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Free love
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The term free love has been used since at least the nineteenth century to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage, especially for women. Much of the free-love tradition is an offshoot of anarchism, and reflects a civil libertarian philosophy that seeks freedom from State regulation and Church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations.
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The term free love has been used since at least the nineteenth century to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage, especially for women. Much of the free-love tradition is an offshoot of anarchism, and reflects a civil libertarian philosophy that seeks freedom from State regulation and Church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations. In addition, some free-love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure. In the Victorian era, this was a radical notion.
While the phrase free love is often associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination, especially in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, historically the free-love movement has not advocated multiple sexual partners or short-term sexual relationships. Rather, it has argued that love relations that are freely entered into should not be regulated by law. Thus, free-love practice may include long-term monogamous relationships or even celibacy, but would not include institutional forms of polygamy, such as a king and his wives and concubines.
Laws of particular concern to free love movements have included those that prevent an unmarried couple from living together, and those that regulate adultery and divorce, as well as age of consent, birth control, homosexuality, abortion, and prostitution; although not all free lovers agree on these issues. The abrogation of individual rights in marriage is also a concern—for example, some jurisdictions do not recognise spousal rape or treat it less seriously than non-spousal rape. Free-love movements since the 19th century have also defended the right to publicly discuss sexuality and have battled obscenity laws.
In the 20th century, some free-love proponents extended the critique of marriage to argue that marriage as a social institution encourages emotional possessiveness and psychological enslavement.
Free love and the women's movement
The history of free love is entwined with the history of feminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, and many have advocated its abolition. A married woman was solely a wife and mother, denying her the opportunity to pursue other occupations; sometimes this was legislated, as with bans on married women and mothers in the teaching profession. In 1855, free love advocate Mary Gove Nichols described marriage as the "annihilation of women," explaining that women were considered to be men's property in law and public sentiment, making it possible for tyrannical men to deprive their wives of all freedom. For example, the law allowed a husband to physically discipline his wife. In response, free love feminists stressed the anarchist concept of self-ownership in the context of sexual self-determination. Free love advocates like Nichols argued that many children are born into unloving marriages out of compulsion, but should instead be the result of choice and affection—yet children born out of wedlock did not have the same rights as children with married parents.
Sex, to proponents of free love, was not only about reproduction. Access to birth control was considered a means to women's independence, and leading birth-control activists like Margaret Sanger also embraced free love.
However, many of the leaders of first-wave feminism attacked free love. To them, women's suffering could be traced to the moral degradation of men, and by contrast, women were portrayed as virtuous and in control of their passions, and they should serve as a model for men's behaviour. Some feminists of the late 20th century would interpret the free-love ethic of the 1960s and 1970s as a manipulative strategy against a woman's ability to say no to sex.
History of free love movements
Historical precedents
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned both marriage and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. An early Christian sect known as the Adamites—which flourished in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries—also rejected marriage. They practised nudism while engaging in worship and considered themselves free of original sin.
In the 6th century AD, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage, and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership. One folk story from the period that contains a mention of a free-love (and nudist) community under the sea is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (c. 8th century).
Karl Kautsky, writing in 1895, noted that a number of "communistic" movements throughout the Middle Ages also rejected marriage. Typical of such movements, the Cathars of 10th to 14th century Western Europe freed followers from all moral prohibition and religious obligation, but respected those who lived simply, avoided the taking of human or animal life, and were celibate. Women had an uncommon equality and autonomy, even as religious leaders. The Cathars and similar groups (the Waldenses, Apostle brothers, Beghards and Beguines, Lollards, and Hussites) were branded as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church and suppressed. Other movements shared their critique of marriage but advocated free sexual relations rather than celibacy, such as the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, Taborites, and Picards.
18th and 19th century Europe
In 1789, radical Swedenborgians August Nordenskjöld and C.B. Wadström published the Plan for a Free Community, in which they proposed the establishment of a society of sexual liberty, where slavery was abolished and the "European" and the "Negro" lived together in harmony. In the treatise, marriage is criticised as a form of political repression. The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where such ideas could flourish. Though at first an ardent, even dogmatic supporter of such liberating aspects of the Revolution, in his policies as Emperor Napoleon later repudiated them, a move typical of revolutionaries who come to power. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins) supported the French Revolution, abolitionism, feminism, and free love. Among them was William Blake, who explicitly compares the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).
