The term
free love has been used to describe a
social movement that rejects
marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage, especially for women. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.
Much of the free-love tradition is an offshoot of anarchism, and reflects a civil libertarian philosophy that seeks freedom from state regulation and church interference in personal relationships. According to this concept, the free unions of adults are legitimate relations which should be respected by all third parties whether they are emotional or sexual relations. In addition, some free-love writing has argued that both men and women have the right to sexual pleasure. In the Victorian era, this was a radical notion. Later, a new theme developed, linking free love with radical social change, and depicting it as a harbinger of a new anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive sensibility.
Many people in the early 19th century believed that marriage was an important aspect of life to "fulfill earthly human happiness." Middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world. This mentality created a vision on strongly defined gender roles, which led to the advancement of the free love movement.
While the phrase free love is often associated with promiscuity in the popular imagination, especially in reference to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, historically the free-love movement has not advocated multiple sexual partners or short-term sexual relationships. Rather, it has argued that love relations that are freely entered into should not be regulated by law.
The term "sex radical" is also used interchangeably with the term "free lover," and was the preferred term by advocates because of the negative connotations of "free love". By whatever name, advocates had two strong beliefs: opposition to the idea of forceful sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases.
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 sometimes prostitution; although not all free love advocates agree on these issues. The abrogation of individual rights in marriage is also a concern—for example, some jurisdictions do not recognize 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 1857, Francis Barry wrote that "marriage is a system of rape," stating that the woman is a victim where she can do nothing but be oppressed by her husband, as he tortures her in her home, which becomes a house of bondage. In one of his articles, Barry wrote:
'The Object of this [women’s emancipation] Society,’ according to Article 2 of its [free love] constitution, ‘shall be to secure absolute freedom to woman, through the overthrow of the popular system of marriage.’
At the turn of the 20th century, some free-love proponents extended the critique of marriage to argue that marriage as a social institution encourages emotional possessiveness and psychological enslavement.
Free love and the women's movement
The history of free love is entwined with the history of
feminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such as
Mary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, and many have advocated its abolition.
Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first women to contribute to the free love movement with her literary works. Her novels criticized the social construction of marriage and its effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction written in 1788, the heroine is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons. She finds love in relationships with another man and a woman. The novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, written in 1798, but never published, revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an asylum by her husband; Maria finds fulfillment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate. Mary makes it clear that women “had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise.”
A married woman was solely a wife and mother, denying her the opportunity to pursue other occupations; sometimes this was legislated, as with bans on married women and mothers in the teaching profession. In 1855, free love advocate (1810–1884) described marriage as the "annihilation of woman," 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. Free love advocates like Nichols argued that many children are born into unloving marriages out of compulsion, but should instead be the result of choice and affection—yet children born out of wedlock did not have the same rights as children with married parents.
Sex, to proponents of free love, was not only about reproduction. Access to birth control was considered a means to women's independence, and leading birth-control activists like Margaret Sanger also embraced free love.
In the 1850s, Hannah R. Brown contributed to the journal, the “Una,” made lecture tours, and edited her personal journal, “the Agitator.” In one of her articles, she stated, “the woman is regarded as a sort of appendage to the goods and glories [of a man].” She advocated that true marriages could be formed if only women were allowed to choose freely.
In recent years, women have created works of art to help keep the free love movement alive, often in ways that even the artist does not realize. Sara Bareilles’ songs, “Fairytale” and “Love Song” are modern examples of how women are participating in the Free Love movement; although, artists such as Bareilles do not write their songs specifically for the Free Love movement.
The famous feminist, Gloria Steinem at one point stated, “you became a semi-nonperson when you got married.” She also famously coined the expression 'A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,' Steinem dismissed marriage in 1987 as not having a 'good name.' Steinem got married in 2000, stating that the symbols that feminists once “rebelled against” now are freely chosen, or society had changed.
History of free love movements
, by
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1504). Art historian
Wilhelm Fraenger speculates that Bosch was a sympathiser or member of the free-love sect known as the
Brethren of the Free Spirit.]]
Historical precedents
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male
Essenes, who lived in the
Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. An early Christian sect known as the
Adamites—which flourished in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries—also rejected marriage. They practised
nudism while engaging in worship and considered themselves free of
original sin.
In the 6th century AD, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage, and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership. One folk story from the period that contains a mention of a free-love (and nudist) community under the sea is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (c. 8th century).
