Free love is asocial movement that accepts all forms oflove. The movement's initial goal was to separate thestate from sexual and romantic matters such asmarriage,birth control, andadultery. It stated that such issues were the concern of the people involved and no one else.[1] The movement began during the 19th century and was advanced byhippies during the 1960s and early 1970s.
The free love movement promoted the idea that consensual sexual and emotional relationships between adults should be free from state and religious interference, emphasizingpersonal freedom, sexual autonomy, andwomen’s rights. While intertwined withfeminism and advocating for radical social change, the movement was often dominated by male voices and criticized for failing to significantly alter mainstream gender norms.
Throughout history, various utopian and radical movements have embraced the concept of free love as a challenge to conventional marriage and sexual norms. Early examples include theAdamites andMazdakites, who rejected marriage and promoted communal or free sexual relations. In medieval Europe, sects like theCathars andBrethren of the Free Spirit werepersecuted for their unorthodox beliefs, includingcritiques of marriage and advocacy forcelibacy or free love.
Enlightenment thinkers such asMary Wollstonecraft andWilliam Blake denounced marriage as oppressive, with Wollstonecraft portraying female sexual autonomy in her novels and personal life, while Blake critiqued religious chastity and advocated passionate love unfettered by law. Romantic poets likePercy Bysshe Shelley andMary Shelley also embodied free love ideals in their writings and relationships. These ideas continued through theutopian socialism of thinkers likeCharles Fourier andRobert Owen, who viewed the suppression of sexual freedom as socially harmful. By the 19th century, figures likeHerbert Spencer were arguing for free divorce, reflecting the growing association between free love, feminism, and individual liberty. TheSummer of Love in 1967 helped mainstream theBeat Generation’s ideals, fueling a broadercounterculture andNew Left movement that championed free love,anti-war sentiment, andsexual liberation.
Much of the free love tradition reflects aliberal philosophy that seeksfreedom fromstate regulation andchurch interference inpersonal relationships. According to this concept, thefree unions ofadults (or persons at or above theage of consent) 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 theright to sexual pleasure without social or legal restraints. In theVictorian era, this was a radical notion. Later, a new theme developed, linking free love with radical social change and depicting it as aharbinger of a newanti-authoritarian, anti-repressive sensibility.[2]
According to the modern stereotype, earlier middle-class Americans wanted the home to be a place of stability in an uncertain world. To this mentality are attributed strongly defined gender roles, which led to a minority reaction in the form of the free-love movement.[3]
While the phrasefree love is often associated withpromiscuity in the popular imagination, especially in reference to thecounterculture 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 sexual relations that are freely entered into should not be regulated by law, and may be initiated or terminated by the parties involved at will.[4] Nevertheless, it has been acknowledged that many men who participated in the free love movement also saw free love as a way to get free sex.[5]
The term "sex radical" is often used interchangeably with the term "free lover".[6] By whatever name, advocates had two strong beliefs: opposition to the idea of forced sexual activity in a relationship and advocacy for a woman to use her body in any way that she pleases.[7]
Laws of particular concern to free love movements have included those that prevent an unmarried couple from living together, and those that regulateadultery anddivorce, as well asage of consent,birth control,homosexuality,abortion, and sometimesprostitution; 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 recognizespousal rape, or they 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 battledobscenity laws.
The history of free love is entwined with the history offeminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such asMary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, and many have advocated its abolition.[8]
According to feminist critique, 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 being employed asteachers. In 1855, free love advocateMary Gove Nichols (1810–1884) described marriage as the "annihilation of woman", explaining that women were considered to be men's property inlaw and public sentiment, making it possible for tyrannical men to deprive their wives of all freedom.[9][10] For example, the law often allowed a husband to beat his wife. Free-love advocates argued that many children were 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.[11]
In 1857, in theSocial Revolutionist, Minerva Putnam complained that "in the discussion of free love, no woman has attempted to give her views on the subject" and challenged every woman reader to "rise in the dignity of her nature and declare herself free."[12]
The figureheads of the free love movement were often men, both in leading organizations and contributing to its ideology. Almost all books endorsing free love in the 1850s were by men, except forMary Gove Nichols's 1855 autobiography.[13] This was the first full-length case against marriage written by a woman.[14] Of the four major free-love periodicals in theReconstruction era, half had woman editors.[15][16]
To proponents of free love, the act of sex was not just about reproduction. Access tobirth control was considered a means to women's independence, and leading birth-control activists also embraced free love. Sexual radicals remained focused on their attempts to uphold a woman's right to control her body and to freely discuss issues such ascontraception, marital-sex abuse (emotional and physical), andsexual education. These people believed that by talking about female sexuality, they would help empower women. To help achieve this goal, such radical thinkers relied on the written word, books, pamphlets, and periodicals, and by these means the movement was sustained for over fifty years, spreading the message of free love all over the United States.[17] However, many feminists would point out that the 1960s free love movement did not significantly change views about women's role in mainstream America.[5]Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic founder Dr. David Smith, who was a prominent participant in the 1967Summer of Love, acknowledged in 2007 how many of the men who participated in the event viewed women as prone.[5]
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. Anearly Christian sect known as theAdamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage. They practicednudism and believed themselves to be withoutoriginal sin.
