Free Love - History of Free Love Movements - 19th Century United States

19th Century United States

Christian socialist writer John Humphrey Noyes has been credited with coining the term free love in the mid-19th century, although he preferred to use the term 'complex marriage'. Noyes founded the Oneida Society in 1848, a utopian community that " conventional marriage both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over women". He found scriptural justification: "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Noyes also supported eugenics; and only certain people were allowed to become parents. Another movement was established in Berlin Heights, Ohio.

Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individual's self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, marriage laws and anti-birth control measures. The most important American free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer (1883–1907) edited by Moses Harman and Lois Waisbrooker but also there existed Ezra Heywood and Angela Heywood's The Word (1872–1890, 1892–1893). Also M. E. Lazarus was an important American individualist anarchist who promoted free love.

Elements of the free-love movement also had links to abolitionist movements, drawing parallels between slavery and "sexual slavery" (marriage), and forming alliances with black activists. They also had many opponents, and Moses Harman spent two years in jail after a court determined that a journal he published was "obscene" under the notorious Comstock Law. In particular, the court objected to three letters to the editor, one of which described the plight of a woman who had been raped by her husband, tearing stitches from a recent operation after a difficult childbirth and causing severe hemorrhaging. The letter lamented the woman's lack of legal recourse. Ezra Heywood, who had already been prosecuted under the Comstock Law for a pamphlet attacking marriage, reprinted the letter in solidarity with Harman and was also arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.

Victorian feminist Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first woman to run for presidency in the U.S. in 1872, was also called "the high priestess of free love". In 1871, Woodhull wrote:

Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!

The women's movement, free love and Spiritualism were three strongly linked movements at the time, and Woodhull was also a spiritualist leader. Like Noyes, she also supported eugenics. Fellow social reformer and educator Mary Gove Nichols was happily married (to her second husband), and together they published a newspaper and wrote medical books and articles, a novel, and a treatise on marriage, in which they argued the case for free love. Both Woodhull and Nichols eventually repudiated free love.

Publications of the movement in the second half of the 19th century included Nichols' Monthly, The Social Revolutionist, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (ed. Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Clafin), The Word (ed. Ezra Heywood), Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (ed. Moses Harman) and the German-language Detroit newspaper Der Arme Teufel (ed. Robert Reitzel). Organisations included the New England Free Love League, founded with the assistance of American libertarian Benjamin Tucker as a spin off from the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL). A minority of freethinkers also supported free love.

The most radical free love journal was The Social Revolutionist, published in the 1856-1857, by John Patterson. The first volume consisted of twenty writers, of which only one was a woman.

In an edition of Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, there is a blurb about women and marriage:

in order to live the purest life, must be free, must enjoy the full privilege of soliciting the love of any man, or of none, if she so desires. She must be free and independent socially, industrially," -- Page 265. This is only one specimen of the many radical and vitally important truths contained in "A CITYLESS AND COUNTRYLESS WORLD," by Henry Olerich. Bound in red silk, with gold lettering on side and back; nearly 400 pages. Read it and you will see the defects of paternalism as set forth by Bellamy. Price $1. For sale at this office.

This quote demonstrated the journal's fight to get women to see the light of how marriage truly was in the early 20th century.

In 1852, a writer named Marx Edgeworth Lazarus published a tract entitled "Love vs. Marriage pt. 1," in which he portrayed marriage as "incompatible with social harmony and the root cause of mental and physical impairments." Lazarus intertwined his writings with his religious teachings, a factor that made the Christian community more tolerable to the free love idea.

Sex radicals were not alone in their fight against marriage ideals. Other 19th century Americans saw this social institution as flawed, but hesitated to abolish it. Groups such as the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Latter-day Saints were wary of the social notion of marriage. These organizations and sex radicals believed that true equality would never exist between the sexes as long as the church and the state continued to work together, worsening the problem of subordination of wives to their husbands.

The free love movement evolved through four stages between 1853 and 1910. The first stage was a collective stage, where sex radicals put out print materials. The second stage was when the sex radicals encountered strong opposition; editors risked being arrested for writing about sexual topics. During the third stage, sex radicals challenged the government’s power to control women’s bodies and their private lives. The fourth and final stage was when the movement started to lose its drive. A new type of women’s movement was born, thus making it impossible to keep the free love movement alive.