Free Love: Cultivating the Garden of Eden in America

By John Anderson

This narrative history of sexism in America presents the adventures of Fanny Wright, Victoria Woodhull, Mary Gove Nichols, and their contemporary reformers. Free Love rescues them from the neglect imposed on them by those who so dreaded the equality of women and their threat to change the status quo. The book describes the way myths were employed about the reformers, providing an anatomy of regression that continues in a contemporary culture that has responded to the assent of women with a reassertion of sexist values. Can anyone deny the current objectification of young women? By restoring yesterday’s reformers to the public consciousness, the author’s goal is to inspire new reformers who will help women opt out of this culture, who can create a path away from the one that leads inexorably to fake nails, fake tan, and fake breasts. Not long ago, feminists believed that they only had to install conditions for equality. The remnants of early nineteenth-century sexism in our culture would then wither away. Now, as we are bombarded with the sound bites and images of pop celebrity throwbacks, we must admit that the dystopia of sexism is alive and thriving in America. Perhaps Free Love can help renew the effort to establish Utopia in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Anderson
• Release date: Jan 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458038951

John Anderson

I'm an aspiring author who floats on with the rest of the clouds in the sky. I'm not really sure where my place is but I look for it every day. It's an adventure in itself I guess. Along the way I enjoy the outdoors, sports and music.

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Free Love

Cultivating the Garden of Eden in America

by

John Anderson

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

John Anderson on Smashwords

Free Love

Copyright © 2011 by John Anderson

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Also by John Anderson:

GIRTY: The Legend (with a foreword by Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore, elder of the Manataka Peace Council)

The Wages of Gin

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Editor: Whitney Roberts. Cover Design and Image Composition: Jana Rade.

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And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. – Book of Genesis

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. – Book of Genesis

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. – Rebecca West

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For Cara, Amy, and Julia

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Acknowledgments

This book tells the stories of the sadly forgotten nineteenth century social reformers who inspired and advanced America’s feminist movement. David Owen, Fanny Wright, John Humphrey Noyes, Judith Sargent Murray, Margaret Fuller, Lucretia Mott, Mary Gove Nichols, Josiah Warren, and Victoria Woodhull were well known in their own time. Their century’s mythmakers made them notorious with lies about their immorality and dangerous ambitions. Women then were virtual slaves in a male controlled democracy where only white, propertied men were equal. To protect that status quo, the mythmakers made the efforts of the reformists seem a terrible threat to the very existence of America. The notoriety of the reformers led to their ostracism from our history books. Free Love attempts to right that wrong by showing how their brave experiments ultimately led to the recognition that all women are created equal to men.

I would like to thank several people working in all the libraries I visited for my research and others who came to my aid in places as different as New York and Berlin Heights, Ohio. They showed me old newspaper and magazine articles and books that condemned and warned against the socialist experiments profiled here. It’s so much more rewarding to read a tattered newspaper than microform copies. Most important to the existence of this book is my editor, Whitney Roberts. I remember her first comment to me about Free Love: When you told me about this manuscript, I thought ‘Hmmm, will I like that?’ But of course, I really enjoyed it! Whitney’s editing has made a typically miserable task a pleasure instead. She’s made a better book of it.

In a series of fascinating dialogues, the late Carlos Castaneda set forth his partial initiation with don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman from the state of Sonora, Mexico, in his book, The Teachings of Don Juan. The University of California Press published this now classic book by their anthropology student named Carlos Castaneda, and his book initiated a generation of seekers dissatisfied with the limitations of the Western worldview. Castaneda’s book remains controversial for the alternative way of seeing that it presents and the revolution in cognition it demands. He made the essential point that to enter into alien worlds, in my case the worlds of wild, abused Indians (Girty: The Legend) and now of wild and abused women (Free Love), the adventurer requires a trusted, spiritual ally. In Girty: The Legend, my ally was Grandfather Lee Standing Bear Moore, of the Manataka (Place of Peace) American Indian Council and editor of Smoke Signal News. Now, in Free Love, my allies are my dearest, merciless friends, Katharine Bentley and Dori Lieber. I say merciless because they would not lightly let me off the hook. They did their best to correct my weakness for redundancy and my male tendency to not just listen but instead to plead, What can I do to help? Thanks for all these years, my allies, Katharine and Dori.