In the 6th century, adherents ofMazdakism in pre-MuslimPersia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage.[18] One folk story from the period that contains a mention of a free-love (andnudist) community under the sea is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" fromThe Book of One Thousand and One Nights (c. 10th–12th century).[19]
Karl Kautsky, writing in 1895, noted that a number of "communistic" movements throughout the Middle Ages also rejected marriage.[20] Typical of such movements, theCathars 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 (theWaldenses, Apostle brothers,Beghards andBeguines,Lollards, andHussites) were branded asheretics by the Roman Catholic Church and suppressed. Other movements shared their critique of marriage but advocated free sexual relations rather than celibacy, such as theBrethren of the Free Spirit,Taborites, andPicards.
Free love was an element in radical thinking during the "English Revolution" of 1640–1660, most strongly associated with the "Ranters".[21][22] There were also perceptive critiques, within these radical movements, such as byGerrard Winstanley:
The mother and child begotten in this manner is like to have the worst of it, for the man will be gone and leave them ... after he hath had his pleasure. ..... By seeking their own freedom they embondage others.[23]
The ideals of free love found their champion in one of the earliest Englishfeminists,Mary Wollstonecraft. In her writings, Wollstonecraft challenged the institution of marriage, and advocated its abolition. 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, never finished but published in 1798, revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an asylum by her husband. Maria finds fulfilment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate. Wollstonecraft makes it clear that "women had strongsexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise."[8]
Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus did not marry her partner,Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of theTerror 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 later developed a relationship with the anarchistWilliam Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry, just months before her death from complications inparturition.
A member of Wollstonecraft's circle of notable radical intellectuals in England was theRomantic poetWilliam Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage toslavery in works such asVisions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), published five years after Wollstonecraft'sMary. Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions ofchastity as a virtue.[24] At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine's apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.[25] His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as "Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?" and "Earth's Answer" seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem "London" he speaks of "the Marriage-Hearse" plagued by "the youthful Harlot's curse", the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry.Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". InVisions, Blake writes:
Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)
Blake believed that humans were "fallen", and that a major impediment to a free love society was corrupt human nature, not merely the intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic hypocritical nature of human communication.[26] He also seems to have thought that marriage should afford the joy of love, but that in reality it often does not,[27] as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy:
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 ...
True love has this, different from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
In an act understood to support free love, the child of Wollstonecraft and Godwin,Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poetPercy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 at the young age of sixteen. Shelley wrote in defence of free love in the prose notes ofQueen Mab (1813), in his essayOn Love (c. 1815), and in the poemEpipsychidion (1821).
Sharing the free-love ideals of the earlier social movements—as well as their feminism, pacifism, and simple communal life—were theutopian socialist communities of early-nineteenth-century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such asHenri de Saint-Simon andCharles Fourier in France, andRobert Owen in England. Fourier, who coined the termfeminism, argued for true freedom, without suppressing passions: the suppression of passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a whole.[28] 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.[29]
The eminent sociologistHerbert Spencer argued in hisPrinciples of Sociology for the implementation of free divorce. Claiming that marriage consists of two components, "union by law" and "union by affection", he argued that with the loss of the latter union, legal union should lose all meaning and dissolve automatically, without the legal requirement for a divorce.[30] Free love particularly stressedwomen's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, marriage laws and anti-birth control measures.[31]
Free love began to coalesce into a movement in the mid- to late 19th century. The term was coined by the Christian socialist writerJohn Humphrey Noyes, although he preferred to use the term 'complex marriage'. Noyes founded theOneida Community 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).[32] Noyes also supportedeugenics; and only certain people (including Noyes himself) were allowed to become parents. Starting in 1837,Theophilus Gates, a precursor to Noyes, founded a short-lived free-love sect known as the "Battle Axes" nearPottstown, Pennsylvania. Another movement was established inBerlin Heights, Ohio.
