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The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism
By Wendy McElroy
mac@headwaters.com
Special to
The Libertarian Enterprise
The 19th century Free Love movement sought to separate the state
from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It
insisted that such matters were properly the concern of the
individuals involved, and no one else.
Free love advocates, who 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. Although the touchstone libertarian of
the 19th century, Benjamin Tucker agreed with the goals of free love,
significant differences of strategy distanced him from that movement
as a whole. The free love movement, for example, tended to use civil
disobedience, along with Tucker's preferred strategy of education.
The free love periodical with which Tucker was most closely
associated was Ezra and Angela Heywood's
The Word
(1872-1890,
1892-1893), issued first from Princeton and then from Cambridge,
Massachusetts. After the Civil War, the abolitionist Ezra Heywood
turned his attention toward the labor movement and, eventually,
toward free love. The Heywoods'
The Word
-- subtitled "A Monthly
Journal of Reform," -- was connected to radical individualism both
through its editors and through its contributors, who included Josiah
Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and J.K. Ingalls. Initially,
The Word
presented free love as a minor theme which was expressed within a
labor reform format. But the publication later evolved into an
explicitly free love periodical.
Through his association with Ezra Heywood and
The Word
, Tucker
acquired much of the background from which
Liberty
sprang. In April
1875, he became an associate editor of
The Word
, but as the paper
de-emphasized economics to stress free love he grew dissatisfied.
Finally, Tucker resigned in December 1876 and established the
Radical
Review
, a quarterly that published Stephen Pearl Andrews, Heywood,
Ingalls, Greene, and Spooner.
It is probable that Tucker's long-term friendship with
freethinker and individualist-anarchist Lysander Spooner (1808-1887)
began during the
Radical Review
. Tucker's admiration for Spooner was
immense. One of the most moving articles to appear in
Liberty
was
Tucker's eulogy to his deceased friend entitled "Our Nestor Taken
From Us."
In contrast, Tucker's relationship with Heywood grew more
distant. Yet, when Heywood was imprisoned for his pro-birth control
stand from August to December 1878 under the Comstock laws, Tucker
abandoned the
Radical Review
in order to assume editorship of
Heywood's
The Word
. After Heywood's release from prison,
The Word
openly became a free love journal; it flouted the law by printing
birth control material and openly discussing sexual matters.
Tucker's disapproval of this policy stemmed from his conviction that
"Liberty, to be effective, must find its first application in the
realm of economics..."
This difference of emphasis did not prevent Heywood from
welcoming Tucker's second periodical
Liberty
into the radical
individualist movement. In response to the first issue, Heywood
wrote: "
Liberty
is intelligent and vigorous, has opinions, character
and will command attention from its first issue; a bright, smart,
timely journal to which live people will find it unsafe not to
subscribe."
Another free love influence was the notorious Victoria Woodhull
who edited the
Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly
with her sister
Tennessee Claflin. Tucker and Woodhull became acquainted when town
authorities tried to prevent her from lecturing on "The Principles of
Social Freedom" and Tucker, among others, came to her defense.
Literally seduced by Woodhull, he joined the circle of male admirers
surrounding her, but became disillusioned, presumably upon
discovering that lectures and articles bearing her name were ghost
written, often by the individualist Stephen Pearl Andrews.
The most important American free love journal was
Lucifer the
Light Bearer
(1883-1907) edited by Moses Harman first from Valley
Falls, Kansas, then from Topeka (1890), and finally from Chicago
(1896). Tucker's relationship with Lucifer started well. At one
point, he exclaimed:
"I say, Messrs. Harman and Walker, editors of 'Lucifer,' I wish
you wouldn't make absolutely every number of your paper so good
and true and live and keen and consistently radical ... since
your advent, you have kept me in a state of perpetual doubt and
anxiety lest Liberty's light be dimmed by Lucifer's. In mercy's
name, let up a little, and give a toiling torch-bearer an
occasional chance to recuperate."