Karl Kautsky, writing in 1895, noted that a number of "communistic" movements throughout the Middle Ages also rejected marriage. Typical of such movements, the Cathars of 10th to 14th century Western Europe freed followers from all moral prohibition and religious obligation, but respected those who lived simply, avoided the taking of human or animal life, and were celibate. Women had an uncommon equality and autonomy, even as religious leaders. The Cathars and similar groups (the Waldenses, Apostle brothers, Beghards and Beguines, Lollards, and Hussites) were branded as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church and suppressed. Other movements shared their critique of marriage but advocated free sexual relations rather than celibacy, such as the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, Taborites, and Picards.
's (1793), which contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left), are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.]]
18th and 19th century Europe
In 1789, radical
Swedenborgians August Nordenskjöld and C.B. Wadström published the
Plan for a Free Community, in which they proposed the establishment of a society of sexual liberty, where slavery was abolished and the "
European" and the "
Negro" lived together in harmony. In the treatise, marriage is criticised as a form of political repression. The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the
Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the
French Revolution created an environment where such ideas could flourish. Though at first an ardent, even dogmatic supporter of such liberating aspects of the Revolution, in his policies as Emperor Napoleon later repudiated them, a move typical of revolutionaries who come to power. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English
Jacobins) supported the
French Revolution,
abolitionism,
feminism, and free love. Among them was
William Blake, who explicitly compares the sexual oppression of marriage to
slavery in works such as
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793).
Another member of the circle was pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn't marry her partner, Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of the Terror of the French Revolution. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay's infidelity, and not least because Imlay abandoned her for good, Wollstonecraft's belief in free love survived. She developed a relationship with early English anarchist William Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry, just days before her death due to complications at parturition. In an act understood to support free love, their child, Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Percy also wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in the prose notes of Queen Mab (1813), in his essay On Love (c1815) and in the poem Epipsychidion (1821):
"I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion...
Free love has this, different from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away."
Sharing the free-love ideals of the earlier social movements—as well as their feminism, pacifism, and simple communal life—were the utopian socialist communities of early-19th-century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France, Robert Owen in England, and, perhaps most far-reachingly, the German composer Richard Wagner. Fourier, who coined the term feminism, argued that true freedom could only occur without masters, without the ethos of work, and without suppressing passions: the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long as people are not abused, and that "affirming one's difference" can actually enhance social integration. The Saint-Simonian feminist Pauline Roland took a free-love stance against marriage, having four children in the 1830s, all of whom bore her name. Wagner's position seems quite similar; he not only advocated something like free love in several of his works, he practiced what he preached, and began a family with Cosima Liszt, then still married to the conductor Hans von Buelow. Cosima had been one of three children born out of wedlock to the ultra-popular Hungarian composer and pianist Ferenc (Franz) Liszt by Countess Marie d'Agoult. Though apparently scandalous at the time, such liaisons seemed the actions of admired artists who were following the dictates of their own wills, rather than those of social convention, and in this way they were in step with their era's liberal philosophers of the cult of passion, such as Fourier, and their actual or eventual openness can be understood to be a prelude to the freer ways of the 20th century. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke occasionally in favor of something like free love, but when he proposed marriage to that famous practitioner of it, Lou Andreas-Salome, she berated him for being inconsistent with his philosophy of the free and supramoral Superman, a criticism that Nietzsche seems to have taken seriously, or to have at least been stung by. The relationship between composer Frederic Chopin and writer George Sand can be understood as exemplifying free love in a number of ways. Behavior of this kind by figures in the public eye did much to erode the credibility of conventionalism in relationships, especially when such conventionalism brought actual unhappiness to its practitioners.
That European outpost, Australia, which began its existence as a penal colony, had a much more flexible view of cohabitation and sexual bonding than was known in Europe itself at the time, "Neither the male nor the female convicts thought it was disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock."
19th century United States
Christian socialist writer
John Humphrey Noyes has been credited with coining the term 'free love' in the mid-19th century, although he preferred to use the term '
complex marriage'. Noyes founded the
Oneida Society in 1848, a utopian community that "[rejected] conventional marriage both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over women". He found scriptural justification: "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Noyes also supported
eugenics; and only certain people were allowed to become parents. Another movement was established in
Berlin Heights, Ohio.
Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individual's self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, marriage laws and anti-birth control measures. The most important American free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer (1883–1907) edited by Moses Harman and Lois Waisbrooker but also there existed Ezra Heywood and Angela Heywood's The Word (1872–1890, 1892–1893).
The women's movement, free love and Spiritualism were three strongly linked movements at the time, and Woodhull was also a spiritualist leader. Like Noyes, she also supported eugenics. Fellow social reformer and educator Mary Gove Nichols was happily married (to her second husband), and together they published a newspaper and wrote medical books and articles, a novel, and a treatise on marriage, in which they argued the case for free love. Both Woodhull and Nichols eventually repudiated free love.
Publications of the movement in the second half of the 19th century included Nichols' Monthly, The Social Revolutionist, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (ed. Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Clafin), The Word (ed. Ezra Heywood), Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (ed. Moses Harman) and the German-language Detroit newspaper Der Arme Teufel (ed. Robert Reitzel). Organisations included the New England Free Love League, founded with the assistance of American libertarian Benjamin Tucker as a spin off from the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL). A minority of freethinkers also supported free love.
The most radical free love journal was The Social Revolutionist, published in the 1856-1857, by John Patterson. The first volume consisted of twenty writers, of which only one was a woman. This quote demonstrated the journal's fight to get women to see the light of how marriage truly was in the early 20th century.
In 1852, a writer named Marx Edgeworth Lazarus published a tract entitled "Love vs. Marriage pt. 1," in which he portrayed marriage as "incompatible with social harmony and the root cause of mental and physical impairments." Lazarus intertwined his writings with his religious teachings, a factor that made the Christian community more tolerable to the free love idea. Zetkin also recounted Lenin's denouncement of plans to organise Hamburg’s women prostitutes into a “special revolutionary militant section”: he saw this as “corrupt and degenerate.”
Despite the traditional marital lives of Lenin and most Bolsheviks, they believed that sexual relations were outside the jurisdiction of the state. The Soviet government abolished centuries-old Czarist regulations on personal life, which had prohibited homosexuality and made it difficult for women to obtain divorce permits or to live singly. However, by the end of the 1920s, Stalin had taken over the Communist Party and begun to implement socially conservative policies. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and free love was further demonized.
France
In the bohemian districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse, many were determined to shock the "bourgeois" sensibilities of the society they grew up in; many, such as the anarchist Benoît Broutchoux, favored free love. At the same time, the cross-dressing radical activist Madeleine Pelletier practised celibacy, distributed birth-control devices and information, and performed abortions.
An important propagandist of free love was individualist anarchist Emile Armand. He advocated naturism and polyamory in what he termed la camaraderie amoureuse. He wrote many propagandist articles on this subject such as "De la liberté sexuelle" (1907) where he advocated not only a vague free love but also multiple partners, which he called "plural love".
Free love advocacy groups active during this time included the Association d'Études sexologiques and the Ligue mondiale pour la Réforme sexuelle sur une base scientifique.
Germany
In Germany, from 1891 to 1919, the Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women's Associations) called for a boycott of marriage and for the enjoyment of sexuality. Founded by Lily Braun and Minna Cauer, the league also aimed to organise prostitutes into labor unions, taught contraception, and supported the right to abortion and the abolition of criminal penalties against homosexuality, as well as running child-care programs for single mothers. In 1897, teacher and writer Emma Trosse published a brochure titled Ist freie Liebe Sittenlosigkeit? ("Is free love immoral?"). The worldwide homosexual emancipation movement also began in Germany in the late 19th century, and many of the thinkers whose work inspired sexual liberation in the 20th century were also from the German-speaking world, such as Sigmund Freud, Otto Gross, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, and Max Stirner's follower and biographer, John Henry MacKay.
1940s - 1960s
From the late 1940s to the 1960s, the bohemian free-love tradition of Greenwich Village was carried on by the
beat generation, although differing with their predecessors by being an apparently male-dominated movement. The Beats also produced the first appearance of male homosexual champions of free love in the U.S., with writers such as
Allen Ginsberg and
William S. Burroughs. Like some of those before, the beats challenged a range of social conventions, and they found inspiration in such aspects of black culture as
jazz music. The Beat movement led on the West Coast to the activities of such groups as the
Merry Pranksters (led, according to
Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally, not by novelist
Ken Kesey, but by hipster and driver
Neal Cassady) and the entire San Francisco pop music scene, in which the implications of sexual bohemianism were advanced in a variety of ways by the
hippies. With the
Summer of Love in 1967, the eccentricities of this group became a nationally recognized movement. The study of
sexology continued to gain prominence throughout the era, with the works of researchers like
Alfred Kinsey lending a new legitimacy to challenges to traditional values regarding sex and marriage.
