The title page of Woman and Her Secret Passions (MC 4516 James Waddell family fonds); photo taken at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick (PANB).
Gemma Marr
“The luxurious habits of civilized life lead to many excesses. Those of gluttony and hard drinking have been sufficiently commented upon. Tracts and newspapers showing the fatal results of intoxication, surround us on all hands. But an evil more destructive than any of these has received, comparatively, but little attention. It is time that the warning was given, and that the trumpet was blown within the hearing of every young person. For want of knowledge on this subject, the fairest daughters of the land have gone down to a premature grave, or lingered out existence in wretchedness, without knowing the cause of their misery, or without ever knowing that there was such a thing as enjoyment, in living according to the dictates of nature and virtue”[1]
When I first read these lines, I (like you, dear reader) had very little context. I was in the research room at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, and had just been handed a folder. “You might find this interesting,” the archivist told me, and walked away. Indeed, I did; indeed, I do. The passage, which aims to strike a fearful curiosity in the reader, comes from a small book called Woman and Her Secret Passions: Containing an Exact Description of the Female Organs of Generation, Their Uses and Abuses, Together with a Detailed Account of the Causes and the Cure of the Solitary Vice. In it author Robert T. Wakely talks about the “secret vice”[2], and is worried about the vitality of young women lost to the evils of masturbation. When this book was first introduced to me, I wondered who read it and why (for titillation or information or instruction?). As I continued my research, a secondary thought emerged. I began to draw connections between the ideas of “safety” in relation to gender and sexuality as presented in Woman and Her Secret Passions and debates around “safety” in relation to gender and sexuality in contemporary conversations around sexual education and school policy. Continue reading
Much of Black history, and Black women’s history is erased, undocumented, or misconstrued through dominant white claims, but through these Black produced creations – the photo, the Dawn, CLACP, Black oral histories – we learn that the player’s ancestors self-emancipated, the women were politically active, their men worked as railway porters, and that Black people in Canada needed to possess a newspaper to stir up change. From the photograph we gather that Black women came together, sometimes in pearls, to play ball. 
This is the second of a two-part series to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. The first part appeared on this site 
