1863 WOMEN'S SEXUAL RIGHTS. Legalized Prostitution; Or, Marriage as it is, and Marriage as it Should be.

A very scarce imprint of Dr. Charles S. Woodruff’s Legalized Prostitution, a provocative and significant contribution to mid-nineteenth-century American radical reform, medical philosophy, and sex radicalism.

Published in Boston by Bela Marsha prominent publisher noted for printing Spiritualist, abolitionist, and alternative health texts, the book argues that traditional legal marriage, when lacking mutual love, physical harmony, or female autonomy, is functionally equivalent to a form of socially sanctioned and legalized prostitution. Woodruff framing marital sexual relations without consent or genuine affection as institutionalized coercion linked his work directly to early feminist critiques of marital rape and women’s physical subjection within the domestic sphere. 

Writing from a medical perspective, Woodruff integrated nineteenth-century physiological arguments with health reform principles, contending that forced sexual compliance and bodily ignorance within marriage bred physical degeneration, spiritual decay, and psychological distress. By challenging traditional religious and legal doctrines regarding matrimonial "duty," the work framed physical and sexual autonomy as central to true health and spiritual elevation.

An important idealogical contribution as part of the broader antebellum and Civil War-era Free Love, Spiritualist, and medical reform movements. Woodruff aligned with contemporary iconoclasts who argued that true marriage was grounded in spiritual and physiological affinity rather than legal contracts alone. By utilizing radical rhetoric to critique the legal and economic dependency of wives, Legalized Prostitution anticipated later nineteenth-century free-thought and free-love tracts, such as Ezra Heywood's Cupid's Yokes, which further pushed the boundaries of reproductive freedom, marital reform, and state regulation of private life. Its publication during the Civil War era reflects how reform publishers like Bela Marsh continued to promote radical bodily self-determination alongside the broader struggle over human freedom, and was perhaps thought of as an opportune moment to speak to women's issues, with so many of young men involved in the conflict. 

Woodruff, Charles S. Legalized Prostitution: Or, Marriage as it Is, and Marriage as it Should be, Philosophically Considered. Second Edition. Boston. Bela Marsh. 1863. 226pp. 

Good - to fair in original cloth, spine somewhat naively, though solidly enough reinforced with book tape. Text block stained, but solid and the pages still in very decent structural condition.