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.McElroy, Wendy. "The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism." Libertarian Enterprise .19 (1996): 1. 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 (or persons at or above the age of consent) 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.Spurlock, John C. Free Love Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America. New York: New York UP, 1988.
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.Passet, Joanne E. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality. Chicago, IL: U of Illinois P, 2003.
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.Kreis, Steven. "Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759–1797". The History Guide. 23 November 2009 <http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/wollstonecraft.html >.
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 (1810–1884) 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. Full text at Internet Archive (archive.org).Nichols, Mary Gove, 1855. Mary Lyndon: Revelations of a Life. New York: Stringer and Townsend; p. 166. Quoted in Feminism and Free Love 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."Joanne E. Passet, Grassroots feminists: women, free love, and the power of print (1999), p. 119
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.Spurlock 1994, p. 36 This was the first full-length case against marriage written by a woman.Spurlock 1994, p. 37 Of the four major free-love periodicals in the Reconstruction era, half had woman editors.Spurlock, John. "A Masculine View of Women's Freedom: Free Love in the Nineteenth Century." International Social Science Review 69.3/4 (1994): 34–45. Print.
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 (emotional and physical), 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.Passet, Joanne E. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality. Chicago, IL: U of Illinois P, 2003. 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.Crone, Patricia, Kavad's Heresy and Mazdak's Revolt, in: Iran 29 (1991), S. 21–40 One folk story from the period that contains a mention of a free-love (and nudist) community under the sea is "The Tale of Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights ().Irwin, Robert, Political Thought in The Thousand and One Nights, in: Marvels & Tales – Volume 18, Number 2, 2004, pp. 246–257. Wayne State University Press
Karl Kautsky, writing in 1895, noted that a number of "communistic" movements throughout the Middle Ages also rejected marriage.Kautsky, Karl (1895), Die Vorläufer des neuen Sozialismus, vol. I: Kommunistische Bewegungen in Mittelalter, Stuttgart: J.W. Dietz. 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 (the Waldenses, Apostle brothers, Beghards and Beguines, Lollards, and Hussites) 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."