Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The Free Love movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.
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
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 today's 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.
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.
The term "sex radical" is also used interchangeably with the term
"free lover", and was the preferred term by advocates because of the
negative connotations of "free love".
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.
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 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.
At the turn of the 20th century, some free-love proponents
extended the critique of marriage to argue that marriage as a social
institution encourages emotional possessiveness and psychological
enslavement.
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.
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.
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."
In the 19th century at least six books endorsed the concept of
free love, all of which were written by men. However of the four major
free-love periodicals following the U. S. civil war, half had female
editors. Mary Gove Nichols was the leading-female advocate and the woman
most looked up to in the free-love movement. Her autobiography became
the first argument against marriage written from a woman's point of
view.
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.
History
Early precedents
The Adamites were a sect that rejected marriage. Pictured, they are being rounded up for their heretical views.
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery. They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist vegetarians. 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, and like many other free-love movements, also favored vegetarianism, pacificism, and communalism. Some writers have posited a conceptual link between the rejection of private property and the rejection of marriage as a form of ownership.
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 (c. 8th century).
Karl Kautsky, writing in 1895, noted that a number of "communistic" movements throughout the Middle Ages also rejected marriage. 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.
Enlightenment thought
Frontispiece to William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion
(1793), which contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values of
marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left), are chained together, as
Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon
(right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act,
considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where ideas such as free love could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins), who supported the French Revolution developed early ideas about feminism and free love.
Notable among them was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue.
At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to
Catherine's apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated
bringing a second wife into the house.
His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce
love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy
and egotism as a motive for marriage laws. Poems such as "Why should I
be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?" and "Earth's Answer" seem to
advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem "London"
he speaks of "the Marriage-Hearse" plagued by "the youthful Harlot's
curse", the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion
is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since
the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by
laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he
castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In Visions, Blake writes:
Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)
Blake believed that humans were "fallen", and that a major impediment
to a free love society was corrupt human nature, not merely the
intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic
hypocritical nature of human communication. He also seems to have thought that marriage should afford the joy of love, but that in reality it often does not, as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy.
Title page from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), by Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and proponent of free love.
Another member of Blake's circle was the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband and early anarchist, William Godwin. The ideals of free love found their champion in one of the earliest feminists.
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. Mary makes it clear that "women had
strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise."
Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn't marry her partner, Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of the Terror
of the French Revolution. Though the relationship ended badly, due in
part to the discovery of Imlay's infidelity, and not least because Imlay
abandoned her for good, Wollstonecraft's belief in free love survived.
She later developed a relationship with Godwin, who shared her free love
ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the
two did decide to marry, just days before her death due to complications
at parturition.
In an act understood to support free love, their child, Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Shelley wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in the prose notes of Queen Mab (1813), in his essay On Love (c. 1815). and in the poem Epipsychidion (1821):
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion ...
True love has this, different from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Utopian socialism
Sharing
the free-love ideals of the earlier social movements—as well as their
feminism, pacifism, and simple communal life—were the utopian socialist communities of early-nineteenth-century France and Britain, associated with writers and thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier in France, and Robert Owen in England. Fourier, who coined the term feminism,
argued that true freedom could only occur without masters, without the
ethos of work, and without suppressing passions: the suppression of
passions is not only destructive to the individual, but to society as a
whole. He argued that all sexual expressions should be enjoyed as long
as people are not abused, and that "affirming one's difference" can
actually enhance social integration.
Robert Owen argued that marriage formed one of an "awful trinity" of oppressors to mankind, as well as religion and private property, and his son Robert Dale was a leading proponent of free divorce. The Saint-Simonian feminist Pauline Roland took a free-love stance against marriage, having four children in the 1830s, all of whom bore her name.
The German composer Richard Wagner advocated something like free love in several of his works, and began a family with Cosima Liszt, then still married to the conductor Hans von Bülow.
