re-membering

The misconceptions described below call for a remembering of free love history. A deeper look at free love’s history will reveal its contribution to feminism and radical political praxis. Free love history contributes substantive insights to current trends in polyamory and free love, radical intellectual history, and feminism and anarchism in America.

My interest in free love history includes a three-fold desire to understand the movement in terms of the politics of location (place, gender, and ideology). Mohanty defines the politics of location as “the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries that provide the ground for political definition and self-definition for contemporary U.S. feminists” (Feminism without Borders, 106). In her own work, Mohanty asks how the politics of location “determine and produce experience and difference as analytical and political categories” (106). In my work, I am interested in how the politics of location determined and produced free love thought.  Thus, in my readings of nineteenth century free love histories (written between 1977 and 2005) I have considered the politics of location generally, with an interest in historians’ varying considerations of gender, place, and ideology, and i have considered the politics of location specifically, with a desire to locate the experiences of anarchist free love advocates in the Pacific Northwest within the larger movement.

Taken together, the histories of free love in America and the histories of free love in the Pacific Northwest pose some interesting questions about gender: how closely were feminism and free love related? What amount of agency did women have in creating and effecting free love discourse? How do historians’ choices affect the way we remember women in the history of free love?

The juxtaposition of regionally and nationally oriented scholarship on free love creates a tension around the politics of physical location—the development and movement of knowledge through space. How does regionalism affect knowledge and experience? How does knowledge move through space, inter- and intra-regionally? How do historians deal with this relationship between place and politics? Do historians see differences in rural and urban free love discourse, or between Northwest, Midwest, and Northeast free love discourse? What are the repercussions of historical and geographical generalizations?

My interest in 19th century free love comes from a curiosity about incipient forms of anarcha-feminism and historical discourses on the radicalization of the private sphere (love, intimate relations, family, the home, etc). Anarcha-feminism is not simply women doing anarchism, and neither is it anarchism doing women’s rights. Free love has historically been a site of intersection between anarchism and feminism and is a part of an important intellectual lineage of anti-authoritarian theory and practice. I am interested in how the link between critiques of intrusive male dominance and intrusive state dominance have been connected at the site of free love, and how historians have made sense of this connection.

mis-conceptions

When most people, including feminists, think of “free love,” they think of 1960s and ’70s men coercing women into sex because it was the “liberated” thing to do. I was talking to my friend Claudia about this and we both expressed frustration that this sentiment–practically the only thing we ever hear about free love– serves to discredit the actual movement and ignore the women who claimed their agency, empowerment, and sexuality through it. It is ironic that this one-dimensional cultural memory (that free love=liberal male sexual coercion) has taken the place of what is in many ways opposite and contradictory to the tenets of the actual movement. It might be more accurately characterized as a nineteenth century movement against marital rape; an upsurge of radical male feminists; a historical moment in which women and men traded economic and political agency for personal and spiritual agency; an intellectual perspective in which exploitation in public and private spheres were understood as parallel and mutually enforcing; and a movement for women to take back their bodies. Perhaps free love ideas were distorted into a call for sexual obligation, but the core of the movement rested on the very opposite–a woman’s right to her own body, including the right to say no to sex even in marriage and the right to voluntary rather than coerced pregnancy and motherhood.

you are missed, dear one….

Thanks Eug.

Thanks for your thoughts, Eugene! Below is a response to your thoughts, a moment of dwelling on the parallels of interpersonal and economic exploitation, a moment of appreciation for what is “radical” about radical love, and finally, i thought I’d put out some specifics about what radical love is to me, in light of your own definition: “engaging in intimate and possibly romantic relationships while simultaneously maintaining unrestrained independence and the ability to pursue one’s own dreams.”

Your comments drew on the large and interconnected web of issues that our desire for ‘radical love’ is set within. You touched on the idea that radical love is connected to social and ecological sustainability, bodily integrity, language, and systems (i’m guessing economic systems but also social institutions like education and marriage) that support and encourage non-coercive behavior. I’m so glad you brought up the interconnectedness of these issues.

Love between people requires the logistical balance between interconnectedness and autonomy. It is important to understand that exploitative power often works via dependence: I am dependent on other people to make my clothes and grow, kill, or gather my food because i am not sophisticated enough to do it myself. Another individual (or hundreds) probably toil away their lives making/producing the things i buy because they have to have money to survive. Both groups are dependent, and exploitation rests on that relationship. Just as dependence in an economy leads to exploitative relationships, so too does dependence in love. Thus, as Maya Angelou wrote, “Every woman should have/ enough money within her control to move out/ and rent a place of her own, / even if she never wants to or needs to….” Free love to me means that each individual has as much autonomy as possible, because dependency is a trap.

