Alpha, The.
A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Cause of Woman and Reform / Human Rights before all Laws and Constitution. The Divine Right of Every Child to be Born Well.
1875--1888? Monthly
Washington, D.C.. Publisher: Moral Education Society of Washington. Editor: Caroline B. Winslow, M.D.
Corporate author: Moral Education Society of Washington, D.C.1/1, September 1875-August 1888(?) The preserved copies of the journal start in 1877, but the journal existed as early as the fall of 1875, when it was advertised in The Spiritual Scientist. This was the organ of the Moral Education Society of Washington, D.C., whose works on "Pre-Natal Culture" and women generally were noted in The Banner of Light and Religio-Philosophical Journal in the 1880s. Peter Davidson in The Occult Magazine also noted the journal, sent him by Josephine Cables in Rochester (see the note on her under The Occult Word), and says the society was devoted to moral purity and progressive reform. More generally, it was devoted to "all questions on human development, Physiology, Hygiene, Heredity, Pre-Natal Culture, Marriage, Education and all questions that will elevate the race and elevate vice." Winslow (1822-1896) was a pioneering woman physician (a graduate of J.R. Buchanan's Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati), reformer, and suffragist. Her bust, along with those of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The general topics of the journal aroused the suspicions of the Reverend William Alexander Ayton, who, like Davidson and Cables was then active in the H.B. of L:

"I have lately seen copies of some American journals. One of these the Alpha touches very plainly on the Sexual subject, & I daresay will open many people's eyes to what has been a frightful abuse. However, I think I perceive that P.B.R.'s [Paschal Beverly Randolph's] works have inspired the writer in this journal." Letter to American head of H.B. of L., May 19, 1885.

In actuality, the Alphaites or Alphites were far more concerned with total sexual abstinence, eugenics, and the possibility of women conceiving without the assistance of living men--ideas which had their role in the New Thought occult amalgam. LOC microfilm; National Library of Medicine; Library Company of Philadelphia.

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