by Alice Bunker Stockham (Author)
1896. Karezza was a name coined (from the Italian for caress) by the Victorian reformer Alice Bunker Stockham. It refers to non-religious spiritual sexual practices that draw upon tantric techniques of body control but do not involve any of tantra's cultural or iconographic symbolism. Stockham, an Ob-Gyn from Chicago, and the fifth woman to be made a doctor in the United States, traveled to northern India to learn the secrets of tantra-for example, control of the orgasm response-but she did not have any interest in Eastern religions and she felt that such addenda to the methods were not essential. Her view of spirituality was basically Quaker-Christian, and she fitted sacred sexuality into a Christian paradigm with no apparent difficulty. A most interesting read.