I’m glad for your post because i think it is incredibly important to think about the interconnectedness of issues, and to understand what is at stake in our choices. Radical lovers are “radical” because we are actively choosing to live our lives as something other than symptoms of a diseased society. We are choosing to have the agency to not perpetuate the exploitation and domination we face on a daily basis by poisoning our relationships with it as well. As a result, we create (in my experience) mini environments in which the real freedom is a stark contrast to other definitions of “freedom” and “progress,” and i believe it creates a ripple effect, if even on the local level, in which noncoercive relationships shift political consciousness, creating happy “oh!” moments like flowers waking up in the sunshine…..

Ok. So Free Love is a Basket: and Here are Its Things.

Bodily Integrity–the freedom from bodily harm or physical coercion

Emotional Integrity–the freedom from emotional coercion (enforced obligation, blackmail, threat, etc)

Honesty and Respect

Choice–to live one’s life how she pleases and with whom as long as it does not encumber the freedom of others

The ability to leave–this is the most important for me because the ability to let another person go requires respect for that person’s bodily and emotional integrity, it requires an autonomy and self reliance, and it requires honest and self control.

In my experience, the depth of my relationships flow from the strength of these tenets. Since i’ve begun exploring radical love i have been poly, i have been with just one person, i have been alone, but i’ve never had a “boyfriend” or “girlfriend.” I’ve stopped using that language because it creates a false border. Love flows naturally between people, sexually or not, and creating a throne for sexual love in my life has only created unnecessary strife. It has created such absurdity as “leaving” or “breaking up” when the real desire has nothing to do with either of those words, but rather has to do with a shift in physicality between individuals. It creates a value dualism between friends and lovers which creates often false hierarchies and emotional coercion based on a sense of righteousness to another person’s priorities. It just creates a big mess! So in my life, everyone is a friend, and everyone is treated with the respect, autonomy, and mutuality of friendship. Sexual love is a terrible excuse to forget such basic concepts.

What is free love??

I’m in a women’s history masters program in New York, where I’m working on history and historiography projects about free love in the 1800s in the Pacific Northwest. When people ask what I’m researching, i feel like I’m that weird kid on the unicycle all over again. I used to get predictable comments that everyone thought were so brilliantly unique, most notably, “you lost your other wheel.” I’d hear it five, seven times a day and everyone would think they were so original! Now with free love, I get “I…I don’t think… Idon’tthinkIknowwhatthatis.” The other common response is “That is SO Awesome,” as if they know exactly what free love is and exactly what I’m all about based on those two words. One time, i was joyfully surprised to hear something to the extent of “oh, well if you need a contemporary experience for comparison….” But i don’t think he was serious! It was probably just an equivalent to the occasional unicycle joke that stands out from the rest.

So here are some historians’ definitions of 19th century free love:

“‘Free love’ is a problematic term because of its contradictory meanings. Mainstream newspaper editors and clergy, free love’s most vocal critics, called anyone who deviated from customary ideals of proper behavior a ‘free lover.’ Nineteenth century sex radicals further confused matters because they could not agree on the term’s application in daily life: for some it meant a lifelong and monogamous commitment to a member of the opposite sex, others envisioned it as serial monogamy, a few advocated chaste heterosexual relationships except when children were mutually desired, and a smaller number defined it as variety (multiple partners, simultaneously) in sexual relationships…. No matter what their practical interpreation 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” (Joanne Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality, 2).

“Free love simply allowed no coercion in sexual relations, whether from the legally prescribed duties of marriage or from the unrestricted urgings of libido…. Andrew Jackson Davis…summarized important principles of free love, among them the priority of female control in the sexual and generative relations, the irrelevancy of positive law to the attractions, the justification of seminal expenditure only for reproduction, and the attractional definition of marriage, which held that those who were joined by transcendental affinities were automatically and truly mated and that those who were not were divorced, regardless of legalities. Less conservative free lovers of later periods–such as Ezra Heywood, Victoria Woodhull, and Moses Hull in the 1870s, and the Moses Harman circle still later in the century–would add agitation for birth control and “free motherhood” to these principles and would disagree that coition could only be justified for procreation…” (Hal Sears, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America, 4-5).

“‘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. Sexual relations should be the result of spiritual affinity and love” (Lois Waisbrooker, A Sex Revolution, 3).

“To [Henry Addis], free love encompassed several anarchist tenets. It was at once a matter of personal freedom and an act of defiance of church and state. He believed that sexual freedom was as important as any other kind of freedom and wondered why a couple having decided that they could live more happily together than apart should not unite their lives without having to secure the permission of the church or state…. Furthermore, according to Addis, free love promised to liberate women from ‘sexual slavery’ by preventing men from holding ‘their’ wives in legal bondage” (Carlos A. Schwantes, Free Love and Free Speech on the Pacific Northwest Frontier, 282).

