Graul’s co-operative community of the future, ‘liberty’ meant ‘life will be a constant wooing’.18
Echoing the early nineteenth-century utopians, the anarchist Kate Austin suggested that free love carried a promise of what might be. Writing in Firebrand, she argued in 1897:
We all know that no golden key will unlock the casket of love, and that oft-times free love is the priceless possession of the poorest man or woman on earth. Many insist on saying ‘free love is not practicable under present conditions’. Now I am not afraid to say that free love is all there is of love, that it was born of life and has always been with us, and is all that sweetens our onward march. If love is put in a cage, or fettered in any way, it is no longer love, but a ghastly nameless thing, that blasts the living and curses the unborn.19
Women advocates of free love were, however, all too aware that it was easier to express new ideals of sexual relationships than to live them. Lizzie Holmes’s novel Hagar Lyndon (1893) detailed the practical obstacles her heroine encountered when she sought to be free, to love passionately and to survive in a hostile world. Eventually she was compelled to renounce passion for autonomy. When the journal Discontent, produced in the anarchist Home Colony in Washington, serialized a free-love novel by Nellie M. Jerauld, Holmes wrote a letter pointing out that free-love couples could be as demanding and possessive as married ones; moreover they, too, could be forced to stay together by economic pressures, especially after they had children.20
Although free-thinking and anarchist women were on the whole hopeful about the possibility of mutual understanding between men and women, they could be critical of men’s gender blindness. In 1895 Edith Vance, a convinced free thinker associated with the Legitimation League, raised the differing consequences of heterodoxy for two Leeds members, the Dawsons, who lived in a free union:
I did not know until I had a talk with Mrs Dawson afterwards . . . what a very great deal she has to endure, it is very easy – perhaps it is fun to you gentlemen – to be twitted about your connection with the League. You can bear it with fortitude, and perhaps rather like it than otherwise, and if the conversation gets too bad, you can knock the man down but Mrs Dawson is not in a position to thus deal with her slanderers, men or women, and in most cases the women are the worst.21
Women in free-love circles knew from experience that abstract ‘free-love’ prescriptions could overlook the complexities of actual situations and needs in relationships, and that refusing marriage was no guarantee of happiness. Not only was it evident that cultural attitudes were far less forgiving towards women’s sexual deviance than men’s, but some suspected that enthusiasm for autonomy and the value of ‘experiences’ could be cynical male ploys. Nellie Shaw describes how a man who arrived at the Whiteway Tolstoyan anarchist community in the British Cotswolds during the early 1900s, advocating ‘varietism’, was sent packing. Autonomy was about women expressing their individuality within monogamy, as far as she was concerned.22
The dilemmas and arguments continued in the early twentieth century, though the context changed. The American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre regarded sex as one aspect of experience, and believed in a state of permanent flux and autonomy. Writing in Mother Earth in 1908 she plumped for ‘ecstasy’ rather than permanent free union. ‘Never allow love to be vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communion.’23 The problem was, when freedoms conflicted who was to decide? Jealousy too proved particularly resistant to free-love reasoning. Women advocates of free unions might insist they were motivated by a higher, inner-directed morality rather than old-style competition for men, but their rivals were not necessarily convinced.
Some of the free lovers’ assumptions about the need for self-ownership and greater choice and control were shared by the ‘new women’ writers of the late nineteenth century. In 1888 the British novelist Mona Caird was insisting on the need for a ‘full understanding and acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul’.24 New women, however, were inclined to be more sceptical than anarchist women about the possibility of co-operating with men; as Caird declared, ‘The enemy has to be met and fought within men’s soul’.25 Like anarchist free lovers, new women like Caird believed that women’s dependent status was deeply embedded not only within existing family relations, but in established institutions such as the church and the state; however, their strategies for change differed. While free lovers stressed individual direct action in defiance of the law, Caird was prepared to accept that self-ownership required legislative reforms such as female suffrage, equal parental rights, and divorce, along with marriage as a free contract, co-education and the abolition of segregated patterns of work. Like the free lovers, though, Caird asserted that woman’s self-possession involved the right ‘to give or withhold herself . . . exactly as she wills’.26
Voltairine de Cleyre (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)
Self-ownership, greater equality in sexual relationships, interconnections between personal behaviour and external political demands, along with free love, were all being discussed in the socialist movement during the late nineteenth century. Edith Lanchester’s free union in defiance of her family in 1895 brought the issue of sexuality out into the open and caused ripples of controversy. However, prominent women socialists, whose position was already socially and culturally precarious because of their politics, were inclined to be wary. As the Independent Labour Party activist Margaret McMillan put it, ‘Marriage is bad and Free Love is worse’.27
Many women who sought to live more autonomously were inclined to associate sex with danger. Meridel LeSueur, who would become a novelist, came from a left-wing background in the Mid-West and her mother was a feminist. As a young woman in Greenwich Village before World War One, she met and admired Emma Goldman, but contrasted Goldman’s frank acceptance of sexual pleasure with the attitudes of her mother’s generation.
Many of them felt sex was a humiliating force, symbolic of their repression – of marriage and child-bearing – and it represented to them violence, rape, and enslavement. Many of them at that time felt a woman had only two choices: living her own life with a career and calling as a radical, or marriage with sex and children.28
In the late nineteenth century the conviction that women needed to be protected from male sexuality encouraged women reformers in both countries to become involved in efforts to eradicate prostitution. An unintended consequence was that over-zealous police harried women they thought were not ‘respectable’. In Britain in 1885 a broad coalition led by the supporter of women’s rights, Josephine Butler, secured the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Act which had sanctioned forced physical examinations of women whom police suspected of prostitution. The National Vigilance Association was formed as a result of the campaign. However, divisions arose between women concerned to protect working-class prostitutes from destitution, and vigilance campaigners who wanted to close brothels by force. Among the latter was Laura Ormiston Chant, a supporter of the Liberal Party, women’s suffrage, temperance and social purity. Although initially distrustful of state intervention, Chant and other social-purity activists began to shift from simply campaigning to seeking changes in local and national government policy. In the 1890s Chant, with allies from the British Women’s Temperance Association, successfully put pressure on a coalition of Progressives on the London County Council to restrict licences to music halls that featured acts of which they disapproved. In 1901 a vigorous campaign against prostitution was mounted by Progressives, evangelicals, feminists and temperance supporters against prostitution; it targeted the women rather than their male clients, an approach which caused conflict among social-purity feminists.29
Social purity was also a powerful force in the United States. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union could