The sexual revolution and beyond
Free love became a prominent phrase used by and about the
new social movements and
counterculture of the 1960s and early 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 late 60s/early 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 abortion, birth control, and homosexuality; freedom in choosing love, sex, or both; and women's rights in general. Chastity, virginity, and subservience in marriage had much less power as social ideals for women.
Modern descendants of free love could be seen to include the contemporary sex-positive, polyamory, and queer movements and figures such as Susie Bright, Patrick Califia, and Annie Sprinkle. Though they don't often identify as free lovers, modern movements around the world against arranged marriage and forced marriage in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe share many of the same goals as the free-love movement.
Legal aspects of the fruit of free love are far from settled. Some gains in the women's rights movement have inverted, rather than corrected, the injustices of the past. For example, an unwed father has no right to see his child in the State of New York. American composer Max Schubel found himself in this category, and wrote the New York theater piece Rubber Court to bring wider attention to the problem.
In popular culture
;Literature
H. C. M. Watson, Erchomenon; or the Republic of Materialism (1879): 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 (1961), Valentine Michael Smith founds his own church preaching free love. Lazarus Long's family, in multiple books including Time Enough for Love, believe in 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", a 1930 film starring Conrad Nagel, directed by Hobart Henley, written by Winifred Dunn, Sidney Howard and Edwin Knopf
The Harrad Experiment, a 1973 film directed by Ted Post, based on a novel by Robert H. Rimmer, starring James Whitmore and Tippi Hedren
"Amor libre", a 1978 film directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo and written by Francisco Sánchez
;Music
"Free Love Freeway", written and sung by Ricky Gervais, who starred as David Brent in the British television comedy series The Office
"Freelove", written by Martin Gore; from Depeche Mode's 2001 album Exciter
"Unsheathed" from Live's 1997 album Secret Samadhi contains the chorus "Free love is a world I can't linger too long in/Free love was just another party for the hippies to ruin", although any specific objections are very unclear.
"The Concept Of Love" by Hideki Naganuma (as featured in both the Jet Set Radio Future and Ollie King original soundtracks) contains a strong theme of free love, including a number of recurring sampled audio clips concerning the topic.
"The Blind House" by Porcupine Tree on the 2009 album The Incident, contains, in the chorus, "Free love, free love, feel love in all my sisters" and has a strong theme of free love.
"Free Love" by American rock band Cage the Elephant on their 2009 self-titled album, depicts a girl who personifies free love.
;Comics
Elfquest, by Wendy and Richard Pini, follows the adventures of a tribe of elves who, among other things, consider free love completely natural. The tribe in question freely lets its members decide their number of sexual partners, even allowing them to choose none or establish a monogamous relationship if that is what the elf/elves in question desire.
See also
Don Juanism
Free union
New Woman
Open marriage
Polyamory
Bertrand Russell
Sexual norm
Anarchism and issues related to love and sex
References
;Notes
;Further reading
"The recurring movements of free love" by Saskia Poldervaart
Victoria Woodhull, Free Lover: Sex, Marriage And Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull (Seattle: Inkling, 2005) ISBN 1-58742-050-3
Stoehr, Taylor, ed. Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: AMS Press, 1977).
Sears, Hal, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence, KS: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977
Spurlock, John Free Love: Marriage and Middle Class Radicalism, 1825-1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1987
Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ISBN 0-252-02804-X.
Martin Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)
"Emile Armand and la camaraderie amourouse".Revolutionary sexualism and the struggle against jealousy." by Francis Rousin
Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, 1999, ISBN 0-06-095332-2
Goldman, Emma, Marriage and Love (New York, Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911)
Françoise Basch, Rebelles américaines au XIXe siècle : marriage, amour libre et politique (Paris : Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990).
Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner (Cambridge, 1978), ISBN 0 521 28254.
Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip, the Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York, 2002), ISBN 0 7679 1186 5
Hugh M. Hefner, The Playboy Philosophy, Playboy Magazine, December 1962 through May 1965 issues.
Open History, A Japanese History Website (This reference needs confirmation).
Category:Hippie movement
Category:Love
Category:Sexual revolution
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