What about Love!?

Of course, Love. I always come back to you.

Thanks for your comments, Sean. You are awesome. What do ya’ll think of this idea:

A Radical/Subversive history of love. I’m thinking a mosaic. I could trace the larger arch of how the mainstream discourses on love have changed over time, but underneath that show how different subcultures have taken the dominant meaning of love and subverted it in some way toward social justice. Here are some examples i’ve thought of so far:

interracial (black/white) relationships in slave-holding or reconstruction south

free lovers of late 19th/early 20th centuries

1920’s and harlem rennaisance “new woman”/ “new negro”

… (huge time gap)…

Lesbian feminist back to the land movement in Oregon

Development of womanism, audre lorde “Uses of the Erotic”

Eco-radical discourses on love, maybe anarcha feminist

Polyamory radical queer culture

Current scholarship on love: bell hooks and some others

Anarchy is for Lovers.

Ecofeminism, Poetry, History

I have been avoiding writing an ecofeminist historical analysis of Charles Erskine Scott Wood’s poetry all term because i’m completely intimidated by the prospect of combining ecofeminist theory, poetry analysis, and historical analysis. I have had no idea where to begin! Perhaps my friend Claudia’s poetic influence combined with a conversation i had about ecofeminism  with someone last night pushed me over the edge because i’ve written my first tiny bit…. Here’s where i am going. This is going to be a part of a larger paper about free love, anarchism, and nature in the pacific northwest. Part of it will be about Erskine and his lover Sara (also a poet), part will be about the anarchist periodicals in Oregon and Washington, and part will be about free motherhood and the politics of eugenics. This is a really intense topic which i hate to just mention without explaining, but i will have to wait till later to go into detail about how that fits here. The last part will be about bodies and sexuality. I am trying to fish out information about three women who seem to be elusive. I want to write about Lois Waisbrooker and a court case that happened over nude bathing (she had a periodical called “clothed with the sun”); i’m trying to find information on Marie Equi, who was definitely connected to the Portland anarchists, she was lesbian, and i dont really know about her connection to the free love movement; and i want to find out about this other woman who was a seattle labor activist. She was also lesbian and into free love. I’m very confused about how all this will be put together in the end, but here’s the beginning of Erskine’s part:

 

Charles Erskine Scott Wood: The Poet in the Desert

Wood’s poetry employs classic, indeed cliché, metaphors likening women to nature. But rooted in this language is a keen political agenda which lends his poems both authenticity and power. Couched in the language of eastern Oregon’s high desert landscape, and through the feminization and idealization of this beloved place, Wood calls for women’s rights, free love, anarchy, and environmental conservation.

Throughout The Poet in the Desert, the book he viewed as his life’s masterpiece, Wood develops a dualism between women and men which parallels the dualism between nature and culture. Many ecofeminists, whose theories do not begin to appear for sixty years after his book’s publication, adopt a similar approach: feminizing and glorifying nature, masculinizing and vilifying culture (cite). But most ecofeminists, especially those connected to academia and in its later stages, critique this symbolic language because it tends to feminize nature and naturalize women to the mutual detriment of both (cite). To simply react to this problematic dualism by reversing it—to consider women superior to men and nature superior to culture— the latter group of ecofeminists argue, is to avoid deconstructing the oppressive conceptual framework on which the exploitation of women and nature are founded.

Although Wood’s dualism reversals may not deeply deconstruct the framework of exploitation, oppression, and ownership—key issues associated with “man” and “culture” in his work— his intent is, like earlier ecofeminists, to restore value to that which his culture was rapidly destroying. Industrialization, which played an integral role in transforming the Pacific Northwest during Erskine’s time, intensified this destruction, is a key time in ecofeminist histories of woman and nature in symbolic thought. Contextualizing Wood and his writing within an ecofeminist intellectual history in fact sheds light on his particular relation to nature, women, and freedom on the hinge of industrialization, woman suffrage, and free love in the Pacific Northwest.

The Poet in the Desert at one point consisted of a pile of papers at the bottom of a trunk. They remained there until Erskine met Sara Bard Field, a poet, socialist, and woman suffragist, equal to himself in intelligence, passion, wit and creativity. When Erskine invited her to look at his poetry, she found the poems in the trunk and insisted on their potential. The two became friends over common political and artistic sentiments, and soon lovers, and eventually divorced their respective partners and lived the rest of their lives together in a love that has impressed and inspired everyone who knew them, whether as family and friends, or as those like myself, who’ve encountered their poetry simply as a reader. The mutual love and respect between Sara and Erskine is quite astounding. For instance, in a hand bound, 1918 edition of The Poet in the Desert, Erskine wrote a note to poet Genevieve Taggard, writing that “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.”

