The Blue Monkey Review

October 4, 2003

Yesterday, I wrote a review of Joanne Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality(University of Illinois, 2003) for the Journal of American History. In due course I will revise and send the review to JAH and hope they publish it in a timely fashion (unlike their review of my second book which took about 4 years after my book was published to find its way into print). But as I read the book I began to revisit my own acquaintance with the people and movement of Passet’s study. My Ph.D. dissertation and first book was Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825-1860 (NYU, 1988). Passet’s work covers much of the same ground, though with a different emphasis and a distinctive thesis. Yet my reflections on Passet’s work, and perhaps the passage of so much time, gave me a flood of thoughts about 19th century free love that I knew would never make it into the 500 words of my review and that might, in some cases, violate the fiction of impartiality that historians must maintain.

First, now that my book is long out of print I can freely recommend that if you read only one book on free love, make it Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. This work provides an overview of the movement, an in-depth discussion of the diverse views of free lovers, and a sturdy empirical study appropriate to a historical monograph. Passet does not write that her study was provoked by any of my views (though she does mention Free Love in her introduction), but she did manage to find an obscure article of mine on the free love movement entitled “A Masculine View of Women’s Freedom.” Perhaps she read that article after she had conceived of or even written much of her book. But her work does make a highly (though not totally) effective case against the thesis of my short article. In my article I proposed that free love was a movement for the freedom and equality of women but one that in most respects was thoroughly masculine. The lone anonymous referee for that article, apparently someone who knew very little about free love, wrote snidely that of course free love was a con game played by men and that the only remarkable thing about it was how long it kept going. That judgment annoyed me greatly (as did another thought-free criticism of one of my references), but I felt that I could do little to defend the movement and its leaders since it seemed to me that free love could have had little appeal to most women. The sexual freedom envisioned by free love ideologues would have worked only in a communal society (of which there were several, all male-dominated)—in the world outside a cooperative community, the freedom from marriage bonds preached by free lovers would have left women without support but almost inevitably with children to support. The leadership of the movement was almost entirely male, and the two most prominent women associated with the movement were both conflict-inspiring and volatile figures who lasted less than a decade each as leaders within the movement.

Passet’s work patiently attempts to answer each of my claims. Although she considers the careers of Mary Gove Nichols and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the two notorious leaders of the movement mentioned above, she also gives in-depth studies of other women who worked within and led the movement for decades. More importantly, she builds a strong case for the appeal of free love to ordinary women through her study of the correspondence published in free love periodicals. For Passet, free love was not a communitarian movement but a virtual community of periodicals and the readers and contributors to the periodicals drew support and a sense of togetherness from their participation in that virtual community. [True, I made something of the same point in an early article on the “Free Love Counterculture,” but my early work as a research assistant for Robert Hine dealt with communal societies. My attraction to free love came out of my earliest published article on the Modern Times community on Long Island, work that I rolled over into my dissertation study. And, as Passet admits, at least for early free lovers, the ideals seemed to make sense only in communitarian settings. Two communities did attempt free love, though as predicted by John Humphrey Noyes, leader of the Oneida community, without a firm religious discipline the freedom preached by free love made for volatile community relations. Nevertheless, the anarchists (read individualists who expected cooperation but not common ownership) at Modern Times and Berlin Heights persisted far longer than most surveys of communal societies give them credit for (certainly far longer than Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s sociological approach [Commitment and Community (1972)] would have predicted—she far understates the lifespan of Modern Times).]

I have a few criticisms of Passet’s work. I mention in my review that her early chapters claim support from women for Mary Gove Nichols and free love ideas that her evidence does not justify. She builds a portrait of women readers of Mary Gove Nichols’ Mary Lyndon that seems based in literary theory and not historical evidence. Later chapters make up for this and I have no problem in admitting that she adequately answers the claims in my article of many years ago (a relief, I’m sure, to Joanne Passet). Other issues were not important enough to take up space in my review. For instance, the author also gives Victoria Woodhull the mantle of bridging the pre and post-Civil War free love movements. I don’t think much of Woodhull—she was an unstable character even within the lively crowd of radical reformers, and she always managed to exploit radical reform for her own ends. Passet’s revelation that Woodhull tried to blackmail leaders of the women’s rights movement did nothing to improve my confidence in Woodhull. But Woodhull clearly picked up free love from her association with Stephen Pearl Andrews, with whom she headed the International Workers Party section 12. Andrews, and others, launched free love in the 1850s. Woodhull had plenty of contact with other pre-Civil War free lovers, including Jospeh Treat, another unstable character who Woodhull seems to have pushed over the edge. Due to her emphasis upon women leaders (which, let me repeat, I find appropriate given the need to overturn the Spurlock thesis), she says little about key figures such as Andrews.

