Free Love in 19th Century
Passet makes clear that the late century convergence of free love discourse with eugenics created a significant divide in the movement along gender lines: “For several decades, sex radical men and women did share a commitment to women’s reproductive autonomy, but… significant gender and generational differences developed by the late 1890s.” Passet repeatedly holds men responsible for eugenic thought, and places women in uniform opposition to it.
We might read their calls for sexual freedom as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to”.
The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America by Hal Sears (1977) was the first major study of the 19th century free love movement
focused primarily on the Kansas free love circle and the publication Lucifer, the Light Bearer
Free Love in America: A Documentary History ed. by Taylor Stoehr (1979) https://www.amazon.com/Free-Love-America-Documentary-History/dp/0404160344
“Women in particular stood to gain from some new sexual dispensation, and thus it is not surprising that every militant free lover, male or female, was also a feminist.”
Agitation for free love began as early as Fanny Wright’s claims in the 1830s, though it did not become more widespread until the 1870s when the movement began its more feminist leanings. In the 1850s, communes such as Berlin Heights in Ohio, Modern Times on Long Island, and Oneida in New Yourk emerged as places where “perfectionists” could practice the values of free love.
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1850s emergence of free love organisations, such as Free Love League in New York where philosopher Stephen Andrews led group meetings.
First Woman to Own a Brokerage Firm, start a Weekly Newspaper, Advocate of Women’s Rights
first publisher of the Communist Manifesto in the United States
First Woman to Run for President (1872) it would be 50 years before women could vote, but there was no law preventing women from running for officearrested for activism “a
“bridge connecting the utopian free love threories” of the communes to the anarchist free lovers of the late nineteenth century. (Passet, Sex Radicals)
“The great advocate of the female-first model of intercourse in the nineteenth century was Victoria Woodhull. She understood that rape was slavery; not less than slavery in its insult to human integrity and human dignity. She acknowledged some of the fundamental questions of female freedom presented by intercourse in her imperious insistence that women had a natural right–a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself–to be entirely self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what the sex is and will be.” [Dworkin, Intercourse]
“ To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold . . .”[ quoted in Dworkin, Intercourse – source The Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. Madeleine B. Sterm 1974]
Tennessee Claflin – Woodhull’s sistes – both famous 1870s
Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radacalism in America 1825-1860 (1988) by John C. Spurlock
Sex Radicalism in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920 by Angus McLaren
A Sex Revolution by Lois Waisbrooker
Feminist
Natty Seidenverg: https://loveradical.wordpress.com/ (2009)
The stereotype about the 1960’s free love movement has to do with the patriarchal appropriation of freedom and sexuality-the idea that the only place for a woman in a movement is prone, or that women are not “radical” enough if they do not succumb to the desires of their male comrades. But the 1960’s/1970’s free love movement was rooted in an earlier free love movement of the late 1800’s.
The early free love movement was about the right of everyone to say yes to love and sex, as well as to say no.
https://polywog.wordpress.com/nineteenth-century-free-love-and-the-politics-of-location-a-historiography/ (December 2007) by Natty Seidenverg.