 

Nineteenth Century Free Love and the Politics of Location, a Historiography

This term i’ve been working on two projects: a history and a historiography. History is history; historiography is the analysis of histories. Both are on free love, and bits of both have appeared on this blog as i’ve explored and articulated my thoughts. This is the culmination of the historiography. The history will be done in spring, and over the next few months i get to delve into exploration. For now, i’m happy to invite breath back into my life, and art, and delayed correspondences, and perhaps a trip into the city to get a gluten-free cupcake at Babycakes bakery and browse the books at Bluestockings radical bookstore.

 

 

 

Free Love and the Politics of Location, a Historiography

 

The free love movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century contributes precious insights to the history of American radicalism. Historians have understood the movement to encompass a mosaic of characteristics: it was a radical critique of marriage; a movement against marital rape; an upsurge of radical male and female feminists; a rejection of public and private authority; and a movement for women to claim agency and ownership of their bodies. The movement was connected to dress reform, divorce reform, health reform, spiritualism, feminism, anarchism, and environmental conservation. Radical for their time and in some ways still radical for ours, free lovers from disparate backgrounds across the continent engaged in national and international discourses which unfolded new and empowering ways of knowing, living, and loving.

This essay explores the politics of social and geographical location in several histories of the 19^th century American and Pacific Northwest free love movements. Contemporary scholarship on free love houses significant rifts and contradictions which expose the pitfalls of loose generalizations. Each history, written between 1977 and 2005, disservices the movement by ignoring the politics of two important locations: place and gender.

Historians’ inattentiveness to the politics of location obscures the many permutations of the free love movement. Feminist theorist Chandra 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.”[1] Mohanty asks how the politics of location “determine and produce experience and difference as analytical and political categories.”[2] This essay illustrates how historians have selectively attended to or ignored the politics of location to determine and produce free love histories substantially differing from one another. Arguing for engagement rather than transcendence of difference, Mohanty replaces problematic universal categories with a call for historic specificity. This lens is useful for reading historians of free love, whose universalities tend to arise from transcendence of difference, rather than engagement with varying experiences. The histories of the 19^th century free love movement form messy yet productive unions, simultaneously disrupting hegemonies while creating their own problematic universalizations.

A field guide to the paper is as follows: the first part of the essay addresses historians’ definitions of free love. These definitions both determine and reflect the politics of place and gender. Parts two and three explore place and gender in the free love histories separately, showing that historians have been only selectively attentive to these interlocking locations. When historians re-place free lovers and their theories to the geographic and social locations within which they were historically situated, free love history might be further grounded and contextualized in place-based, experience-based lives.

This is not a historiography of failure. Each history brings a unique knowledge to the forefront, and each history in some way bolsters, corrects, contests, or contradicts another history. The goal of this essay is to expose how differing perceptions can emerge from the past based on each historian’s choices in relationship to the politics of location. While in some moments inattentiveness to social location borders on flaw, more often the histories complement one another, creating a mosaic and a constant reminder that no social movement is rooted in a singular place or identity. Rather, it is the interplay between these differences which makes the movement so rich and powerful. This essay is an attempt to lend power to the politics of location, and to explore the historian’s role in locating knowledge, putting memory on the map.

*Part One: Definitions*

Definitions locate basic understandings of free love at the same time they locate historians’ particular leanings and motives in their studies. Historians of the 19^th century free love movement agree that free love at least meant love and sexual relations without any type of coercion. Hal Sears, who’s 1977 The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America was the first major study of the 19^th century free love movement, stated that “free love simply allowed no coercion in sexual relations, whether from the legally prescribed duties of marriage or from the unrestricted urgings of libido.”[3] Similarly, Pam McAllister stated in her 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.”[4] Beyond this, historians diverge.

Joanne Passet, in her 2003 feminist analysis of the free love movement, offered a more complex assessment of 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 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] Furthermore, Schroer found that male free love authors in particular “implied that it did exist and avoided addressing the fact that it did not.”[7] Importantly, Schroer’s critique of the male free lovers also applies to the male historians whose histories came before Passet’s and her own.

