Although the free love movement owed its origin to European intellectual traditions, the phrase "free love," which came to embody its countercultural critique, was the creation of American vernacular speech. Pejorative in intent, its earliest usage seems to have been to describe the close association of Frances Wright (1795–1852) and Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877) and more particularly Nashoba (1826–1829), the racially mixed, manumissionist social experiment Wright founded in Tennessee, popularly known as Fanny Wright's Free Love Colony.

Proponents of social and sexual orthodoxy, like Hubbard Eastman (1809–1891)—who published Noyesism Unveiled (1849), a critique of the perfectionist theology and sexual practices of John Humphrey Noyes's (1811–1886) Putney and Oneida Communities that had institutionalized the pantagamic marital form Noyes called "complex marriage"—and John B. Ellis (Free Love and Its Votaries, 1870), used the term as a derogatory reference to "promiscuous intercourse of the sexes," "founded in lust," in which "utter freedom . . . is given to the passions" (Ellis, p. 193). Exemplary of this association of free love with vice was the roué's guidebook, the Directory to the Seraglios in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and All the Principal Cities of the Union (1859), compiled by "A Free Loveyer."

By the 1850s, however, the loose coalition of those who advocated an anti-marriage position had begun to call themselves "Free Lovers." "Free lovism" came to be a shorthand way of referring to free love (a complex set of ideas and practices critical of conventional marriage) and its correlative social doctrines. Indicative of this shift in usage was Bible Communism (1853), which provided an expository overview of the unique social practice of pantagmy, or "complex marriage" (under which each adult male and adult female was married to every other adult of the opposite sex in their alternative society) of the Oneida Community (1848–1879). Bible Communism explicitly equated pantagmy with "free love" and asserted its power as an agent of universal reform and moral purification that would "annihilate the very sources of adultery, whore-dom, and all sexual abuse" (p. 128). J. H. Noyes, charismatic founder of the community, even claimed, in his History of American Socialisms (1870), that the term "free love" had originated in Oneidan publications around 1849.

ORIGINS OF FREE LOVE

The roots of the free love movement may be traced to the triumph of Protestant evangelicalism in the Second Great Awakening, especially the religious enthusiasm associated with perfectionism (the radical evangelical doctrine that the individual could attain complete freedom from sin during his or her earthly life, absolute "salvation from sin," that is, could be come "perfect") in the 1830s and the rapid spread of spiritualism in the 1840s. Indeed contemporaries often cited the concept of "spiritual affinities" (the quest for an individual's "true" soul mate), a higher and purer form of association between the sexes than terrestrial marriage, as the model for free love. William Hepworth Dixon (1821–1879), a British journalist and editor of the Athanaeum, called the doctrine "celestial marriage" and linked it directly to free love in his Spiritual Wives (1868). Contemporary dictionaries of Americanisms typically cross-referenced "free love" and "affinity." The Swedish mystic and theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg's (1688–1772) concept of mystical union in The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugal Love (1768, 1856), as popularized by Andrew Jackson Davis (1827–1910) in "The Seven Phases of Marriage," made the theoretical link most explicitly, as did the sensationalist Lenderman's Adventures among the Spiritualists and Free-Lovers (1857). Phrenology, the popular pseudo-science that claimed to be able to read character traits by examining the shape of the skull by touch, also influenced free love. Of particular import here were the addition of a specific cranial organ as a site of "amativeness" in the 1820s by Johann (Christoph) Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) and the systematic discrimination of that trait from "philoprogenitiveness." The distinction of these two phrenological traits validated free lovers' separation of sex as an expression of love or to satisfy the desire for bodily pleasure from sexual intercourse with the primary objective of reproduction. These ideas were popularized in America by Orson Fowler and Lorenzo Fowler, especially in the sex-advice books of the former, like Amativeness; or, Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality (1844).

Utopian socialism reinforced unorthodox conceptions of sexual relations, most specifically in the ideas of Robert Owen (1771–1858), an English philanthropist and founder of the New Harmony community in Indiana (1825–1827), whose "Declaration of Mental Independence" (4 July 1826) declared marriage grounded in private property as one of the chief social evils and asserted the impossibility of a binding pledge of lifelong commitment to a single sexual partner. He also advocated liberalization of divorce laws and equality for women. His son, Robert Dale, in conjunction with Fanny Wright, continued to advocate these ideas in the Free Enquirer well into the 1830s after the collapse of the community.