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Contents

Preface

Chapter One: The Quest for Perfection

Chapter Two: The Benevolent Dictator

Chapter Three: The Red Harlot

Chapter Four: Mister Perfect

Chapter Five: The Spirit of Free Love

Chapter Six: The Bride of Satan

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

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Free Love

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Preface

Why are so few American heroes of the nineteenth century honored today? Yes, the Civil War, its generals, and Abraham Lincoln are given great attention. Otherwise, the middle period between the Revolution and the Civil War is largely noticed only for such oddities as its mesmerizing healers, frontier outlaws and New York gangs, spirit speakers, clairvoyants and prophets, and notorious leaders, such as the polarizing Andrew Jackson, the crooked Boss Tweed, the terrorist John Brown, and the weak Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore. Yet the experience in the early and middle nineteenth century did a great deal to shape the nation we live in today as America moved so quickly from a developing country after the War of 1812 to a major world power by the end of the Mexican War of 1846.

Subsistence farming gave way to industry with innovations in transportation (the steamboat, the Erie Canal, the railroad), communications (the telegraph, the steam-operated printing press, more efficient papermaking), the mechanization of agriculture (McCormick’s reaper, John Deere’s steel plow), and methods of mass production. Many of the issues that faced Americans then are remarkably similar to those that confront us today: social reform, religious zeal, immigration, financial markets in crisis, and wars criticized as immoral. Most interesting to me are the contributions made by individuals whose achievements have been lost to history but have affected each of us. Anyone who wants to know how the past has made the present should look more closely at the nineteenth century.

This book profiles some of the leading social reformers of this middle period who sought to establish utopia in the new world of America. I’ve also chosen to neglect some, such as Etienne Cabet, the French autocrat and utopian whose experiments failed first in Texas and later in Nauvoo, Illinois, Iowa, and California. He was influenced by the work of Robert Owen. Cabet was a dedicated communist who came to the United States in 1847. As another child of the Enlightenment, he romanticized women. They were pure, but contained intensely powerful and potentially dangerous passions that must be held in reserve for their future husbands. His Icarian Movement declared that men and women were equal, but it paradoxically refused to grant full citizenship to its female followers and required them to marry and submit to male Icarians. The average nonreligious socialist commune lasted only fifteen years in America, but the Icarians’ five communes survived for more than fifty years. They achieved far more than any other experiment in the quality of their arts and education. But they too ultimately failed at the hard work required to build a sustainable colony. Cabet was a tyrant, not a benevolent dictator like his model, Robert Owen. I’ve neglected his history because it contributed nothing to the American feminist movement or to anything else for the nation’s future. It turned out to be the last socialist colony standing. The final Icarian attempt at perfection was made in Cloverdale, California, in 1886, long after Cabet’s death.

All the great reformers failed, but in that process each one of them, with the exception of Cabet, helped to build the foundation for the twentieth century’s feminist movement. Odds are that you have not read about or ever heard of Robert Owen, Fanny Wright, Lucretia Mott, John Humphrey Noyes, Josiah Warren, Mary Gove Nichols, and Victoria Woodhull. Well, here they are, and here are their compelling stories.

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Chapter One

The Quest for Perfection

As I sorted through my mother’s possessions after her death, a sad task turned tedious—she never threw anything away. I came across a stack of crumbly newspapers at the bottom of an old cedar chest. The paper on top was a November 21, 1857, issue of the Tri-Weekly Cleveland Herald. The front-page headline, The Berlin Free-Lovers, topped the following lead:

The case of these loose characters are still undergoing examination at Sandusky. The Register says that a crowd fills the Court House, and adds: Miss Emma Dame, a sister of one of the prisoners, a handsome young girl of about seventeen, sat in court with a face suffused with blushes, in manner evincing that she felt herself out of place.

The article continued, confusingly:

Mrs. Powers is certainly a strong-minded woman. Of large and well-developed person, she possesses a courage and brazenness that seems literally to fear nothing. The forenoon was spent by her at the side of her counsel, prompting questions to witnesses, sneering at the prosecution; laughing heartily at points made in her favor, etc., etc.

Later, we learn what the reader in 1857 must have known about these members of a Free Love colony in the township of Berlin, Ohio, now called Berlin Heights just west of Cleveland. Those who attacked it for its association with socialism called it a Free Lust colony. The newspaper reported that its followers were:

… an incalculable injury to that township. On account of their presence its very name has become a byword and term of reproach, property has declined in value, and the pecuniary credit of the township and community has been made to suffer. Nor has the reproach been confined to Berlin. It has extended beyond her township borders, and at this moment the country of Erie is jeeringly pointed out among her sister counties of the State, as the home of these Free Love desecrators of law human and divine.