Passet responds to the ambiguity of ‘free love’ by replacing it with an even broader term, “sex radical,” for which she offers no background and no discussion of the term’s meaning or consistency among individuals of the movement. Hal Sears’s study includes references to both “free love” and “sex radicals,” even in the title (The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America), without offering a definition or reference to the meaning of the latter term within the movement. 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] However, 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]

 

Sex reformers, then, might be seen in the largest sense, with sex radicals and social purists divided by tactics (liberation versus repression), and free love might be seen interchangeably with sex radical, or perhaps with a more radical connotation. Free love may have been the term of choice for those who were against the sex radical cause, but all who wielded it agreed on its potential to radically alter the foundation of society.

 

 

*Part Two: Place*

 

Many histories of the 19^th century free love movement have purported to be illustrative of the movement in general when they are actually geographically and thus culturally specific. Chandra Mohanty’s critique of universality is useful here. Mohanty problematizes the concepts of universal sisterhood and transcendence of difference because these means of forging solidarity often rely on “specific assumptions about women as a cross-culturally singular, homogenous group with the same interests, perspectives, and goals and similar experiences.”[10] Many free love historians have made similar assumptions. Like the feminists Mohanty critiques, they rely on a few perspectives to speak for all.

Inattentiveness to place generates trans-geographic generalizations and a false sense of homogeneity within the movement. Free love histories that are more successful in their attentiveness to place reveal that place-based experiences fostered specific, place-based motives for advocating free love. Joanne Passet and several historians of the Pacific Northwest have exposed a tension around the politics of physical location: the relationship between knowledge, place, and experience. As Mohanty writes, “a place on the map (New York City) is, after all, also a locatable place in history.”[11]

Sandra Schroer’s 2005 sociohistorical analysis of gender in the free love movement ignores physical location by comparing men and women as two homogeneous groups. Rather than making the more common assumption that free love was in and of urban elite spaces, Schroer limited her analysis to two rural locations: the Berlin Heights community in Ohio and the Home community in Home, Washington. Schroer 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. This criterion limited her analysis to three publications, two of which came from the same location and were edited by the same person. Moreover, although Schroer purports to use the three periodicals, she only uses the two from the Berlin Heights community. The limitations of her study were submerged in an analytical, objective tone, creating an allusion of universality for the reader.

Schroer’s work describes how rural midwestern women and men (and perhaps a few others who contributed to the publications from elsewhere) wrote about free love; she does not consider how a rural perspective may have shaped and informed her subjects’ writings. Neither does she consider the history or politics of the utopian community in which her study is situated. While successful in showing that men and women wrote about free love differently, the study would have been much more provocative had she looked at differences among women (including geographic differences), rather than simply between women and men, assuming that the experiences of one community could speak for the entirety of the movement.

Although Schroer writes that “no existing study has examined the writings of female and male Free Lovers to compare their issues,”[12] Passet’s 2003 Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality does just that. Passet’s attentiveness to physical location elucidates important differences between women. The politics of location set Passet’s history apart from its predecessors: “Earlier accounts, in which such female sex radicals as Mary Gove Nichols and Victoria Woodhull appear as members of an urban avant-garde, obscure the fact that similar discussions about sexuality, marriage, and women’s freedom occurred among non-elite women—midwestern and western women….”[13] Passet’s groundbreaking research privileges many voices from diverse locations, rather than focusing on an elite, urban few.

But urban bias is not simply an issue of representation. Passet argues that rural sex radicals who moved to urban places “remained informed by the idea of agrarian individualism.”[14] Contradictory to earlier studies, Passet suggests that rural sentiments informed urban free lovers as much as urban and rural utopian newspapers informed those in more isolated rural areas. Where Schroer ignores geographic differences between free lovers, Passet describes a mutually influencing relationship between urban and rural radicals and differentiates the many rural sex radical women throughout the west from the few big named women who had heretofore consumed historical imagination.

Neither Schroer, Passet, nor Hal Sears, author of the aforementioned The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America, do justice to an important site of free love, the Pacific Northwest. Passet compares rural and urban free lovers but largely ignores the Pacific Northwest periodicals or comparative regionalism. Instead of examining their own forums, Passet chooses to focus on geographically disparate women’s contributions to Kansas and New York newspapers. Hal Sears purports that the Kansas periodical Lucifer, the Light Bearer, was “virtually the only free love periodical,” then sites a few Northeast names and leaves out important Northwest periodicals altogether.[15] This neglect leaves out an important space of meaning-making in the free love movement, thus obscuring their studies.