The most extensive secular communitarian movement in the antebellum years, Fourierism, was based on the phalanstery system of the French social thinker Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who established "phalanxes" (communal, self-contained, cooperative societies) in the 1840s. Fourier provided a model for the later development of free love associations—Berlin Heights, Ohio (1854–1858); Modern Times, Brentwood, Long Island, New York (1851–1863); and Oneida. Although its chief American propagandists—Albert Brisbane (1809–1890), the leading American Fourierist and author of The Social Destiny of Man (1840), and Horace Greeley (1811–1872), the activist editor of the New York Tribune—tended to ignore Fourier's application of the série passionelle (his seven degrees of "passional attraction") to sexual relationships, the French social thinker Victor Antoine Hennequin (1816–1854) published Love in the Phalanstery (1848, translated by Henry James Sr.), which provided a frank and succinct summary of Fourier's radical sexual ideas. Brook Farm (Roxbury, Massachusetts) was a transcendentalist utopian community from 1841 to 1844 and was reorganized as a Fourierist community, the Brook Farm Phalanx, from 1844 to 1847. Max Lazarus resided at Brook Farm during its Fourierist phase and published a major overview of the Fourierist system in the Harbinger (November and December 1846 and January 1847) and in 1852 issued Love vs. Marriage, which applied Fourier's ideas directly to American society. The broad stream of social reform from abolitionism and the first stirrings of the women's movement to the discursive debates over divorce, birth control, and abortion contributed to the development of free love thought. Female antislavery activists analogized the condition of wives in traditional marriages to that of the enslaved, as did Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) in her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838). Early advocacy of liberal divorce laws as well as the publication of the first American book to openly discuss contraceptive methods—Moral Physiology (1830)—were undertaken by Robert Dale Owen. Charles Knowlton (1800–1850), an enlightened physician, produced The Fruits of Philosophy (1832), the most popular and thorough canvass of contraceptive methods of the antebellum years. Rational control of reproduction, the social and emotional equality of women, and the quest for more flexible, open systems of sexual association to serve as an alternative to monogamy would comprise the core of the free love program.

DOCTRINES OF FREE LOVE

Wholly a phenomenon of the North and, with the exception of the Oneida Community, largely a decentralized network of like-minded social radicals, the free love movement had two primary centers of activity—Ohio and New York. Consequently the diversity of views and the contradictions of their social positions made for doctrinal inconsistency. For instance, most women's rights advocates were opposed to marriage, believing it to be an institution of patriarchal domination that licensed male sensuality (compulsion of wives to excessive frequency of intercourse, insistence of sexual practices wives found distasteful, and imposition of undesired pregnancy on women), but few women openly supported the radical sexual solutions proposed by the free love movement. Despite the fact that virtually all free lovers were feminists, the movement ironically became the mirror image of the sexual economy of the dominant social order—those who wrote the tracts and gave the lectures, with a few notable exceptions like Mary Gove Nichols (1810–1884) and Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), were men. Although a central tenet of free love reform was the contention that women should have the absolute right to determine whether, when, and with whom they should have sexual intercourse and the collateral right to decide whether they wished to assume the burden of maternity and, if so, who the father should be, the heart of free love concern revolved around the regulation of male sexuality.

The separation of sexual intercourse from reproduction suggested both the possibility of the redemption and purification of institutionalized marriage (considered by free lovers to be abusive of women and to be a legally sanctioned form of rape or unrestricted lust) and, when coupled with liberalized divorce, the practice of serial monogamy. These two alternatives divided free lovers into two broad groups—varietists and romantics, the latter of which sought to preserve the sentimentalities of courtship and the tenderness of the honeymoon within the bounds of a reformed marital institution. Thus contrary to the image of exponents of free love in the minds of their opponents, theorizing desire apart from reproduction did not necessarily mean that free lovers validated sexual pleasure; more typically, it prioritized sexual purity (anti-masturbation, opposition to prostitution, self [primarily male] control of the sex drive, and the use of contraception to protect women from excessive childbearing and to promote eugenic reproduction rather than to enhance sexual pleasure) and control of the sexual response.

