Free love
Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual and romantic matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It stated that such issues were the concern of the people involved and no one else. The movement began during the 19th century and was advanced by hippies 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, emphasizing personal freedom, sexual autonomy, and women’s rights. While intertwined with feminism 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 the Adamites and Mazdakites, who rejected marriage and promoted communal or free sexual relations. In medieval Europe, sects like the Cathars and Brethren of the Free Spirit were persecuted for their unorthodox beliefs, including critiques of marriage and advocacy for celibacy or free love.
Enlightenment thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William 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 like Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley also embodied free love ideals in their writings and relationships. These ideas continued through the utopian socialism of thinkers like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, who viewed the suppression of sexual freedom as socially harmful. By the 19th century, figures like Herbert Spencer were arguing for free divorce, reflecting the growing association between free love, feminism, and individual liberty. The Summer of Love in 1967 helped mainstream the Beat Generation’s ideals, fueling a broader counterculture and New Left movement that championed free love, anti-war sentiment, and sexual liberation.
Principles
Much of the free love tradition reflects a liberal 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 without social or legal restraints. 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.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.
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 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. 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.
The term "sex radical" is often used interchangeably with the term "free lover". 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.
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 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 battled obscenity laws.
Relationship to feminism
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.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 as teachers. In 1855, free love advocate Mary Gove Nichols 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 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.
In 1857, in the Social 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."
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 for Mary Gove Nichols's 1855 autobiography. This was the first full-length case against marriage written by a woman. Of the four major free-love periodicals in the Reconstruction era, half had woman editors.
To proponents of free love, the act of sex was not just about reproduction. Access to birth 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 as contraception, marital-sex abuse, and sexual 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. However, many feminists would point out that the 1960s free love movement did not significantly change views about women's role in mainstream America. Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic founder Dr. David Smith, who was a prominent participant in the 1967 Summer of Love, acknowledged in 2007 how many of the men who participated in the event viewed women as prone.
History
Early precedents
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. An early Christian sect known as the Adamites existed in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries and rejected marriage. They practiced nudism and believed themselves to be without original sin.In the 6th century, adherents of Mazdakism in pre-Muslim Persia apparently supported a kind of free love in the place of marriage. One folk story from the period that contains a mention of a free-love community under the sea is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.
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 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 Brethren of the Free Spirit, Taborites, and Picards.
Free love was an element in radical thinking during the "English Revolution" of 1640–1660, most strongly associated with the "Ranters". There were also perceptive critiques, within these radical movements, such as by Gerrard 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.
Enlightenment thought
The ideals of free love found their champion in one of the earliest English feminists, 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 strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise."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 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 later developed a relationship with the 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 months before her death from complications in parturition.
File:Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy G plate 01.jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.8|Frontispiece to William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which contains Blake's critique of Christian values of marriage. Oothoon and Bromion are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
A member of Wollstonecraft's circle of notable radical intellectuals in England was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion, published five years after Wollstonecraft's Mary. Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. 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. 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 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". In Visions, Blake writes:
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. He also seems to have thought that marriage should afford the joy of love, but that in reality it often does not, as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy:
In an act understood to support free love, the child of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 at the young age of sixteen. Shelley wrote in defence of free love in the prose notes of Queen Mab, in his essay On Love, and in the poem Epipsychidion.