Historians have illustrated that Pacific Northwest free lovers had different motivations for participating in the movement than people of other regions. This disjunction is most acute when historians consider the relationship of free love to industrialism. While authors unanimously agree that industrialization played an important role in the creation of free love as a movement, they do not agree on the nature of industrialization’s role.

For Sears, free love is firmly rooted in 1850’s New York, a movement to keep humans up to the pace of industrial progress: “Although such rapid development through the incursion of the machine exacerbated social anxieties, it was less the nature of Americans to find fault with progress itself than to mask misgivings in exultation.”[16] To the mid-nineteenth century New Yorker, free love was a human development that paralleled, even reinforced industrialization.

Western historian Carlos Schwantes, on the other hand, found that 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.”[17] Free love was part of the alternative to industrialization for many Northwesterners, rather than an exultation of it.

Sandra Schroer finds in her critical discourse analysis that the nature conservation movement had an influence on many free lovers—women in particular.[18] In Schroer’s study, women differed from men in their focuses on motherhood, nature, and spirituality. Unfortunately, the lack of comparative analysis in Schroer’s book makes it impossible to tell whether this emphasis on nature was unique to the Berlin Hights community of her study, or if it was in fact more general to free love discourse.

Brigitte Koenig’s research on the Home Colony shows that rural radicalism did not simply mirror urban radicalism; rather, “Home’s founders believed that their colony offered the means through which they could put anarchist principals into practice.”[19] Home’s radicalism was based in the participants’ ability to put theory to practice, growing vegetables and not inflicting one another’s freedom among their higher priorities.

Passet stresses that the economic depressions accommodating industrialization particularly affected rural women: “Recurring drought and economic depression in the 1880s and 1890s not only heightened rural interest in individualist anarchism but also influenced the development of sex radical theories about the role of the state in regulating private life.”[20] For rural radicals and Northwesterners, free love was not an accommodation to industrialism, not parallel human “progress,” but a reaction to it and a stance against it, as well as the church, the state, or controlling husbands, taking any agency from their lives.

In contrast to Sears’s depiction of free love as parallel to industrialization and his characterization of Americans as naturally non-judgmental, many Pacific Northwest free love advocates did find fault with industrialization and saw freedom, land, and love as wrapped together in many of their anarchist projects.

Ignoring physical location in history affects how we understand other locations, such as gender and ideology. As glossing over geographical differences contributes to homogenous perceptions of men and women, it also contributes to erroneous perceptions of free lovers’ relationships to the changing environmental and political landscapes of their time. Clearly, intersectionality is inherent in experience. The locations which historians choose to focus on, and those which they choose to ignore, affect the larger meaning of free love.

 

 

*Part Three: Gender*

 

Gender is an especially important social location in free love history because women had so much at stake in the free love movement. But even free love historians manage to write women into the background. Passet’s Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality is vitally important in the historiography of free love because it is, as Passet writes “the first to provide a gendered analysis of the nineteenth century sex radical movement.”[21] Previous to Passet’s work, men had written every book length history of the 19^th century free love movement. According to Passet, “Previous works have portrayed sex radicals as unified in support of relatively static beliefs. But when gender is taken into account a more complex and nuanced understanding of the movement emerges.”[22] 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, and whether women’s voices and participation were worth including at all.

The relationship of free love to feminism is no settled fact in the historiography of the 19^th century free love movement. Sears’s 1977 and Passet’s 2005 histories offer two contradictory explanations of feminism’s place in the free love movement. Sears’s groundbreaking study, which focused primarily on the Kansas free love circle and the publication Lucifer, the Light Bearer, downplays the importance of feminism by more than omission. Passet briefly critiqued Sears’s work for minimizing “the reach and impact of its feminist message by arguing that ‘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] Indeed, Sears’s work gave scant attention to important free love women.

But Passet lets Sears off the hook quite easily. Beyond downplaying women’s influence and participation, Sears also downplays the significance of feminism as an ideological component of the movement. Minimizing feminism to its most formal and conservative definition, Sears writes that the feminist movement “opted for conventional morality and discrete political goals and forsook the revolutionizing of domestic relations.”[24] This definition of feminism ignores the important reality that no movement, including feminism and free love, is singular or static. By defining feminism in its least radical form, Sears occludes any possibility for overlap between the two movements.

Contrarily, 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] Historian Taylor Stoehr similarly links feminism and free love in his 1979 documentary history of free love in America: “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.”[26] Stoehr is quick to explain that female free lovers “more than outshone their male counterparts.”[27] To feminist historians, other influences of the time—health reform, individualism, the shifting economy, religious revivals, and abolition—took lesser roles in the formation of the free love movement.