Another member of the circle was pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn't marry her partner, Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of the Terror of the French Revolution. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay's infidelity, and not least because Imlay abandoned her for good, Wollstonecraft's belief in free love survived. She developed a relationship with early English anarchist William Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry, just days before her death due to complications at parturition. In an act understood to support free love, their child, Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Percy also wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in the prose notes of Queen Mab (1813), in his essay On Love (c1815) and in the poem Epipsychidion (1821):
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion...
Free love has this, different from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Sharing the free-love ideals of the earlier social movements—as well as their feminism, pacifism, and simple communal life—were the utopian socialist communities of early-19th-century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France, Robert Owen in England, and, perhaps most far-reachingly, the German composer Richard Wagner. Fourier, who coined the term feminism, argued that true freedom could only occur without masters, without the ethos of work, and without suppressing passions: the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long as people are not abused, and that "affirming one's difference" can actually enhance social integration. The Saint-Simonian feminist Pauline Roland took a free-love stance against marriage, having four children in the 1830s, all of whom bore her name. Wagner's position seems quite similar; he not only advocated something like free love in several of his works, he practiced what he preached, and began a family with Cosima Liszt, then still married to the conductor Hans von Buelow. Cosima had been one of three children born out of wedlock to the ultra-popular Hungarian composer and pianist Ferenc (Franz) Liszt by Countess Marie d'Agoult. Though apparently scandalous at the time, such liaisons seemed the actions of admired artists who were following the dictates of their own wills, rather than those of social convention, and in this way they were in step with their era's liberal philosophers of the cult of passion, such as Fourier, and their actual or eventual openness can be understood to be a prelude to the freer ways of the Twentieth Century. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke occasionally in favor of something like free love, but when he proposed marriage to that famous practitioner of it, Lou Andreas-Salome, she berated him for being inconsistent with his philosophy of the free and supramoral Superman, a criticism that Nietzsche seems to have taken seriously, or to have at least been stung by. The relationship between composer Frederic Chopin and writer George Sand can be understood as exemplifying free love in a number of ways. Behavior of this kind by figures in the public eye did much to erode the credibility of conventionalism in relationships, especially when such conventionalism brought actual unhappiness to its practitioners.
That European outpost, Australia, which began its existence as a penal colony, had a much more flexible view of cohabitation and sexual bonding than was known in Europe itself at the time, "Neither the male nor the female convicts thought it was disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock."
19th century United States
Christian socialist writer John Humphrey Noyes has been credited with coining the term 'free love' in the mid-nineteenth century, although he preferred to use the term 'complex marriage'. Noyes founded the Oneida Society in 1848, a utopian community that "[rejected] 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.
A number of individualist anarchists and feminists in the U.S. embraced free love from the late 19th century, such as Josiah Warren, Lois Waisbrooker, Lillian Harman, Moses Harman, Angela Heywood, Ezra Heywood, and Benjamin Tucker. They viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individual's self-ownership, stressing women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women. A number of communities from a range of class backgrounds adopted free-love ideas, which sought to separate the state from sexual matters, such as marriage, adultery, divorce, age of consent, and birth control.
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, Woodhall 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!" (November 20, 1871)
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 (1810–1884) 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 Benjamin Tucker as a spin off from the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL). A minority of freethinkers also supported free love.
Turn of the 20th century
United Kingdom
Toward the end of the 19th century in the United Kingdom, free love was a topic of discussion among a minority of freethinkers, socialists, and feminists. Many of them were associated with The Fellowship of the New Life, such as Olive Schreiner and Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was one of the first writers to defend homosexuality in the English language. Like many of the movements before them who were associated with free love, the group also favored a simple communal life, pacifism, and vegetarianism. The best-known modern British advocate of free love was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, later Third Earl Russell, who said that he did not believe he really knew a woman until he had made love with her. Coming from one of the best-respected minds of the 20th century, this remark cannot be ignored as mere Don Juanism. Russell consistently addressed aspects of free love throughout his voluminous writings, and was not personally content with conventional monogamy until extreme old age.