In 1852, a writer namedMarx 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.[7] Elements of the free-love movement also had links toabolitionist movements, drawing parallels between slavery and "sexual slavery" (marriage), and forming alliances with black activists.
American feministVictoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first woman to run for presidency in the U.S., in 1872, was also called "the high priestess of free love".In 1871, Woodhull wrote: "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere".[33]
Thewomen's suffrage movement, free love andSpiritualism were three strongly linked movements at the time, and Woodhull was also a spiritualist leader. Like Noyes, she also supportedeugenics. 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.[34][35][36] Both Woodhull and Nichols eventually repudiated free love.[37][38]
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 sisterTennessee Claflin),The Word (ed.Ezra Heywood),Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (ed.Moses Harman) and the German-language Detroit newspaperDer Arme Teufel (ed. Robert Reitzel). Organisations included the New England Free Love League, founded with the assistance of American libertarian socialistBenjamin Tucker as a spin-off from the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL). A minority offreethinkers also supported free love.[39]
The most radical free love journal wasThe Social Revolutionist, published in 1856–1857 by John Patterson. The first volume consisted of twenty writers, of which only one was a woman.[16]
Sex radicals were not alone in their fight against marriage ideals. Some other nineteenth-century Americans saw this social institution as flawed, but hesitated to abolish it. Groups such as the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Latter-day Saints were wary of the social notion of marriage. These organizations and sex radicals believed that true equality would never exist between the sexes as long as the church and the state continued to work together, worsening the problem of subordination of wives to their husbands.[7]
Free-love movements continued into the early 20th century inbohemian circles in New York'sGreenwich Village. A group of Villagers lived free-love ideals and promoted them in the political journalThe Masses and its sister publicationThe Little Review, a literary journal. Incorporating influences from the writings of the English thinkers and activistsEdward Carpenter andHavelock Ellis, women such asEmma Goldman campaigned for a range of sexual freedoms, including homosexuality and access to contraception. Other notable figures among the Greenwich-Village scene who have been associated with free love includeEdna St. Vincent Millay,Max Eastman,Crystal Eastman,Floyd Dell,Mabel Dodge Luhan,Ida Rauh,Hutchins Hapgood, andNeith Boyce.Dorothy Day also wrote passionately in defense of free love, women's rights, and contraception—but later, after converting to Catholicism, she criticized the sexual revolution of the sixties.
The development of the idea of free love in the United States was also significantly impacted by the publisher ofPlayboy magazine,Hugh Hefner, whose activities and persona over more than a half century popularized the idea of free love to some of the general public.
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Free love was a central tenet of the philosophy of theFellowship of the New Life, founded in 1883 by the Scottish intellectualThomas Davidson.[40] Fellowship members included many illustrious intellectuals of the day, who went on to radically challenge accepted Victorian notions of morality and sexuality, including poetsEdward Carpenter andJohn Davidson, animal rights activistHenry Stephens Salt,[41] sexologistHavelock Ellis, feministsEdith Lees,Emmeline Pankhurst andAnnie Besant and writersH. G. Wells,Bernard Shaw,Bertrand Russell andOlive Schreiner.[42] Its objective was "The cultivation of a perfect character in each and all," and believed in the transformation of society through setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. Many of the Fellowship's members advocatedpacifism,vegetarianism andsimple living.[43]
Edward Carpenter was an early activist for the rights ofhomosexuals.[44] He became interested in progressive education, especially providing information to young people on the topic of sexual education. For Carpenter, sexual education meant forwarding a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in Carpenter's radical workLove's Coming-of-Age. In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual andeconomic freedom of women. The main crux of his analysis centred on the negative effects of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution.