Though apparently scandalous at the time, such liaisons seemed the
actions of admired artists who were following the dictates of their own
wills, rather than those of social convention, and in this way they were
in step with their era's liberal philosophers of the cult of passion,
such as Fourier, and their actual or eventual openness can be understood
to be a prelude to the freer ways of the twentieth century. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke occasionally in favor of something like free love, but when he proposed marriage to that famous practitioner of it, Lou Andreas-Salome,
she berated him for being inconsistent with his philosophy of the free
and supramoral Superman, a criticism that Nietzsche seems to have taken
seriously, or to have at least been stung by. The relationship between
composer Frédéric Chopin and writer George Sand
can be understood as exemplifying free love in a number of ways.
Behavior of this kind by figures in the public eye did much to erode the
credibility of conventionalism in relationships, especially when such
conventionalism brought actual unhappiness to its practitioners.
Origins of the movement
The eminent sociologist Herbert Spencer argued in his Principles of Sociology
for the implementation of free divorce. Claiming that marriage consists
of two components, "union by law" and "union by affection", he argued
that with the loss of the latter union, legal union should lose all
meaning and dissolve automatically, without the legal requirement for a
divorce. Free love particularly stressed women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women: for example, marriage laws and anti-birth control measures.
United States
The Oneida Community was a utopian group established in the 1840s, which practiced a form of free love. Postcard of the Oneida Community Mansion House from 1907.
Free love began to coalesce into a movement in the mid to late 19th
century. The term was coined by the Christian socialist writer John Humphrey Noyes, although he preferred to use the term 'complex marriage'. Noyes founded the Oneida Community
in 1848, a utopian community that "[rejected] conventional marriage
both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a
selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over
women". He found scriptural justification: "In the resurrection they
neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in
heaven" (Matt. 22:30). Noyes also supported eugenics; and only certain people (including Noyes himself) were allowed to become parents. Another movement was established in Berlin Heights, Ohio.
In 1852, a writer named Marx Edgeworth Lazarus published a tract
entitled "Love vs. Marriage pt. 1," in which he portrayed marriage as
"incompatible with social harmony and the root cause of mental and
physical impairments." Lazarus intertwined his writings with his
religious teachings, a factor that made the Christian community more
tolerable to the free love idea. Elements of the free-love movement also had links to abolitionist movements, drawing parallels between slavery and "sexual slavery" (marriage), and forming alliances with black activists.
American feminist Victoria Woodhull
(1838–1927), the first woman to run for presidency in the U.S. in 1872,
was also called "the high priestess of free love". In 1871, Woodhull
wrote: "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional
and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a
period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with
that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to
interfere".
Cartoon by Thomas Nast portraying Victoria Woodhull as an advocate of free love
The women's movement, free love and Spiritualism were three strongly linked movements at the time, and Woodhull was also a spiritualist leader. Like Noyes, she also supported eugenics.
Fellow social reformer and educator Mary Gove Nichols was happily
married (to her second husband), and together they published a newspaper
and wrote medical books and articles,
a novel, and a treatise on marriage, in which they argued the case for
free love. Both Woodhull and Nichols eventually repudiated free love.
Publications of the movement in the second half of the 19th century included Nichols' Monthly, The Social Revolutionist, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly (ed. Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin), The Word (ed. Ezra Heywood), Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (ed. Moses Harman) and the German-language Detroit newspaper Der Arme Teufel
(ed. Robert Reitzel). Organisations included the New England Free Love
League, founded with the assistance of American libertarian Benjamin Tucker as a spin-off from the New England Labor Reform League (NELRL). A minority of freethinkers also supported free love.
The most radical free love journal was The Social Revolutionist, published in the 1856–1857, by John Patterson. The first volume consisted of twenty writers, of which only one was a woman.
