Studies in Crap: 1904’s top sexologists on our helpless, unclean, flowerlike women

Each Thursday, your Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.

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Sexual Physiology or Hidden Truths Revealed:
Purity, Heredity and Physical Manhood

Authors: Bishop Samuel Fallows and Dr. W. J. Truitt, both “heaven-appointed teachers of purity and truth.”

Date: 1904

Publisher: Hertel, Jenkins & Co.

Discovered at: Sentimental Journey Antiques, Olathe

The Frontispiece Promises: “Celebrated Prescriptions for all diseases” and “Profusely illustrated”

Representative Quotes:

• “There is beauty in the helplessness of a woman. The clinging trust which searches for extraneous support is graceful and touching.” (page 95).

• “In order that it may be beneficial, the bath should not be taken at a time when any of the important organs of the body are engaged in the performance of their functions.” (page 78).

As any teen who has ever scissored up fashion magazines to assemble a collage on body issues can tell you, our current ideal of feminine beauty is something like the Microsoft Word paperclip with lips like a life preserver. But your Crap Archivist has good news for all those ladies out there who have ever eaten a sandwich: It wasn’t always this way!

That’s according to the authors of Sexual Physiology, my favorite turn-of-the-last-century guide to the human body and the unfathomable evil of its tingliest parts.

According to Fallows and Pruitt, “Good health, proper diet, regular exercise, habits and dress all have more or less to do with beauty, but the main source is in the mind and heart.” That sounds sweet, but the theory works both ways: If you’re not beautiful something deeper must be wrong:

“Deformity of limb clearly shows a lack of vitality in that limb; a bad complexion indicates something wrong in the vital system; a malformation of the brain is a sure sign of want in the mental system.”

But remember, beauty isn’t all outside. Heed this “Caution to Young Women”:

“It is well known that, at certain periods, women from fifteen to forty-five are, in the language of Mosaic law, ‘unclean’; that is, at their monthly periods. Unless great care is taken, women may, and sometimes do, give off a very unpleasant odor.”

They make no exception for the pure of heart, whose lady-parts, according to Fallows and Pruitt’s theories of morality, should smell like Glade Plug-Ins.