The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Elmina D. Slenker to Walt Whitman, 3 August [1888?]
Date: August 3, [1888?]
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03693
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Cristin Noonan, Amanda J. Axley, Paige Wilkinson, and Stephanie Blalock
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Aug 3
Friend Whitman1
I hear thee is far from well, I want to send thee one more appreciative greeting & to tell thee, thee has one appreciative worshipper way off here in Old Virginia
One who has quoted from thy Leave of grass persistantly ever since it appeared, and this, together with other hygienic sex work, has robbed me of friends, husband, & perhaps of all the little savings of a life-time as O'Va. Law allows the man to sell all & the wife to be turned from house & home till he dies when she can get her third of what he does not squander
I want thee to feel that thy work has done much for needed Sexual Reform
Respectfully
Elmina D. Slenker2
Correspondent:
Elmina Drake Slenker (1827–1908)
was born in New York; she was the daughter of Thomas Drake (1800–1865) and his wife Eliza (1800–1884). She was an author,
an early sex reformer, and a proponent of Free Thought. In 1887, she spent six months in jail
for violating the Comstock Act, which prohibited the delivery of materials with
sexually explicit content via the U. S. Postal Service. Elmina married Isaac Slenker
in 1856, and they later lived in Virgina. She served as an assistant editor of the
New York Physiologist and Famiy Physician in the early 1880s and was in charge
of the "Children's Corner" column in the Boston Investigator for several years.
She also wrote the books Studying the Bible (1870)
and The Darwins: A Domestic Radical Romance (1879), among others.
For more information on Slenker, see her biographical sketch in Appletons' Cyclopedia
of American Biography, 1600–1889, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1888), 5:549.
Notes:
1. A letter from Elmina Slenker is mentioned in Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden. See the entry for Sunday, August 5, 1888. It may be this letter. [back]
2. With this letter, Elmina Slenker enclosed a circular letter advertising her children's book Science in Story. She also enclosed two newspaper clippings in which she quotes from Leaves of Grass: "'Rosa, the Educating Mother' by Prof. H. M. Cottinger, A. M." and "Little Lessons for Little Folks." [back]