Sex radicals were not alone in their fight against marriage
ideals. Some other nineteenth-century Americans saw this social
institution as flawed, but hesitated to abolish it. Groups such as the
Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Latter-day Saints were wary of
the social notion of marriage. These organizations and sex radicals
believed that true equality would never exist between the sexes as long
as the church and the state continued to work together, worsening the
problem of subordination of wives to their husbands.
Free-love movements continued into the early 20th century 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 the English thinkers and activists Edward Carpenter and 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 was also significantly impacted by the publisher of Playboy magazine, Hugh Hefner, whose activities and persona over more than a half century popularized the idea of free love to the general public.
United Kingdom
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Havelock Ellis was a pioneer sexologist and advocate of free love.
Free love was a central tenet of the philosophy of the Fellowship of the New Life, founded in 1883, by the Scottish intellectual Thomas Davidson.
Fellowship members included many illustrious intellectuals of the day,
who went on to radically challenge accepted Victorian notions of
morality and sexuality, including poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, animal rights activist Henry Stephens Salt, sexologist Havelock Ellis, feminists Edith Lees, Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Besant and writers H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Olive Schreiner.
Its objective was "The cultivation of a perfect character in each and
all," and believed in the transformation of society through setting an
example of clean simplified living for others to follow. Many of the
Fellowship's members advocated pacifism, vegetarianism and simple living.
Edward Carpenter was the first activist for the rights of homosexuals.
He became interested in progressive education, especially providing
information to young people on the topic of sexual education. For
Carpenter, sexual education meant forwarding a clear analysis of the
ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in
Carpenter's radical work Love's Coming-of-Age. In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual and economic freedom
of women. The main crux of his analysis centred on the negative effects
of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both
enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution.
Edward Carpenter in 1875.
He did not believe women would truly be free until a socialist society was established.
In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, this led him to
conclude that all oppressed workers should support women's emancipation,
rather than to subordinate women's rights to male worker's rights.
He remarked, "... there is no solution except the freedom of woman -
which means, of course, the freedom of the masses of the people, men and
women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is no
solution which will not include the redemption of the terms free women
and free love to their true and rightful significance. Let every woman
whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare
herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free
woman."
The best-known 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. Russell consistently
addressed aspects of free love throughout his voluminous writings, and
was not personally content with conventional Monogamy until extreme old age. His most famous work on the subject was Marriage and Morals, published in 1929. The book heavily criticizes the Victorian notions of morality
regarding sex and marriage. Russell argued that the laws and ideas
about sex of his time were a potpourri from various sources, which were
no longer valid with the advent of contraception,
as the sexual acts are now separated from the conception. He argued
that family is most important for the welfare of children, and as such, a
man and a woman should be considered bound only after her first
pregnancy.
Marriage and Morals prompted vigorous protests and denunciations against Russell shortly after the book's publication. A decade later, the book cost him his professorial appointment at the City College of New York due to a court judgment that his opinions made him "morally unfit" to teach. Contrary to what many people believed, Russell did not advocate an extreme libertine position. Instead, he felt that sex, although a natural impulse like hunger or thirst, involves more than that, because no one is "satisfied by the bare sexual act". He argued that abstinence enhances the pleasure of sex, which is better when it "has a large psychical element than when it is purely physical".
Russell noted that for a marriage to work requires that there "be
a feeling of complete equality on both sides; there must be no
interference with mutual freedom; there must be the most complete
physical and mental intimacy; and there must be a certain similarity in
regard to standards of value". He argued that it was, in general,
impossible to sustain this mutual feeling for an indefinite length of
time, and that the only option in such a case was to provide for either
the easy availability of divorce, or the social sanction of extra-marital sex.
Russell was also a very early advocate of repealing sodomy laws.
Australia
Interest in free love spread to Australia in the late 19th century. The English-born anarchist, Chummy Fleming founded the Melbourne Anarchist Club
in 1886, which led a debate on the topic of free love, 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.
France
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.