Australia
There was also an interest in free love among the late 19th-century Left in Australia. In 1886, the Melbourne Anarchist Club led a debate on the topic, and a couple of years later released an anonymous pamphlet on the subject: 'Free Love—Explained and Defended' (possibly written by David Andrade or Chummy Fleming). The view of the Anarchist Club was formed in part as a reaction to the infamous Whitechapel Murders by the notorious Jack the Ripper; his atrocities were at the time popularly understood by some - at least, by anarchists - to be a violation of the freedom of certain extreme classes of "working women," but by extension of all women. Newcastle libertarian Alice Winspear, the wife of pioneer socialist William Robert Winspear, wrote: "Let us have freedom—freedom for both man and woman—freedom to earn our bread in whatever vocation is best suited to us, and freedom to love where we like, and to live only with those whom we love, and by whom we are loved in return." A couple of decades later, the Melbourne anarchist feminist poet Lesbia Harford also championed free love.
United States
Anarchist free-love movements continued into early 1900s in bohemian circles in New York's Greenwich Village. A group of Villagers lived free-love ideals and promoted them in the political journal The Masses and its sister publication The Little Review, a literary journal. Incorporating influences from the writings of English homosexual socialist Edward Carpenter and international sexologist Havelock Ellis, women such as Emma Goldman campaigned for a range of sexual freedoms, including homosexuality and access to contraception. Other notable figures among the Greenwich-Village scene who have been associated with free love include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Ida Rauh, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce; a certain extreme was reached by self-proclaimed Satanist Anton LaVey. Dorothy Day also wrote passionately in defense of free love, women's rights, and contraception—but later, after converting to Catholicism, she criticized the sexual revolution of the sixties.
The development of the idea of free love in the United States cannot be discussed without mention being made of the well-known publisher Hugh Marston Hefner, with whose activities over more than a half century the project of popularizing the idea of free love finally reached the perception of the public at large, at a time when it was impossible to completely suppress. Indeed, Hefner is considered by many to be the hero of the movement. When Hefner's magazine Playboy began to be criticized as shallow and amoral, Hefner articulated in a book-length series of essays, and he certainly has lived, what he calls "the Playboy Philosophy." He has said that the Playboy Philosophy was "a response to political, personal, and economic repression," and that it makes "a case for personal freedom not unrelated to... the American Dream." By no means an opportunistic organ of fly-by-night libertines, the magazine often criticizes the truly amoral and has helped millions of people with all aspects of the free love project, including hygiene and not least, common sense. Hefner's version of free love resembles those of antecedent philosophers as little as most popular movements do, but is the most robust free love effort to date, and cannot be discounted. It is not least significant for the way it fits into and promotes many other aspects of popular culture that also support the idea of free love, notably popular music and film.
Japan
The anarchist feminist, social critic, novelist, and Emma Goldman translator Noe Ito (1895–1923) and her lover, fellow anarchist Sakae Osugi (1885–1923), promoted free love in Japan. The entire nation was shocked by their extrajudicial execution by a squad of military police in what became known as the Amakasu Incident, after the name of its perpetrator, who was imprisoned for his crime. Their story is told in the 1969 movie Erosu purasu Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre).
USSR
After the October Revolution in Russia, Alexandra Kollontai became the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration. Kollontai was also a champion of free love. In what may be an apocryphal conversation, she defended free love to Lenin, saying "Love should be free, like drinking water from a glass." Lenin is supposed to have replied, "but who wants to drink from a soiled glass?" Clara Zetkin recorded that Lenin opposed free love as "completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social". Zetkin also recounted Lenin's denouncement of plans to organise Hamburg’s women prostitutes into a “special revolutionary militant section”: he saw this as “corrupt and degenerate.”
Despite the traditional marital lives of Lenin and most Bolsheviks, they believed that sexual relations were outside the jurisdiction of the state. The Soviet government abolished centuries-old Czarist regulations on personal life, which had prohibited homosexuality and made it difficult for women to obtain divorce permits or to live singly. There is evidence that this caused a small-scale renaissance in non-traditional love, not only among intellectuals but also the working class. However, by the end of the 1920s, Stalin's centrist faction had taken over the Communist Party and begun to implement socially conservative policies. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and free love was further demonized.
France
In the bohemian districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse, many were determined to shock the "bourgeois" sensibilities of the society they grew up in; many, such as the anarchist Benoît Broutchoux, favored free love. At the same time, the cross-dressing radical activist Madeleine Pelletier practised celibacy, distributed birth-control devices and information, and performed abortions.