The best-known British advocate of free love was the philosopherBertrand Russell, later Third Earl Russell, who said that he did not believe he really knew a woman until he had made love with her. Russell consistently addressed aspects of free love throughout his voluminous writings, and was not personally content with conventionalmonogamy until extreme old age. His most famous work on the subject wasMarriage and Morals, published in 1929. The book heavily criticizes theVictorian notions of morality regarding sex and marriage. Russell argued that the laws and ideas about sex of his time were a potpourri from various sources, which were no longer valid with the advent ofcontraception, as the sexual acts are now separated from the conception. He argued that family is most important for the welfare of children, and as such, a man and a woman should be considered bound only after her first pregnancy.[45]
Marriage and Morals prompted vigorous protests and denunciations against Russell shortly after the book's publication.[46] A decade later, the book cost him his professorial appointment at theCity College of New York due to a court judgment that his opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach.[47] Contrary to what many people believed, Russell did not advocate an extremelibertine position. Instead, he felt that sex, although a natural impulse like hunger or thirst, involves more than that, because no one is "satisfied by the bare sexual act". He argued that abstinence enhances the pleasure of sex, which is better when it "has a large psychical element than when it is purely physical".[48]
Russell noted that for a marriage to work requires that there "be a feeling of complete equality on both sides; there must be no interference with mutual freedom; there must be the most complete physical and mental intimacy; and there must be a certain similarity in regard to standards of value". He argued that it was, in general, impossible to sustain this mutual feeling for an indefinite length of time, and that the only option in such a case was to provide for either the easy availability ofdivorce, or the social sanction of extra-marital sex.[48]
Russell's view on marriage changed as he went through personal struggles of subsequent marriages; in his autobiography he writes, "I do not know what I think now about the subject of marriage. There seem to be insuperable objections to every general theory about it. Perhaps easy divorce causes less unhappiness than any other system, but I am no longer capable of being dogmatic on the subject of marriage."[49]
Russell was also a very early advocate of repealingsodomy laws.[50]
An important propagandist of free love wasindividualist anarchistÉmile Armand. He advocatednaturism andpolyamory in what he termedla camaraderie amoureuse.[51] 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".[51] In the individualist anarchist journalL'en dehors he and others continued in this way. Armand seized this opportunity to outline his theses supporting revolutionary sexualism and camaraderie amoureuse that differed from the traditional views of the partisans of free love in several respects.
Later Armand submitted that from an individualist perspective nothing was reprehensible about making "love", even if one did not have very strong feelings for one's partner.[51] "The camaraderie amoureuse thesis", he explained, "entails a free contract of association (that may be annulled without notice, following prior agreement) reached between anarchist individualists of different genders, adhering to the necessary standards of sexual hygiene, with a view toward protecting the other parties to the contract from certain risks of the amorous experience, such as rejection, rupture, exclusivism, possessiveness, unicity, coquetry, whims, indifference, flirtatiousness, disregard for others, and prostitution."[51] He also publishedLe Combat contre la jalousie et le sexualisme révolutionnaire (1926), followed over the years byCe que nous entendons par liberté de l'amour (1928),La Camaraderie amoureuse ou "chiennerie sexuelle" (1930), and, finally,La Révolution sexuelle et la camaraderie amoureuse (1934), a book of nearly 350 pages comprising most of his writings on sexuality.[51] In a text from 1937, he mentioned among the individualist objectives the practice of formingvoluntary associations for purely sexual purposes of heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual nature or of a combination thereof.
He also supported the right of individuals to change sex and stated his willingness to rehabilitate forbidden pleasures, non-conformist caresses (he was personally inclined toward voyeurism), as well as sodomy. This led him to allocate more and more space to what he called "the sexual non-conformists", while excluding physical violence.[51] His militancy also included translating texts from people such asAlexandra Kollontai andWilhelm Reich and establishments of free love associations which tried to put into practicela camaraderie amoureuse through actual sexual experiences.
Free love advocacy groups active during this time included theAssociation d'Études sexologiques and theLigue mondiale pour la Réforme sexuelle sur une base scientifique.[51]
After theOctober Revolution in Russia,Alexandra Kollontai became the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration. Kollontai was also a champion of free love. However,Clara Zetkin recorded thatLenin opposed free love as "completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social".[52] Zetkin also recounted Lenin's denunciation 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.[53]: 87–88 However, by the end of the 1920s,Stalin had taken control of the Communist Party and begun to implement socially conservative policies. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and free love was further demonized.[53]: 161
With theSummer of Love in 1967, the eccentricities of thebeat generation became a nationally recognized movement. Despite the developingsexual revolution and the influence of the Beatniks in this newcounterculture social rebellion, it has been acknowledged that theNew Left movement was arguably the most prominent advocate of free love during the late 1960s.[54] Many among the counterculture youth sided with New Left arguments that marriage was a symbol of the traditional capitalist culture which supported war.[54] "Make Love Not War" became a popular slogan in the counterculture movement which denounced both war and capitalism.[54] Images from the pro-socialistMay 1968 uprising in France, which occurred as theanti-war protests were escalating throughout the United States, would provide a significant source of morale to the New Left cause as well.[54]
Canadian Justice Minister, and future Prime Minister,Pierre Elliot Trudeau's 20 December 1967 statement "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" was a very public declaration justifying his government's decriminalization of sexual activity between same sex partners in Canada, following 1967'sSummer of Love.[55]
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