Differing understandings of the relationship between free love and feminism extend to differences in who they include in the movement history. Hal Sears offers 19^th 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: “In contrast to Noyes, sex radicals embraced… [that] a woman should have the right to determine when and with whom she had children.”[28] Because Noyes “placed sexuality and reproduction under communal control,” he was not a free lover.[29] The primacy of women’s rights was more significant to Passet and many of the female free lovers of her work than to Sears and many of the male leaders of his work.

Important differences in historians’ representations of gender emerge from the foundation of their scholarship, in their choice of sources. Hal Sears and Angus McLaren, author of “Sex Radicalism in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, 1890-1920” both obscure the free love movement by largely ignoring the spaces where women’s voices most often emerge: in letters to journals. Less often did women publish directly in journals, especially under their real names, and even less often did they participate on the editorial level. Although free love journals encouraged women’s participation more than other journals of the time, women most often participated in the free love movement through correspondences rather than publications.[30] Passet’s work distinguishes itself from Sears’s and McLaren’s in that she pays keen attention to women’s correspondences to free love journals.

Sears and McLaren make a significant miscalculation of the movement’s relationship to eugenics by tending to primarily focus on men’s opinions and the women who supported them. Both historians describe the free love movement’s late 19^th century involvement with eugenics as a benevolent and uncontested shift, as opposed to Passet’s findings, that eugenics caused a controversial and gendered split within the movement.

Hal Sears is careful to distinguish the earlier liberatory eugenics of free love advocates from state sanctioned, repressive eugenics of the Progressive Era: “Not to be confused with the later prescriptive eugenics of the Progressive Era, anarchistic eugenics held that enslaved, male-dominated mothers could only perpetuate a race of slavish humans.”[31] Sears also makes sure to name several women who advocated anarchist eugenics, including Lois Waisbrooker and Angela Heywood, while only citing one woman, Lillie White, who opposed it.[32]

In his study of Canadian Pacific Northwest sex radicals Robert Kerr and Dora Forster, McLaren is also quick to distinguish the sex radical strand of eugenics from coercive eugenics. McLaren, however, did point out the tensions embedded in Kerr’s work: “[Kerr] declared himself in favor of the absolute sexual freedom of women; he also stated that everyone did not have the right to bear children”[33] Kerr also contended that “The women contributors to Lucifer were not all convinced” by his eugenic arguments.[34] Angus, like Sears, cited three women against eugenics, one being Lillie White who Sears also quoted, followed by three women who did support Kerr’s work. This use of sources obscures what Passet has argued was a major gendered divide within the movement.

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.”[35] These differences developed as eugenics became “a means to retain patriarchal privilege” within sex reform.[36] Passet repeatedly holds men responsible for eugenic thought, and places women in uniform opposition to it.[37] Passet quoted a myriad of voices that came out against Kerr, and furthermore selected quotes from Kerr’s writings which put the women’s anger in context. Characterizing the debate as a “highly gendered contest for power,”[38] Passet cast a very different picture of Kerr and his eugenic beliefs than did McLaren.

Sears’s and McLaren’s gendered analysis of the free love movement emphasized men’s voices and downplayed feminism. The invisible social location of maleness in their works created a hegemony over meaning within the free love movement, a unity where there was none. Feminist historians Passet and Schroer, on the other hand, successfully write histories which disrupt a sense of unity in the movement, revealing that women’s voices were also contentious voices with agendas that did not necessarily coincide with their male counterparts.

 

 

*Conclusion*

 

Historians have presented widely differing analyses of gender and place in the 19^th century free love movement. Contested moments in free love history are rooted in the universalization of experience. To universalize the experiences of a single social or geographical location means to ignore the politics of location. To ignore the politics of location often means to defer to the perspectives of those who already have a hegemony in meaning-making, and imbue the entire movement with only a partial truth. As recent scholars have shown, the richness and depth of a movement does not come from its sameness or unity, but from its diversity, its contention, and its multiplicity.

Historiography Love

living anarchy, living capricious

A friend wrote this to me recently:

“capricious. here’s the oxford english dictionary definition:

1. Characterized by play of wit or fancy; humorous, fantastic, ‘conceited’. Obs.

2. Full of, subject to, or characterized by caprice; guided by whim or fancy rather than by judgement or settled purpose; whimsical, humoursome.

