right to knowledge, free lovers were confronted by a resolute foe. The campaigner for social purity Anthony Comstock had managed to get a law passed in 1873, banning the distribution of ‘obscene’ literature through the mail. The ‘Comstock Law’ meant that free-love advocates could be criminalized; the editor of Lucifer, Moses Harman, Lillian’s father, went to jail several times for defending women’s sexual freedom, including the right to resist rape in marriage. As late as 1905 Moses Harman was back in prison, for publishing articles by the birth controller Dora Forster on ‘Sex Radicalism’. Forster argued that the worst kind of prostitution occurred in conventional marriages in which women were taught to use their bodies for economic and social advantage. She asserted that few married women experienced sensual enjoyment, and maintained that sex should not be restricted necessarily to one partner. She also defended sexual play in childhood, and advocated sex education.3
Women free lovers wanted to democratize personal relationships and extend possibilities of choice and control. When in 1898 Lillian Harman came to speak in London to the British free lovers in the Legitimation League, she put the case not simply for ‘freedom in sexual relationships’ but for extending the spaces for wider forms of personal encounter between men and women. She considered that the tendency for women’s ‘expression of friendship’ to ‘be construed into an invitation to flirtation’ distorted relations between the sexes. She wanted women to be able to define whether relationships were to be sexual or not, rather than simply having to respond to the terms set by men. Women’s freedom was one aspect of a wider ‘freedom in social relationships’.4
The women free lovers’ campaigns for the right to knowledge involved not simply access to information but self-knowledge, an inner awareness which could foster empathy with others. Writing in Liberty in 1888, Sarah Holmes connected self-control to ‘self-understanding’. Replying to a worried young anarchist whose girlfriend Minnie had been shocked by his views on free love, Holmes explained to him how Chernyshevsky had demonstrated that a troubled love was not real love. We could not rely on our ‘natural, spontaneous feeling’, because ‘We are taught the traditions of slavery’. Constant struggle and ‘watchfulness’ were needed ‘against lapses and mistakes’. In believing he loved Minnie ‘instead of some woman who was a theoretical free lover’ he was, she suggested, emotionally ambiguous about his own free-love ideas. She then proceeded to propound to him the alternative Holmes ideal of ‘free love’. Love was part of a process of harmonized development through which a person grew ‘wholly . . . not unevenly’, and it required ‘latent sympathy in ideas’. She thought that love became ‘a quiet, gentle, normal, life-giving impulse and power only as fast and as far as this sympathy is found and its free expression made possible. It becomes a troubled, wild, anxious, life-destroying fever and madness as fast and as far as this sympathy is lost sight of, or jarred upon, or intercepted in its manifestation.’5
Similarly idealistic, perfectionist aspirations to wholeness, harmony and control recur in the writings of other free-love women. Elmina Slenker proposed ‘Dianaism’, a non-penetrative sexuality advocated by Tolstoy, as a means of gaining wisdom and poise. In December 1889, she assured readers of Ezra Heywood’s Word that this was not a ‘cold, apathetic, distant, unnatural Love’ designed to deny sex feeling.6 Eight years later in Lucifer, Slenker – who believed as did many feminists in this period that women were more spiritual than men – was still explaining Dianaism: ‘The little touches, pats and caresses tokens of love. The clasp of the hand, the glance of affection, the tone of the voice, and all that speaks of genuine kindliness and friendliness; this we offer in place of the overmuch sexing, that is murdering millions of wives and scattering syphilis all over the world.’7 Accepting that ‘the masses’ would move slowly towards Dianaism, she suggested that meanwhile small groups could set an example by adopting alternative ways of making love. Drawing on a metaphor of thrift, common in nineteenth-century free-love discourse, Slenker advised readers of Lucifer that they should ‘Conserve the life forces and not needlessly waste them in mere paroxysms of pleasure’.8 Other women in free-love circles were also interested in changing sexual practices. Alice B. Stockham, a friend of Lillian Harman, argued in Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896) that copulation should not be regarded as simply a means for procreation; rather it should be ‘a blending of body, soul and spirit’.9 Prolonged intercourse without orgasm for either men or women, Stockham maintained, was both pleasurable and a form of soul union.
However, women’s supposed spirituality proved contentious. While some women free lovers agreed with Slenker that the ‘sex instinct’ was stronger in men, others angrily asserted women’s physical desires. In 1897 Dora Forster told a London meeting of radical sexual reformers at the Legitimation League that the suppression of desire resulted in ‘morbidity’, insisting that women ‘suffer as much from enforced celibacy as men’.10 Amy Linnett challenged Elmina Slenker in Lucifer in the same year, taking up the cudgels on behalf ‘of our younger radical women . . . who are not ashamed to avow the deliciousness of their sex, as Walt Whitman put it’.11 When a male contributor argued in the journal that October that women were the moral regulators of sexual relationships, Elizabeth Johnson responded indignantly that ‘woman’ should have the ‘right to use her functions as she pleases’. She declared: ‘Stop setting woman on a pedestal, recognize her as an equal and half the problem would be solved.’12
Within the lofty discourse of free love it was somewhat difficult for women to assert an active desire which might make them seek more than one man. But Rosa Graul raised the question of women choosing differing fathers in her utopian novel Hilda’s Home, serialized by Lucifer in 1897:
if a woman desires to repeat the experience of motherhood, why should it be wrong when she selects another to be the father of her child, instead of the one who has once performed this office for her? Why should the act be less pure when she bestows a second love, when the object of this second love is just as true, just as noble, just as pure-minded as was the first one? Why should an act be considered a crime with one partner which had been fully justified with another?13
She added bravely, ‘My words are backed by personal experience and observation, experience as bitter as any that has been herein recorded.’14 On her visit to Britain in 1898, Lillian Harman also defended variety. ‘I consider uniformity in mode of sexual relations as undesirable and impracticable as enforced uniformity in anything else. For myself, I want the right to profit by my mistakes.’15
The aim was the right to be happy and to make independent choices. In 1891 the anarchist Lillie White, Lizzie Holmes’s sister, defined this as a self-conscious awareness of individual autonomy: ‘When women learn that their best and highest object in life is to be independent and free, instead of living to make some man comfortable; when she finds that she must first be happy herself before she can make others happy, we shall have loving, harmonious families and happy homes.’16 For White, an assertion of self was necessary in order to bond as equals.
Despite the rationalism in both the free-love tradition and the radical utilitarianism of Chernyshevsky, anarchist women also insisted on romance. Clashing in the pages of Liberty in 1888 with the Russian anarchist Victor Yarros, who believed in conventional family life, Sarah Holmes insisted that in the future ‘the love of men and women will not take the form of violets first, and beefsteak but no violets ever after.’ Her ‘most yearning wish’ for her own daughter was that
she may never, in all her life, look into the eyes of an old-time lover and say: You used to bring me violets. I want men and women to keep their love as fresh as the baby-life to which such love gives birth; to be true, honest, strong, self-sustaining men and women first; and then to love; to love one or to love many – fate and the chances of life must settle that – but, one or many, I want each love to be as full of its own essential fragrant essence as a violet’s breath.17
Elmina Slenker was a great enthusiast of Diana-style
