In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

15 1 The Season of Battle: The Rhetoric of Free-Love Feminism in Nineteenth-Century America The season of love is that of battle. —Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871 I n 1889, after the male editors of a small, radical paper titled Lucifer, the Light Bearer were arrested for distributing “obscenity,” a letter signed by eleven women, including Lucinda B. Chandler, Celia B. Whitehead, Juliet H. Severance, M.D., Elmina D. Slenker, Lillie D. White, and Lois Waisbrooker, began to circulate. This letter protested the arrest but also presented an appeal to “women, wives, and mothers, everywhere” to seek justice for women under the law. Viewing the arrest as an attempt to silence arguments for women’s sexual equality, they pled, “This is a woman’s battle” (Chandler et al. 1): Free speech, free press and free womanhood ought not to lack valiant defenders among our sex in this case. Now is our opportunity. We can at least try to prove whether woman has any protection from legal lust in the higher civilization. We can testify on paper if we cannot before the court, that we consider the mutilation of a wife’s body “a great and flagrant wrong.” . . . We can protest against the conviction of the defendants because they published a fact of outrage upon a legal sex slave, containing a plain physiological term. . . . We can pronounce that the man who forces himself upon a lawful wife commits rape, precisely as a man who forces himself upon woman not his wife is held to have committed rape. . . . Every woman who realizes the bondage and degradation of thousands of her sex, married and unmarried, ought to feel herself individually responsible to protest against the misdirected and invasive proceeding that seeks to keep under cover in the name of protection of public morals, such enormous crimes are perpetrated upon wives. . . . Send your best and strongest words, my sisters, to Judge Foster. . . . Protest against the 16 • the season of battle action of Comstockism in prosecuting the defenders of womanhood. . . . Send your most vigorous denunciation of the barbarous statutes and the barbarous treatment of wives. . . . Prove . . . that American womanhood is worthy to be free because she is herself ready to strike for freedom. (1–2) This letter defines several tenets of free-love feminism, a distinctive offshoot of nineteenth-century agitation for free love. We can define free-love feminism as an attempt to redefine women’s sexuality and to critique the social and legal systems that attempted to regulate it. Believing that love in freedom was the only way to achieve women’s full equality and that sex in legal marriage equated to “legal lust,” free-love feminists advocated the abolition of marriage so woman could “own herself.” This letter from several prominent free-love feminists also illustrates the battles occurring over nineteenth-century sex speech: the battle between the prudish and vigilant Anthony Comstock, armed with his own position in the post office to weed out “obscenity,” and those seeking more frank discussion of sexual matters; the battle between the courts and those defending freedom of speech; the battle between women and men for women’s sexual rights; and the battle between males exhorting the cause of free love and the feminists who began to champion it, thus transforming this often ignored “lunatic fringe” movement into a space for women to create a rhetoric of sexuality. The Emergence of Free-Love Feminism in Nineteenth-Century America The story of free-love feminism has remained unexamined, particularly from a rhetorical lens. The valuable historical studies recovering this movement often depict it as male-centered, such as John C. Spurlock’s 1988 study, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860. Spurlock focuses on earlier incarnations of the movement, where males featured more prominently, and ignores its later evolution into a feminist movement. Both Hal D. Sears’s earlier study, The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America, and Taylor Stoehr’s anthology , Free Love in America: A Documentary History, discuss both male and female free lovers but more prominently feature men. Stoehr also limits his definition of free love to those who were actually practicing it in the communes and portrays arguments for free love as individual acts of radicalism rather than as a social movement. Linda Gordon, historian of birth control in America, also rejects the idea of a movement for free love, and she too views the groups advocating free love as “small and sectarian...

Share