3. transf. Of things: Subject to change or irregularity, so as to appear ungoverned by law.
the third definition reminds me of our friendship and living anarchy, and the first two remind me a lot about you, especially humor, wit, fanciness, and nonjudgment.

i think capriciousness could be an organizational principle of any free love-based relationship. it ‘organizes’ chaos and change into the foundation of the relationship, and thus capriciousness becomes an expectation from within, rather than a deviation from, the relationship.”

I love this idea, but i have one thing to add thing:

There are some things that cannot be capricious: respecting the bodily integrity of others; honesty; responsibility for one’s self and emotions; compassionate communication; some degree of independence; and accountability.

Last spring I realized that i am immensly afraid of commitment. I questioned whether my obsession with living anarchy was really just an unhealthy avoidance of a basic life skill. After thinking about it for months, i feel that commitment as it is commonly understood is caustic. I am absolutely committed to the noncapricious qualities that i described above. However, i will never be committed to an individual under all circumstances. I cannot. Commitment to time often comes at the expense of these noncapricious values, and that is unacceptable to me. Commitment is different from accountability. If i have a responsibility for, say, a child, i wouldn’t feel “free” to leave that relationship unless i’d arranged for a more apporopriate situation. Basically i am trying to say that commitment is bulshit if the deeper qualities are not there. Therefore, i’ve redefined commitment in my own life to mean the noncapricious qualities of integrity, not abstract commitments to time or statical forms of relationships.

Love and life are inherently capricious, and in my experience it is best to allow it to stay that way. However, a tree can only stand the wind if it has a strong base.

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.

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)

The Law of Happiness

This is from The Demonstrator, a publication by the anarchist colony in Puget Sound (Washington) –1903

Happiness is a habit encouraged by constant effort and subject to growth similar to other habits. Let anyone determine to find some enjoyment every day, and it will not be long until each hour of the day will be brightened by some pleasure which might otherwise be lost.

There can be no dreariness enter into that soul which has learned to admire and appreciate the beauty and charm of common things. The imaginative man will gaze enraptured at the gorgeous tints of the sunset, and something of its beauty and grandeur will leave its impress upon him. He finds a subdued delight in contemplating the graceful foliage and sombre hues of the forest; its stillness invites his confidence, its sympathy enfolds him with all the abandon of an old-time friend or kindred soul. The sea whispers to him tales of long ago, it soothes him with the calmness of its content, and invigorates him with the fury of its storm. He is elated with gladness by the gleaming of the wave. The mountain-top, picturesque, snow-crowned, imposes upon him something of its majesty and splendor. He is thrilled by the music and melody of the birds. The sunshine cheers him on his way. Flowers blossom at his feet and their fragrance fills him with delight.

Nature compensates anyone who loves her. Whoever becomes enthralled by her beauty, entranced by her manifold charms, intoxicated by her loveliness, sublime in all its diversity and magnificence, will be rewarded not alone by the comfort which this worship brings but also by the upbuilding within himself of that refinement of character which must inevitably correspond to the emotion he feels.

Man’s highest happiness will be found in the realm of his affections. He will be happy just in proportion as he recognizes and appreciates the good qualities in others, also as he correctly estimates his own qualifications.

We get all the love and affection we deserve, and no more. Let us take an inventory of ourselves. If we are lacking in beauty, in bravery, in good health, just to that extent will we be deprived of the admiration which these things bring. If we are deficient in honesty, sincerity or kindness, we must forfeit just that much of the regard and esteem of others. We are doomed to disappointment when we attempt to obtain one tithe of love or affection which is not our just due. Hypocrisy triumphs only over hypocrisy. Pretence wins only pretence. Passion excites and inflames passion. Deception is nourished only by deception; it can’t thrive on any other diet.

The desire of exclusive possession, the commonly accepted definition of love, is narrow and selfish, it partakes always the nature of bargain. It enslaves the one who feels it as well as the other held in bondage. We grasp at the substance and cling to the shadow. Bright fires of hope are reduced to ashes of despair.

Genuine love is unselfish, it feels a willingness to devote a lifetime to promote the happiness of its object. Intelligence increases its intensity. It is subject to no conditions except spontaneity and freedom. It is debarred neither by deformity, disease or old age. Its generosity scales all heights, and reaches all depths. In forbearance and forgiveness it is boundless as the sea. Such a love has never failed to find a hearty response. It can not fail. It is just as certain as that the warmth of the sunshine will germinate the seed within the soil.

Finally, to sum up in a few words, our happiness depends, largely, on our ability to reason, and to rightly interpret the true relation of cause and effect in all its bearings upon human life.

John J. Lason