Germany
In Germany, from 1891 to 1919, the Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women's Associations) called for a boycott of marriage and for the enjoyment of sexuality. Founded by Lily Braun and Minna Cauer, the league also aimed to organise prostitutes into labor unions, taught contraception, and supported the right to abortion and the abolition of criminal penalties against homosexuality, as well as running child-care programs for single mothers. In 1897, teacher and writer Emma Trosse published a brochure titled Ist freie Liebe Sittenlosigkeit? ("Is free love immoral?"). The worldwide homosexual emancipation movement also began in Germany in the late 19th century, and many of the thinkers whose work inspired sexual liberation in the 20th century were also from the German-speaking world, such as Sigmund Freud, Otto Gross, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich.
1940s - 1960s
From the late 1940s to the 1960s, the bohemian free-love tradition of Greenwich Village was carried on by the beat generation, although differing with their predecessors by being an apparently male-dominated movement. The Beats also produced the first appearance of male homosexual champions of free love in the U.S., with writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Like some of those before, the beats challenged a range of social conventions, and they found inspiration in such aspects of black culture as jazz music. The Beat movement led on the West Coast to the activities of such groups as the Merry Pranksters (led, according to Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally, not by novelist Ken Kesey, but by hipster and driver Neal Cassady) and the entire San Francisco pop music scene, in which the implications of sexual bohemianism were advanced in a variety of ways by the hippies. With the Summer of Love in 1967, the eccentricities of this group became a nationally recognized movement. The study of sexology continued to gain prominence throughout the era, with the works of researchers like Alfred Kinsey lending a new legitimacy to challenges to traditional values regarding sex and marriage.
The sexual revolution and beyond
Free love became a prominent phrase used by and about the new social movements and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, typified by the Summer of Love in 1967 and the slogan "make love not war". Unrestrained sexuality became a new norm in some of these youth movements, leading certain feminists to critique the 60s/70s "free love" as a way for men to pressure women into sex; women who said "no" could be characterized as prudish and uptight.
In the 1980s, concerns over AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases tempered the promiscuity of the 1970s, but many of the sexual reforms advocated by earlier free-love movements had become mainstream: legalisation of adultery, birth control, and homosexuality; freedom in choosing love, sex, or both; and women's rights in general. Chastity, virginity, and subservience in marriage had much less power as social ideals for women.
Modern descendants of free love could be seen to include the polyamory and queer movements of the 1990s and contemporary sex radicals like Susie Bright, Patrick Califia, and Annie Sprinkle. Though they don't often identify as free lovers, modern movements around the world against arranged marriage and forced marriage in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe share many of the same goals as the free-love movement.
Legal aspects of the fruit of free love are far from settled. Some gains in the women's rights movement have reversed, rather than corrected, the injustices of the past. For example, an unwed father has no right to see his child in the State of New York. American composer Max Schubel found himself in this category, and wrote the New York theater piece Rubber Court to bring wider attention to the problem.
Free love in the arts
Books:
Comic Books:
- Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, follows the adventures of a tribe of elves who, among other things, consider free love completely natural. The tribe in question freely lets its members decide their number of sexual partners, even allowing them to choose none or establish a monogamous relationship if that is what the elf/elves in question desire.
Films:
Songs:
- "Free Love Freeway" Written and sung by Ricky Gervais, who starred as David Brent in the highly acclaimed British comedy The Office
- "Freelove": Written by Martin Gore. From Depeche Mode's 2001 album Exciter
- "Unsheathed" from Live's 1997 album Secret Samadhi contains the chorus "Free love is a world I can't linger too long in/Free love was just another party for the hippies to ruin", although any specific objections are very unclear.
- "The Concept Of Love" by Hideki Naganuma (as featured in both the Jet Set Radio Future and Ollie King original soundtracks) contains a strong theme of free love, including a number of recurring sampled audio clips concerning the topic.
See also
Further reading
- Victoria Woodhull, Free Lover: Sex, Marriage And Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull (Seattle: Inkling, 2005) ISBN 1-58742-050-3
- Stoehr, Taylor, ed. Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: AMS Press, 1977).
- Sears, Hal, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, KS: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977
- Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ISBN 0-252-02804-X.
- Martin Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)
- Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, 1999, ISBN 0-06-095332-2
- Goldman, Emma, (New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911)
- Françoise Basch, Rebelles américaines au XIXe siècle : mariage, amour libre et politique (Paris : Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990).
- Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner (Cambridge, 1978), ISBN 0 521 28254.
- Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, the Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York, 2002), ISBN 0 7679 1186 5
- Hugh M. Hefner, The Playboy Philosophy, Playboy Magazine, December 1962 through May 1965 issues.
- Open History, A Japanese History Website (This reference needs confirmation).
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