otherw

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