Then there is the issue of sex. Passet’s subject is the free love movement, yet she prefers the term sex radical. She is correct to claim that sex radical includes a range of reformers many of whom would not have identified themselves as free lovers. Yet, free love was the term that identified the movement. No one used the term sex radical. In fact, Passet tells us too little about the sexual hang-ups of these people. Many of the letters she cites spoke of the suffering of women forced to meet the sexual demands of their husbands, often resulting in unwanted pregnancies. Nothing should trivialize the suffering of these women. Yet consider all of the cultural assumptions that contributed to that suffering. Most of the free lovers or sex radicals had no real attraction to sex as a source of physical joy. Passet does identify some who did, and these were remarkably free-thinking individuals for their time. But many of the Midwestern farm women who wrote to free love periodicals had little, if any, notion of the joy of sex. But even if they did, they had no way to enjoy it because almost universally they rejected the use of artificial birth control. The one form of birth control that does seem to have been in wide use in the 19th century among the white, upwardly mobile, middling folk was withdrawal. That practice, like the use of condoms, would have depended on the cooperation of husbands. Apparently, the husbands complained of in the free love press didn’t believe in birth control (and what man would be likely to actually demand the use of withdrawal?), but they also seem to have accepted cultural norms about masturbation, otherwise they might have left their wives alone.

But I’ve uncovered the cultural issue, and this is my last argument with Joanne Passet. She writes that the virtual community of free love periodicals, readers, and contributors grew out of the common experience of martial discord and also from the economic hard times that recurred during the late 19th century. Women—sometimes married to reform-minded men but all too often married to insensitive abusers—isolated in small towns or on farms throughout the Midwest, found in free love a genuine expression of their concerns. This social perspective appeals to me, and I think it contains a valuable insight. Yet, free love spread from New England and New York across upstate New York, the Firelands in Ohio, and then throughout the Midwest. In other words, it flourished where the culture of greater New England flourished, and in many cases (perhaps most) it was carried by New Englanders and their descendants. Much of radical reform, whether free love or the fringe of temperance and abolition, was populated by Puritans, many of whom found a replacement for religion in reform. Who but cultural heirs of the Puritans could have combined the exploration of unmentionable social changes (sexual freedom) with a disciplined (sometimes repressive) attitude about those practices?

I admit, even fifteen years after finishing my study of them, the free lovers still fascinate me, but the fascination is highly ambivalent. These women and men who risked and endured ostracism and even jail for their commitment attract me because of their perspicacity and courage. Yet, their ambivalence about sex, their sectarian conflicts with other liberal movements, and their self-righteousness were often extreme and frankly repulsive. The issues they embraced often have such contemporary resonance that it makes you want to draw a straight line from free love to a present-day sensibility about marriage. As Passet shows repeatedly, free lovers knew that the personal was political, and explosive in its revolutionary potential: “if self-sufficient women could have fulfilling sexual relations with men they loved, they no longer would enter into unloving relationships.” (Passet, p. 163) To a 21st century reader, that sounds like the bedrock of women’s liberation. To a 19th century reader, that would have sounded by turns revolutionary, whimsical, or dangerous. And it would not only have been conservative men, but also most women, who would have considered these ideas dangerous. Self-sufficiency might be available to a tiny minority of wealthy or talented Anglo-American women, but generally “self-sufficiency” belonged to social outcasts with few resources and few options except to scrabble for survival—single mothers (sometimes prostitutes), African American women, and Irish serving maids. By the time self-sufficiency became somewhat more widely available to middle-class women, these college-educated women often chose to live without marriage or to live in Boston marriage. In other words, the cutting edge of women reformers by the Progressive era were urban women who could contemplate giving up heterosexual unions and who seemingly ignored the Midwestern rants about true marriage and sexual variety. These new Puritan women of the 1890s and later showed the same single-mindedness and discipline that characterized sex radicals, but they solved the marriage question by not marrying.

In the end, though, the new women of the progressive era became old maids by the 1920s. The reasons that U.S. culture abandoned or vilified the “New woman as Androgyne” are sketched in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s article by that title. I think she and others have over-emphasized some trends in the culture, and my current work seeks (with little published success to date) to unravel that issue. What is clear, however, is that the homosociality of the Progressive era appeared old fashioned and anti-sex by the Jazz Age. Marriage re-emerged as a pressing issue, and, even though sexual pleasure became an overwhelming concern, the criticisms of marriage in the 1920s appeared in language that free lovers would have understood and cheered. The free love movement, for all its marginality, sectarianism, and self-righteousness, uncovered a deeply felt ambivalence about modern marriage that remains with us in the 21st century and seems as likely to survive as marriage.