Eliza Bisbee Duffey

Eliza Bisbee Duffey was an American feminist and writer of the 19th century. She published several books in defense of women's rights.

She entered a controversy with physician Edward Clarke. Clarke believed women should be educated separately from men at universities, claiming common education would be dangerous for the "mental and physical health of women." Duffey's book No Sex in Education; Or, An Equal Chance for Both Boys and Girls (1874) argued for the equal and co-education of both genders.

Eliza Bisbee Duffey also authored books about women's health and physical and sexual education, What Women Should Know (1873) and The Relations of the Sexes (1876).

In the 1870s, she wrote of unwanted martial sex, and argued that it exhausted and damaged women's bodies. She wrote about marital rape, which the law at the time did not recognize as rape, and she argued that brutality should be sufficient grounds for divorce. In one of her articles, she wrote that women were "no more bound to yield to her body to her husband after the marriage between them, than she was before, until she feels that she can do with the full tide of willingness and affection."

Like most feminists of her time, she also firmly opposed abortion. In The Relations of the Sexes, she states that "The act of abortion which I had hitherto regarded as a trivial thing, at once became in my eyes the grossest misdemeanor—nay, the most aggravated crime. Being guided by this experience, I judge that this offence is perpetrated by women who are totally ignorant of the laws of their being. Consequently, the surest preventative against this crime will be a thorough teaching to women, even before marriage, of the physiology, hygiene, duties and obligations of maternity."

In the same study, she also described the unborn as having a human nature: "From the moment of conception, the embryo is a living thing, leading a distinct, separate existence from the mother, though closely bound to her. From almost the earliest stage, the form of the future being is indicated, and it has separate heart-beats, distinctly perceptible through the intervening tissues of the mother's body, which cover it. It is a human being to all intents and purposes. The period called quickening is a merely fictitious period, which does not indicate the first motion of the embryo. These first motions are not usually detected… until they have acquired considerable force."