Encyclopedia
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 has a civil libertarian philosophy that seeks freedom from State regulation and Church interference in personal relationships. In addition, some free love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure.
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. Rather, it has argued that love relations which 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 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 twentieth 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 lover 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 lovers 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 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 women'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 marriage and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally and were pacifist vegetarians. An early christian sect known as the
Adamites that 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 rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership. One folk story from the period that reflects a vision of a free love society is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" from
The Book of One Thousand and One Nights .
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 were branded as heretics by the
Catholic Church and brutally 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. A group of radical intellectuals in England 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 .
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 partner Gilbert Imlay, despite the two having a child together. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay's infidelity, 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. Their child,
Mary took up with the English romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Percy also wrote in defence of free love in the prose notes of Queen Mab , in his essay
On Love and in the poem
Epipsychidion :
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 and
Robert Owen in England. 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.
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" . 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 of 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" , 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 , 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!"
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 , and together they published a newspaper, 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 nineteenth century included Nichols' Monthly, The Social Revolutionist, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly , The Word , Lucifer, the Light-Bearer and the German-language Detroit newspaper Der Arme Teufel . 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 . A minority of
freethinkers also supported free love.
Turn of the 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.
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' .
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 and Neith Boyce.
Dorothy Day also wrote passionately in defence of free love, women's rights, and contraception — but later, after converting to Catholicism, she criticised the sexual revolution of the sixties.
Japan
The anarchist feminist
Ito Noe and her lover, the male anarchist
Osugi Sakae , promoted free love in
Japan. They were murdered by a squad of
military police. Their story is told in the 1969 movie
Erosu purasu Gyakusatsu .
USSR
in Russia,
Alexandra Kollontai, the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration, was ridiculed for her support for free love by male party heavyweights such as
Lenin.
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 favored free love. At the same time, the
cross-dressing radical activist
Madeleine Pelletier practised celibacy, distributed birth control and performed abortions.
Germany
In Germany, from 1891 to 1919, the
Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine 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? . 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 in 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 found inspiration in aspects of black culture . The tradition 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; personal freedom in choosing love and/or sex; and women's rights in general. Chastity, virginity, and subservience in marriage had much less power as social ideals for women.
Modern descendents 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.
Free love in the arts
Books:- H. C. M. Watson, Erchomenon; or the Republic of Materialism : A free love utopia.
- Robert A. Heinlein explored the concept of free love throughout his writing career, starting with his first novel in 1939. In Stranger in a Strange Land , Protagonist Valentine Michael Smith founds his own church preaching free love.
- Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series : Some of the cultures and individuals of Darkover reject marriage. A freely chosen partner is known as a freemate.
Films:- "Free Love": 1930 film starring Conrad Nagel, directed by Hobart Henley, written by Winifred Dunn, Sidney Howard and Edwin Knopf.
- "Amor libre": 1978 film directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, written by Francisco Sánchez.
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.
See also
- Sexual norm
- New Woman
- Open marriage
- Polyamory
References
Further reading
- Stoehr, Taylor, ed. Free Love in America: A Documentary History .
- Sears, Hal, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America *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
- Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, 1999, ISBN 0-06-095332-2
- Françoise Basch, Rebelles américaines au XIXe siècle : mariage, amour libre et politique .