It is perhaps most accurate to say that free love sexuality found expression along a continuum stretching from those like Andrew Jackson Davis, who, adapting the spiritualist concept of "affinities," advocated readily available divorce and successive exclusive marital relationships until an "eternal union" had been achieved, to J. H. Noyes, who allowed controlled universal sexual association within the Oneida Community based on a postmillennialist perfectionist theology that posited that for believers worldly marriage had ceased to exist. Occupying a middle position, associated with philosophical anarchism that derived from Josiah Warren's (c. 1798–1874) conception of "individual sovereignty" (a form of philosophical anarchism that insisted there should be no restrictions on individual rights; each person would have absolute liberty to act exactly as he or she chose, bearing full personal responsibility for all acts and decisions taken) as practiced at Modern Times, were the universal reformer and social radical Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812–1886) and the hydropathic physician Thomas Low Nichols (1815–1901). Both championed varietism as more honest and purer than conventional marriage; both held a romantic vision of sexuality. Andrews argued in the early 1850s that only love could validate, sanctify, and purify marriage. Loveless marriages (the majority of civil unions) should be subject to immediate dissolution so as to insure emotional liberty. Nichols took a physiological stance in his best-selling Esoteric Anthropology (1853), maintaining that variety in love is natural and denouncing exclusive, lifelong marriage as false and unnatural. True marriage could never be established by legal restriction but only by mutual affection and then for only as long as reciprocal desire persisted. For Andrews and Nichols, free love constituted a kind of informal divorce.

Central to free love doctrine was not libertinism but sexual purity achieved through romanticization of intimate relations, responsible personal emotional lives, and rigorous self-control, especially of male sexuality (i.e., putting the health, inclination, and desire of the female first; typically refraining from intercourse during pregnancy, menstruation, or illness rather than insisting on the absolute male prerogative of marital sexual gratification). Mary Gove Nichols, in her Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology (1842), vigorously condemned masturbation, marital rape, and excessive marital intercourse. Like her husband, she recognized the value of contraception but believed that sexual purity in marriage could best be achieved when the woman determined the frequency of intercourse. J. H. Noyes's system of "complex marriage" mandated an immediate control of male sexuality through "male continence," which required men to refrain from ejaculation during intercourse. Though this practice reinforced male control of the sex act, it was unique in frankly mandating female sexual pleasure, since Oneidan men were expected to bring their partners to sexual climax. This system also provided a "natural" form of contraception (Noyes rejected the use of artificial devices as "unnatural") and ultimately provided the basis (after 1868) for Oneida's practice of eugenical reproduction ("stirpiculture") that made the community the first experiment in practical eugenics in the United States.

FROM THE FIRST TO THE SECOND WAVE OF FREE LOVERS

Free love agitation may be fairly said to have begun with the establishment of the New Harmony community in 1825, but as a countercultural movement, its first wave achieved its greatest coherence in the period 1840–1860. During these years the literature of free love contravened the conventional understanding of love and championed a variety of alternatives to institutionalized marriage as well as reconceptualizing the physiology of sex and reproduction. Books and periodicals were published, reform organizations established, and alternative communistic communities founded. Examples of free love activity in this period were the Free Convention in Rutland, Vermont (1858), that was called the "Free Love Convention" by the New York press, the Free Love League (club) in New York City (1854–1855), the "varietist list" (a free love personals listing) in the Social Revolutionist (1857), and the Progressive Union (Nichols Journal, 1854–1857), a national clearing house for "affinities." Though often vilified, free lovers in the 1840s and 1850s were engaged participants in the broad cultural discourse on ideal marriage, sexual hygiene, and the "true" woman. Perhaps most representative of the movement were the debate over love, marriage, and divorce among Henry James Sr., Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune (1852), and that over divorce between Robert Dale Owen and Greeley in 1860. The first wave of the free love movement ended with the onset of the Civil War; its second wave, less cohesive and more concerned with issues of free speech and eugenics, continued to agitate for sexual freedom in the period 1865–1905.

See also Feminism; Marriage; Reform; Sex Education; Sexuality and the Body; Utopian Communities

Louis J. Kern