Free Love: Turn of the 20th century

United Kingdom

Toward the end of the 19th century in the United Kingdom, free love was a topic of discussion among a minority of freethinkers, socialists, and feminists. Many of them were associated with The Fellowship of the New Life, such as Olive Schreiner and Edward Carpenter. Carpenter was one of the first writers to defend homosexuality in the English language. Like many of the movements before them who were associated with free love, the group also favored a simple communal life, pacifism, and vegetarianism. The best-known modern British advocate of free love was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, later Third Earl Russell, who said that he did not believe he really knew a woman until he had made love with her. Coming from one of the best-respected minds of the Twentieth century, this remark cannot be ignored as mere Don Juanism. Russell consistently addressed aspects of free love throughout his voluminous writings, and was not personally content with conventional monogamy until extreme old age.

Australia

There was also an interest in free love among the late 19th-century Left in Australia. In 1886, the Melbourne Anarchist Club led a debate on the topic, and a couple of years later released an anonymous pamphlet on the subject: 'Free Love—Explained and Defended' (possibly written by David Andrade or Chummy Fleming). The view of the Anarchist Club was formed in part as a reaction to the infamous Whitechapel Murders by the notorious Jack the Ripper; his atrocities were at the time popularly understood by some - at least, by anarchists - to be a violation of the freedom of certain extreme classes of "working women," but by extension of all women. Newcastle libertarian Alice Winspear, the wife of pioneer socialist William Robert Winspear, wrote: "Let us have freedom—freedom for both man and woman—freedom to earn our bread in whatever vocation is best suited to us, and freedom to love where we like, and to live only with those whom we love, and by whom we are loved in return." A couple of decades later, the Melbourne anarchist feminist poet Lesbia Harford also championed free love.
United States

Anarchist free-love movements continued into early 1900s in bohemian circles in New York's Greenwich Village. A group of Villagers lived free-love ideals and promoted them in the political journal The Masses and its sister publication The Little Review, a literary journal. Incorporating influences from the writings of English homosexual socialist Edward Carpenter and international sexologist Havelock Ellis, women such as Emma Goldman campaigned for a range of sexual freedoms, including homosexuality and access to contraception. Other notable figures among the Greenwich-Village scene who have been associated with free love include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Ida Rauh, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce; a certain extreme was reached by self-proclaimed Satanist Anton LaVey. Dorothy Day also wrote passionately in defense of free love, women's rights, and contraception—but later, after converting to Catholicism, she criticized the sexual revolution of the sixties. The development of the idea of free love in the United States cannot be discussed without mention being made of the well-known publisher Hugh Marston Hefner, with whose activities over more than a half century the project of popularizing the idea of free love finally reached the perception of the public at large, at a time when it was impossible to completely suppress. Indeed, Hefner is considered by many to be the hero of the movement. When Hefner's magazine Playboy began to be criticized as shallow and amoral, Hefner articulated in a book-length series of essays, and he certainly has lived, what he calls "the Playboy Philosophy." He has said that the Playboy Philosophy was "a response to political, personal, and economic repression," and that it makes "a case for personal freedom not unrelated to... the American Dream." By no means an opportunistic organ of fly-by-night libertines, the magazine often criticizes the truly amoral and has helped millions of people with all aspects of the free love project, including hygiene and not least, common sense. Hefner's version of free love resembles those of antecedent philosophers as little as most popular movements do, but is the most robust free love effort to date, and cannot be discounted. It is not least significant for the way it fits into and promotes many other aspects of popular culture that also support the idea of free love, notably popular music and film.

Japan

The anarchist feminist, social critic, novelist, and Emma Goldman translator Noe Ito (1895–1923) and her lover, fellow anarchist Sakae Osugi (1885–1923), promoted free love in Japan. The entire nation was shocked by their extrajudicial execution by a squad of military police in what became known as the Amakasu Incident, after the name of its perpetrator, who was imprisoned for his crime. Their story is told in the 1969 movie Erosu purasu Gyakusatsu (Eros Plus Massacre).