It seems that the Berlin people have had in their township what they call a ‘Free Discussion Hall,’ and to this, very probably, is that town indebted for its present calamity. Churches for free speech, halls for free speech, newspapers for free speech, schools for free speech – free speech we now use in its popular sense, as meaning any kind of speech – are unmitigated curses, and lead directly to the utter unbridling of tongue and pen. The Berlin people, if they have encouraged such a nuisance, under a ridiculous notion that such was true freedom of doctrine, have run real liberty of moral and religious belief out of their township. These attempts to avoid seclarianism, lead to unbounded license, utter demoralization, and social anarchy. We feel less sympathy with the Berlin people than before we heard of this ‘Free Discussion Hall,’ and think their present punishment is partially, at least, deserved. It should be a valuable lesson, and we advise them to set their ‘Free Discussion Hall’ on fire, and make the ‘Free Lovers’ run away by the light of it.

Newspapers were freer to subjectively sermonize than the Free Lovers were to speak their minds inside their Free Discussion Hall. The result of such inflammatory propaganda was to discredit progressive ideas for social change and to create imaginary internal enemies that patriotic Americans felt they must oppose. The Tri-Weekly Cleveland Herald article ran side-by-side with one headlined, Brigham Young’s Manifesto. It advocated war on Mormon communities in their Utah Territory.

We know who the Mormons were because they are still very much with us. In 1857, however, their future was in doubt. Utah was a territory where both slavery and polygamy were practiced. Abolitionists claimed that the sexual practices of a slaveholder and a Mormon male were the same—they treated the women of their families as their private harems. The new Republican Party platform in 1856 called for Congressional power over the territory, claiming it had a right and duty to prohibit both of those detestable domestic institutions, slavery and polygamy. No people were more outraged by polygamy than Southerners. They said it was evidence of the evils that can result from Northern liberalism. Democratic President James Buchanan felt it was politically safe to send troops to Utah in 1856 to end the twin threats to the institution of marriage. Nothing came of these efforts to suppress polygamy, however. To protect the sacred institution of marriage, the Republican Party and abolitionists turned their attention back to slaveholder refusal to recognize slave marriages. The Southern states were in effect giving approval to incest and prostitution. In response, the South decided to divorce itself from the Union. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and some 700,000 Civil War deaths would free, but not empower, the slaves so that the North could remarry the South.

Things went far more peacefully for the Mormons in Utah. The man who led them out of persecution, Joseph Smith, believed that a form of communal Christianity existed during the time of the Apostles. At first, it seemed possible that religion could reform the system of oppression against women. After all, Jesus declared that women were just as capable of salvation as men. He even selected women as his disciples, but then Christian dogma began to exclude women. Today, Christianity has begun to attempt the equalization of the roles and responsibilities of men and women. Not Mormonism. Its position on women has not changed much since the early 1800’s, when the official view was that a woman’s primary place was at home, rearing her husband’s children and obeying the rule of her husband. Catholic and Mormon women are excluded from priesthood. Yet, in 1870, Mormon women endorsed plural marriage and Utah became the second territory, after Wyoming, to give its women the right to vote.

What became of the free lovers? Was their Berlin, Ohio, utopian community the model for the communes to come in the 1960s and ’70s where free love implied a sexually active lifestyle with casual sex partners? Not at all. Free love was a collective, self-conscious effort by women and a few men to change the politics of sexual relations. It developed out of the European socialist reform tradition of the 1820s and 1830s. These early experiments had almost nothing in common with the one-size-fits-all state systems that were installed later in Europe and Russia. Their founders and leaders had no Manifesto. They never suggested the revolutionary bloodbaths that removed royalty in France during the revolution from 1789 to 1799 and threatened the same ruthless extermination for other European monarchies. They did not seek to eradicate capitalism or commercialism, nor did they ever plan to crush the government. Unlike the distraught workers and oppressed minorities in Europe, they were not organizing against industrialists and property owners in America. No, they saw the New World literally as a natural paradise where the utopia imagined by Plato and Sir Thomas More could be made a reality. Nor can the moderate socialism of these early utopian theorists be compared to the communism promoted later by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who advocated a militant leftist form of socialism that called for class struggle and revolution to establish a society based on cooperation. The early dreamers proposed that small, local communities, not the state, should manage production and distribution. They wanted the leaders of the movement to be wealthy industrialists like themselves, believing they were best equipped to develop the utopian community based upon cooperation that would eventually eliminate the poverty of the lower classes. They advocated cooperation, not competition, and they rejected all notions of class struggle.