Essay promoting Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality by Joanne Passet, (2003) feminist analysis of the free love movement:
“a smaller number defined it as variety (multiple partners, simultaneously) in sexual relationships…. No matter what their practical interpretation of free love, they shared two core convictions: opposition to the idea of coercion in sexual relationships and advocacy of a woman’s right to determine the uses of her body.[5]
That Passet added a second tenet—women’s rights to their bodies—to free love’s core convictions reveals her larger argument, that previous historians have not done justice to women in the movement. In a 2005 critical discourse analysis of two free love periodicals, sociologist Sandra Schroer similarly found that no common “unified understanding of Free Love and its principles existed.”[6]
Dora Forster’s 1905 book, The Sex Radicals as Seen by an Emancipated Woman of the New Time gives some clues as to the meaning of the term when she uses it interchangeably with “sex reformers.”[8]
Passet makes an important distinction between two types of sex reformers: social purity reformers and sex radicals. Although they shared many goals, their methods were quite opposite:
Advocates of social purity reform also believed that imposition of their standards of sexual behavior would solve many of society’s problems. Thus, they determined ‘to achieve a set of controls over sexuality’ that would protect women from sexual danger because they were ‘structured through the family’ and ‘enforced through law and/or social morality.’ Initially, social purity reformers and sex radicals shared some core convictions, for instance, the importance of consensual sex for women. But over time the social purity campaign’s repressive tendencies ‘overwhelmed its liberatory aspects’ for [sex radical] women.[9]
Schroer (2005) strives toward objectivity in her study by offering the reader a list of supposedly all the publications which advocated free love between 1850 and 1902, but she forgot Benjamin Tucker’s well known Liberty based in New York. She then limited her sources by four criteria, the first of which that the journals had to be from utopian communities only.
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While all historians agree on the important implications the movement had for women, many disagree on the politics of gender and feminism within the movement. Among their disagreements are whether the movement was inherently feminist, whether a controversial non-feminist sex reformer John Humphrey Noyes was or was not a free lover
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‘Victoria Woodhull’s free-love agitation in the early seventies marked the end of the serious and widespread discussion of sexual alternatives in nineteenth-century America.”[23]
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Passet describes free love as inextricably linked to nineteenth century feminism. Passet understands free love to be a “dimension of the nineteenth-century movement for women’s rights” and “at its core a feminist movement.”[25]
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Hal Sears offers 19th century utopian colonist John Humphrey Noyes the important position of first quoted “free lover” in his book. Passet, however, wrote him out of the free love movement entirely. Because Noyes “placed sexuality and reproduction under communal control,” he was not a free lover.
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Passet makes clear that the late century convergence of free love discourse with eugenics created a significant divide in the movement along gender lines: “For several decades, sex radical men and women did share a commitment to women’s reproductive autonomy, but… significant gender and generational differences developed by the late 1890s.” Passet repeatedly holds men responsible for eugenic thought, and places women in uniform opposition to it.
Charles Erskine Scott Wood, an Oregon elite, and Luisa Capetillo, a working class Puerto Rican, wrote and lived free love in the first decades of the 20th century.
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Because free love is a politics against the state, the state outlines its contours of resistance. They are, in a way, mutually constitutive.
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Pam McAllister stated in her 1985 introduction to Lois Waisbrooker’s A Sex Revolution that “‘free love’ during the Victorian era referred not to unrestrained lustful pursuits, but to the belief that love and sexual relations should be free of coercion from church, state, or hedonistic urgings.”
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Self-identified radicals in the Pacific Northwest and Puerto Rico, including Charles Erskine Scott Wood, the Portland radical publication The Firebrand, those who lived at the Home Colony in Washington
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Stansell accurately, finds that CES WOODs “free love justified his excursions outside marriage and at the same time allowed him to hold on to marriages safeties. In a peculiarly fin-de-siècle manner, he melded anarchist tenets of personal liberty, Romantic sonorities about Truth and Beauty, and a lyrical celebration of female sexual power… to embellish his seductions and betrayals with higher morality.”
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to Portland, Oregon anarchists, the lush nature of the undeveloped Pacific Northwest offered “one last opportunity to create a workable alternative to the dehumanizing industrial system so much a feature of life in the commercial and manufacturing centers of the eastern United States and Europe.”[37] Land was cheap and fertile surrounding the Puget Sound in Washington[38], and radicals congregated there on five utopian communities to escape the increasingly unhealthy city life of Portland, Tacoma, and Seattle at the turn of the 20th century.[39]
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By the 1890’s utopian experiments were fading in popularity across the country as realism overgrew idealism.
Among the five communities near Puget Sound, one, the Home community, played a significant role in the free love movement, publishing important publications—Discontent: Mother of Progress, The Demonstrator, and Why?— and embodying the ideas that they touted.