Gradually, however, the relationship between the two periodicals
became strained. Tucker became increasingly hostile to civil
disobedience as a strategy. Early in
Liberty's
history, Tucker had
been so outraged by the post office's refusal to carry Walt Whitman's
book of poems Leaves of Grass due to its alleged obscenity that he
published his own edition and flaunted its sale. Addressing the post
office and District Attorney Stevens, Tucker wrote: "You are hereby
distinctly notified -- all of you in general, and you, Oliver
Stevens, in particular that I have now in my possession, and do now
offer for sale, copies ... Yours, disrespectfully."
But gradually, Tucker became firmly committed to the strategy of
education rather than civil disobedience, especially when that
disobedience was likely to lead to martyrdom or more repressive laws.
With the Chicago Haymarket incident (May 4, 1886) and the hysterical
repression of radicalism which followed it, Tucker observed
first-hand the disastrous consequences of a rash act and concluded
that the cost outweighed any benefit.
In contrast, Harman's
Lucifer
pursued a consistent long term
policy of baiting the law, particularly the Comstock postal obscenity
law. Harman established an "open word" rule for
Lucifer
whereby no
contributions would be edited because of explicit language.
Accordingly,
Lucifer
published the Markland letter which analyzed
forced sex within marriage as rape.
For this and two other letters, the staff of
Lucifer
were jointly
and separately charged with 270 counts of obscenity; subsequently,
the charges were dropped against all but Harman. The rebellious acts
of which Tucker disapproved were exemplified by Harman's reprinting
of
Genesis
38 within
Lucifer
while he was awaiting trial. By
reprinting this portion of the Bible depicting Onan's coitus
interruptus and adultery, Harman tried unsuccessfully to goad the
court into declaring the Bible obscene. Moses Harman was imprisoned
for the Markland letter. This was the first of a series of
imprisonments for obscenity; he suffered through the last
imprisonment of one year at hard labor when he was in his seventies.
Many individualists rushed to support Harman. Most notably, Ezra
Heywood republished one of the offending articles from
Lucifer
and
was also arrested for doing so. Tucker did not feel able to support
Harman with enthusiasm. A number of
Liberty's
contributors were
quite critical of Tucker for this stand on strategy. This was one of
the few occasions upon which Tucker was not in the mainstream of
individualist anarchist thought.
An earlier incident had also created distance between Harman's
and Tucker's periodicals. The non-state, non-church wedding of E.C.
Walker and Lillian Harman (Moses Harman's sixteen year old daughter)
resulted in the couple's imprisonment. Their union had been an
explicit test of the marriage laws, and Tucker firmly disagreed with
the tactic. He later offered Harman an ambiguous apology: "I wish my
readers to learn that I have done the 'Lucifer' people great
injustice in underrating their intellectual capacities and cleanness
of perception and in making out that they fail to understand the
absurdity of their position ..." The "apology" was not well received.
The relationship between E. C. Walker and Tucker improved with
time, perhaps because Walker also disagreed with Harman's "open word"
policy. Walker resigned from
Lucifer
and used his new periodical
Fair Play,
a four page weekly at 75 cents per year, to attack what he
perceived to be
Lucifer's
determined martyrdom. Although E.C. Walker
continued contributing to
Lucifer,
it is significant that when
Fair
Play
ceased (1891) he transferred the current subscriptions to
Liberty.
A contributing editor to
Liberty
magazine, Wendy McElroy has
published widely in feminism beginning in 1983 with
Freedom,
Feminism and the State
(CATO) and most recently in 1995 with
XXX: A
Woman's Right to Pornography
(St. Martin's Press). Her articles have
appeared in such diverse publications as
National Review
and
Penthouse
. Her 'day' job is writing and editing documentaries, some
of which have been recorded by Walter Cronkite, George C. Scott and
Harry Reasoner.