Oppressed workers and social reformers in Europe, including some women who did not dread non-procreative sex, influenced the establishment of the free love movement in the United States. Like the followers of the utopian free-thinkers, its members imagined an egalitarian, marriage-free society where self-ownership was respected by all, where goods were distributed equally to all, where there was no money and all citizens worked together for the common good. Their leisure time could be spent developing the arts and sciences together, again for the common good of the community and for the benefit of all its members. In these pages, we’ll get reacquainted with some of the forgotten, intrepid freedom fighters and crackpots who strove to build a social, political, economic, artistic, scientific, and technological utopia in early America.

The American free love reformist movement attracted naïve utopian industrialist reformers in the first quarter of the century as well as anarchists, abolitionists, and suffragettes in mid century, anti-Comstock rebels and birth control advocates in the 1890s, and the fighters for women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. These were all decades of social upheaval as emphasis shifted from social welfare to personal happiness. Women sought pleasure and protection from sexual relations, and they wanted to define marriage in terms of affection and personal satisfaction, not simply for the purpose of reproduction. A married woman in the 1800s could look forward to an exhausting cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant rearing. She could expect to give birth at least eight times in her life. Adding to the misery of motherhood was the high infant mortality rate. On average, two of her babies would die before their first birthday.

For women who were able to raise their children in a clean environment, breast-feed them and take good care of them, death rates among their infants varied from eighty to one hundred per thousand; but in the cities, poverty, terrible housing conditions, and filth raised those rates to three hundred infant deaths per thousand. Mothers also had to worry about the high possibility of their own deaths during childbirth. The main cause during the nineteenth century was puerperal fever, or puerperal sepsis, an infection of the uterus contracted at the time of or immediately after delivery. The infection was contagious, and doctors and midwives carried it. Hand washing would have solved the problem, but who knew?

Free love did not oppose marriage because it threatened the lives of women during childbirth. After all, death at a young age was a very real possibility for everyone. The free love movement argued against marriage first as a legal institution by which the state attempted to regulate private affections and second as a practice that encouraged emotional possessiveness and psychological enslavement. Free love was also a civil libertarian movement that promoted individual rights in sex and love while supporting public debate about sexuality, love, and biological reproduction. It combined with the utopian socialist experiments and spiritualism to advance the individual’s right to freely opt for a monogamous sexual partner or to choose multiple partners and to freely end a marriage or any sexual relationship when love came to an end. We must keep in mind that men and women in the nineteenth century thought and experienced their sexuality differently than we do because their social norms were so much different.

Alexis de Tocqueville noted the reasons for America’s moral purity in a diary entry from September 21, 1831:

American morals are, I believe, the purest existing in any nation, which may be attributed, it seems to me, to five principal causes:

1. Their physical constitution. They belong to a northern race, even though almost all are living in a climate warmer than that of England.

2. Religion still possesses there a great power over the souls. They have even in part retained the traditions of the most severe religious sects.

3. They are entirely absorbed in the business of making money. There are no idle among them. They have the steady habits of those who are always working.

4. There is no trace of the prejudices of birth which reign in Europe, and it is so easy to make money that poverty is never an obstacle to marriage. Thence it results that the individuals of two sexes unite ..., only do so from mutual attraction, and find themselves tied at a time in life when the man is almost always more alive to the pleasures of the heart than those of the senses. It is rare that a man is not married at 20 years.

5. In general the women receive an education that is rational (even a bit raisonneuse.) The factors above enumerated make it possible without great inconvenience to allow them an extreme liberty; the passage from the state of young girl to that of a married woman has no dangers for her.

Mr. Clay, who appears to have occupied himself with statistical researches on this point, told Beaumont that at Boston the prostitutes numbered about 2000. (I have great difficulty believing this.) They are recruited among country girls who, after having been seduced, are obliged to flee their district and family, and find themselves without resource. It seems that the