Dreamers of a New Day (11 page)

The translation of personal intimacy and sexual desire into the public realm of the social and political proved to be one of the most difficult aspects of women’s freedom.

3

The Problem of Sex

Forgotten ‘free lovers’ dreamed up many of the assumptions eventually destined for 1920s modernity. In the late nineteenth century, high-minded clusters of free lovers were bringing individualist ideas of the inviolability of the person to their conceptions of personal relations; Lillian Harman insisted in
Lucifer
in 1897 that ownership of oneself was integral to women’s inner ‘self-respect’.
¹
Placing a great emphasis on ‘self-control’, free lovers also believed that a frank and rational approach to love would prevent much unnecessary suffering, and enable people to understand and control their feelings. Sarah Holmes, who became one of Helena Born’s friends in Boston, was, like Born, associated with Benjamin Tucker’s journal
Liberty
. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Zelm’, she insisted in 1889 that ‘Honesty is the best policy in love, because it is the only policy that ever gets love – love being the sympathy of those who can understand our real selves.’
²
Unlike the twentieth-century moderns, however, free lovers did not seek out unconscious motivations. Instead they took as their mentor the Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel
What Is to Be Done
(1863) adopted a highly rationalist stance toward alternative ways of living and loving.

In their campaigns for honesty, frankness and the 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 marks of tenderness, while Rosa Graul expressed a desire for romance in
Hilda’s Home
. In 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