USSR

After the October Revolution in Russia, Alexandra Kollontai became the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration. Kollontai was also a champion of free love. In what may be an apocryphal conversation, she defended free love to Lenin, saying "Love should be free, like drinking water from a glass." Lenin is supposed to have replied, "but who wants to drink from a soiled glass?"[citation needed] Clara Zetkin recorded that Lenin opposed free love as "completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social".[12] Zetkin also recounted Lenin's denouncement of plans to organise Hamburg’s women prostitutes into a “special revolutionary militant section”: he saw this as “corrupt and degenerate.”

Despite the traditional marital lives of Lenin and most Bolsheviks, they believed that sexual relations were outside the jurisdiction of the state. The Soviet government abolished centuries-old Czarist regulations on personal life, which had prohibited homosexuality and made it difficult for women to obtain divorce permits or to live singly. There is evidence that this caused a small-scale renaissance in non-traditional love, not only among intellectuals but also the working class.[citation needed] However, by the end of the 1920s, Stalin's centrist faction had taken over the Communist Party and begun to implement socially conservative policies. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, and free love was further demonized.

France

Benoît Broutchoux

In the bohemian districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse, many were determined to shock the "bourgeois" sensibilities of the society they grew up in; many, such as the anarchist Benoît Broutchoux, favored free love. At the same time, the cross-dressing radical activist Madeleine Pelletier practised celibacy, distributed birth-control devices and information, and performed abortions.

Germany

In Germany, from 1891 to 1919, the Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women's Associations) called for a boycott of marriage and for the enjoyment of sexuality. Founded by Lily Braun and Minna Cauer, the league also aimed to organise prostitutes into labor unions, taught contraception, and supported the right to abortion and the abolition of criminal penalties against homosexuality, as well as running child-care programs for single mothers. In 1897, teacher and writer Emma Trosse published a brochure titled Ist freie Liebe Sittenlosigkeit? ("Is free love immoral?"). The worldwide homosexual emancipation movement also began in Germany in the late 19th century, and many of the thinkers whose work inspired sexual liberation in the 20th century were also from the German-speaking world, such as Sigmund Freud, Otto Gross, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich.

1940s - 1960s

From the late 1940s to the 1960s, the bohemian free-love tradition of Greenwich Village was carried on by the beat generation, although differing with their predecessors by being an apparently male-dominated movement. The Beats also produced the first appearance of male homosexual champions of free love in the U.S., with writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Like some of those before, the beats challenged a range of social conventions, and they found inspiration in such aspects of black culture as jazz music. The Beat movement led on the West Coast to the activities of such groups as the Merry Pranksters (led, according to Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally, not by novelist Ken Kesey, but by hipster and driver Neal Cassady) and the entire San Francisco pop music scene, in which the implications of sexual bohemianism were advanced in a variety of ways by the hippies. With the Summer of Love in 1967, the eccentricities of this group became a nationally recognized movement. The study of sexology continued to gain prominence throughout the era, with the works of researchers like Alfred Kinsey lending a new legitimacy to challenges to traditional values regarding sex and marriage.

The sexual revolution and beyond

Main article: sexual revolution

Free love became a prominent phrase used by and about the new social movements and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, typified by the Summer of Love in 1967 and the slogan "make love not war". Unrestrained sexuality became a new norm in some of these youth movements, leading certain feminists to critique the 60s/70s "free love" as a way for men to pressure women into sex; women who said "no" could be characterized as prudish and uptight.

In the 1980s, concerns over AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases tempered the promiscuity of the 1970s, but many of the sexual reforms advocated by earlier free-love movements had become mainstream: legalisation of adultery, birth control, and homosexuality; freedom in choosing love, sex, or both; and women's rights in general. Chastity, virginity, and subservience in marriage had much less power as social ideals for women.

Modern descendants of free love could be seen to include the polyamory and queer movements of the 1990s and contemporary sex radicals like Susie Bright, Patrick Califia, and Annie Sprinkle. Though they don't often identify as free lovers, modern movements around the world against arranged marriage and forced marriage in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe share many of the same goals as the free-love movement.

Legal aspects of the fruit of free love are far from settled. Some gains in the women's rights movement have reversed, rather than corrected, the injustices of the past. For example, in the State of New York, an unwed father has no right to see his child. Finding himself in this category, to bring this problem to wider attention the American composer Max Schubel wrote the theater piece Rubber Court, which was performed in New York.