“‘Free love’” usually meant no more than marriage that could be entered and ended without coercion. ‘Free Motherhood’ similarly signified a situation in which the woman had the right to determine whether or not to bear children” (Angus McLaren, Sex Radicalism in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920, 533)

Fall in Bronxville. some joy

Agenda

Once again i’ve left my “sisters in struggle” class feeling like the most inarticulate, judged and judgmental person in it. In every other aspect of my life i feel that i can be collected and articulate even when i disagree with others, but not in this class. The books we are reading for this class have a consistent theme, even a celebration, of assimilation. My intellectual theme in this program so far is best described in this question: is it possible to write a history that does not reinforce dominant cultural values? The more i ask the question the more it becomes obvious to my classmates that i have somewhat of an agenda. However, i’m getting the sense that those who disagree with me do not see that they also have an agenda. Assimilation is an agenda–and it is reinforced page by page, book by book, historian by historian, feminist by feminist. It is reinforced in so many ways through so many actions, and yet somehow i feel redundant when i make the same claims about each book.

I thought that most feminists agreed or at least acknowledged that women stepping into traditionally middle/upper class white male roles is a problematic version of feminism. But there is very little in women’s history, as i have yet seen, that problematizes this.

Women’s History is a Basket, and in it are Women’s History’s Things:

one Thing is scholarship that acknowledges that women exist in and participate in history.

another Thing is scholarship that acknowledges how women struggled within their historical and social landscape to make their lives better.

another Thing is scholarship that acknowledges differences between and among groups of women and analyzes those differences.

I would guess (i’m only in my second month studying women’s history) that this is about as far as women’s historians have come, and it seems that they have stalled. I believe they’ve stalled for a few reasons:

1) They have no clear political agenda

I’m not suggesting that women’s historians should be unified, but rather that women’s or feminist history could grow from setting out agendas and analyzing history based on those agendas. They have set out a most basic agenda which is described above, but i am not clear on what, if anything, women’s historians plan to do with these “things.” The things are quite powerful. They could build a house or tear one down. They could form the basis for workers’ resistance or they could form a platform for a woman’s presidency. They could also plunder a people or strip an individual of her culture or values. They can also shape themselves into thin cloth-like material and form a veil for the delicate eyes of privileged students who want to believe in a linear social evolution of the human spirit, who want to believe that women have almost won the battle against patriarchy.

The “things” feminists have are useful, are tools potentially, but i don’t want to read one more book unless the author is very clear with me what kind of agenda she has set out for the things in her basket. I don’t want to read another book unless she tells me whether she has made these things into tools, platforms, veils, etc. I don’t want to read another book unless she tells me whether she is building a house or tearing one down. It is not enough to have the “things.” I need to know what she plans to do with them, before i will trust her.

2) They are stunted by the end goal of “equality”

The following is from a reading response about the ongoing equality vs. difference debate among feminist activists, theorists, and historians: Both the categories “equality” and “difference” are imaginative and strategic. Who is the standard bearer of equality? As bell hooks has noted, if women want to be equal to men, which men are they talking about–because men are not a single, homogeneous category themselves. In this society, I’m guessing, it would be the upper or middle class white male. But it is not physically possible for everyone to live like an upper class white male. To occupy this station requires the mass exploitation of human and non-human life. Is that feminist?
A common assumption is that if women were to occupy positions of power, they would for some reason make different choices than men. This seems to me to be sliding essentialism under the table while making an argument for equality. It obscures the fact that women, just as much as men, have the ability and potential to exploit and to ignore or reinforce oppression. Instead of focusing on ambiguous and ideological comparisons, I am interested in framing questions in terms of needs and desires, in terms of justice, in terms of sustainability. I need respect, bodily integrity, joy, challenge, and connection in my life. I need basics like healthy food, clean air, clean water, sleep, and warmth. If I do not have these, I am going to figure out why and work to change that. It does not matter (emphasis on the matter) whether I am “the same” or “different” from anyone else. It does not matter who is the standard-bearer or “equality.”

When people are so focused on equality, they are literally missing the point, which is justice. Equality is always relational, and the standard bearer of equality may not be one which can coexist with justice. As long as feminists ignore this, their actions and beliefs will be hospitable to such dangerous tendencies as imperialism, racism, classism, and the physical and psychological destruction of nature.

3) and thus, my third issue with feminism and women’s history: i believe that it is incredibly detrimental to attempt to understand people without considering nature. Wonderful Chaia Heller writes, and i wish i had the quote with me because i might get it wrong, that “as we radicalize our view of nature, we radicalize our view of culture.” Feminists and women’s historians continue to attempt to understand culture without considering their connection to nature. This leaves their understandings of culture impoverished and stunted. For instance, consider the definition of industrialization i recently quoted from wikipedia: “Industrialisation also introduces some form of philosophical change, or to a different attitude in the perception of nature.”  The week that i wrote that post i was fuming because i’d just read a celebratory history of women industrial workers. The book was unflinchingly celebrated of capitalism, consumerism, and assimilation. It is not the individuals–the women workers–who i am upset with, but the way the story was told, the presumptions the book makes, and the lessons it teaches. I bet lots of people walk away from that book feeling that “women have made it” and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. But women and nature are suffering so much more today than they were back then–is it feminist to celebrate that industrialism has been exported? Is equality only a meaningful goal within the borders of certain countries or colors while it rests on the backs of others (as well as the exploitation of nature)? I believe feminists would deepen and further their ultimate goals of living in a world without oppression if they replaced their obsession with quality as the standard-bearer with an obsession with nature and justice as the standard-bearers. What kind of lives would we be living to ensure that no one is oppressed? What kind of lives would we be living to ensure that the natural world too can breathe?

Purpose

This is an informal blog with an informal purpose. A general audience may find parts of it useful–particularly for those interested in how anarchism, feminism, and a radicalized perception of nature change the way one thinks about and practices love. But I write with my intentions directed toward the readership of a few friends: Eugene, Stina, Quin, Sundeep, Lindsay, and Lindsey. I hope that my occasional entries will allow these geographically dispersed friends some small insight into my passions and musings.

Industrialization.

“Industrialisation (also spelt Industrialization) or an Industrial Revolution is a process of social and economic change whereby a human group is transformed from a pre-industrial society (an economy where the amount of capital accumulated per capita is low) to an industrial one (a fully developed capitalist economy). It is a part of wider modernisation process, where this social and economic change is closely related with technological innovation, particularly the development of large-scale energy and metallurgy production. Industrialisation also introduces some form of philosophical change, or to a different attitude in the perception of nature.

The lack of a large industry sector is widely seen as a major handicap in a country’s economy, pushing many governments to encourage or enforce industrialisation through artificial means.”

–Wikipedia

~~~~~~~~~

I’m taking a course called “sisters in struggle.” We have read several books which seek out the heroins of women’s labor during the early 1900′s. Tonight in class I suggested that maybe industrialization shouldn’t have happened. I knew the reception of my comment would not be good. I did not think of it at the time, but i remembered something about environmental law which parallels the trajectory of industrialization. I cannot remember if Derrick Jenson said this or if it was someone else, but in any case, i heard it years ago. Say a hundred acres of forest exists and the forest service wants to sell a quarter of it. The people resist, lawyers fight in courts, and a portion of the land is saved. They call it a victory. Then the forest service wants to sell another quarter of the remaining land, people resist, lawyers fight, and when a portion of that land is saved, the people rejoice and call it a victory. Slowly, all the while people celebrating, the forest is cut down to almost nothing. Similarly, the histories of the industrial labor movement have been stories of victories, yet now, vastly more than a hundred years ago, the natural world and millions of its people are exploited or destroyed by industrialization. The people who live under the illusion of false victory are the ones in academia. They are the ones producing thought and knowledge consumed by many. They play their role in maintaining the thin veil of victory over deep and indelible losses. This is the danger of liberal discourse.

It is especially important to note that industrialization brings about not just physical and organizational changes in a society, but a change in philosophy and perception of nature.

When the entire class disagrees with me it is hard to not cry or concede or second guess myself. But I got the sense that my questioning industrialism didn’t belong in their classroom. The teacher asked us to “go back to the text.” One woman, who in all other cases has been deeply intelligent and amazing, said that by questioning industrialism i was discrediting the significance of the labor activists and their struggles. Where else can we question history if not in a history class? I feel alienated. I feel like the class asshole. I feel as if i am alone in a forest wrought with chainsaws and men, and i have told the liberals again and again that the forest is being destroyed, but they are too busy celebrating to notice.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood, The Poet in the Desert

This book, published in Portland Oregon in 1918, seemingly hand bound, includes a handwritten note from CES Wood and has a picture of Sara, his love, pasted to one of the first pages. The note reads:

Dear Genevieve -Many happy returns of the day and may the Wolf always be at your door. When I consider how much this book is Sara’s– Her discovery of the manuscript– her insistence on full completion, her insistence also on less preaching and more poetry and her constructive criticisms in arrangement and phrase–many lines are hers– I cannot in this work nor in my life separate myself from her– Take the little volume from us both.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood

November 28- 1922

This was the first bit i opened to in the dim light of the library basement. These are still my favorite lines…

Silence invincible; impregnable;
Compelling the soul to stand forth
And be questioned.
Coyotes bark to the stars.
Upon the midnight sand I lie,
Thoughtfully sifting the earth
Through my fingers.
I am that dust.
I look up to the stars,
Knowing to them my life is not
More valuable than that of the flowers;
The little, delicate flowers of the Desert,
Which, like a breath, catch at the hem of Spring
And are gone.