An important propagandist of free love was individualist anarchist Emile Armand. He advocated naturism and polyamory in what he termed la camaraderie amoureuse.
He wrote many propagandist articles on this subject such as "De la
liberté sexuelle" (1907) where he advocated not only a vague free love
but also multiple partners, which he called "plural love". In the individualist anarchist journal L'en dehors
he and others continued in this way. Armand seized this opportunity to
outline his theses supporting revolutionary sexualism and camaraderie
amoureuse that differed from the traditional views of the partisans of
free love in several respects.
Later Armand submitted that from an individualist perspective
nothing was reprehensible about making "love", even if one did not have
very strong feelings for one's partner.
"The camaraderie amoureuse thesis", he explained, "entails a free
contract of association (that may be annulled without notice, following
prior agreement) reached between anarchist individualists of different
genders, adhering to the necessary standards of sexual hygiene, with a
view toward protecting the other parties to the contract from certain
risks of the amorous experience, such as rejection, rupture,
exclusivism, possessiveness, unicity, coquetry, whims, indifference,
flirtatiousness, disregard for others, and prostitution." He also published Le Combat contre la jalousie et le sexualisme révolutionnaire (1926), followed over the years by Ce que nous entendons par liberté de l'amour (1928), La Camaraderie amoureuse ou "chiennerie sexuelle" (1930), and, finally, La Révolution sexuelle et la camaraderie amoureuse (1934), a book of nearly 350 pages comprising most of his writings on sexuality. In a text from 1937, he mentioned among the individualist objectives the practice of forming voluntary associations for purely sexual purposes of heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual nature or of a combination thereof.
He also supported the right of individuals to change sex and
stated his willingness to rehabilitate forbidden pleasures,
non-conformist caresses (he was personally inclined toward voyeurism),
as well as sodomy. This led him to allocate more and more space to what
he called "the sexual non-conformists", while excluding physical
violence. His militancy also included translating texts from people such as Alexandra Kollontai and Wilhelm Reich and establishments of free love associations which tried to put into practice la camaraderie amoureuse through actual sexual experiences.
Free love advocacy groups active during this time included the Association d'Études sexologiques and the Ligue mondiale pour la Réforme sexuelle sur une base scientifique.
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, Wilhelm Reich, and Max Stirner's follower and biographer, John Henry Mackay.
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. However, Clara Zetkin recorded that Lenin opposed free love as "completely un-Marxist, and moreover, anti-social".
Zetkin also recounted Lenin's denunciation 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. However, by the end of the 1920s, Stalin
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.
Recent
From the late 1940s to the 1960s, the bohemian free-love tradition of Greenwich Village in America 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. The study of sexology continued to gain prominence throughout the era, with the work of researchers Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson supporting challenges to traditional values regarding sex and marriage.
With the Summer of Love in 1967, the eccentricities of this group became a nationally recognized movement. Despite the developing sexual revolution and the influence of the Beatniks had in this new counterculture social rebellion, it has been acknowledged that the New Left movement was arguably the most prominent advocate of free love during the late 1960s.
Many among the counterculture youth sided with New Left arguments that
marriage was a symbol of the traditional capitalist culture which
supported war. "Make Love Not War,"
a slogan of antiquity renewed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono among others,
became a popular slogan in the counterculture movement which denounced
both war and capitalism. Images from the pro-socialist May 1968 uprising
in France, which occurred as the anti-war protests were escalating
throughout the United States, would provide a significant source of
morale to the New Left cause as well.
Second wave feminism continued to question traditional Judeo-Christian teaching on sexuality, while groups like Moral Majority and the Christian right opposed change, after Roe v Wade greatly increased access to abortion in the United States.
After the Stonewall riots, gay rights became an increasingly prominent issue, but by the early 21st century gay activists had shifted their focus to same-sex marriage rather than free love. Divorce and blended families became more common, and young couples increasingly chose to live together in common law marriages or domestic partnerships rather than marrying in church or formalizing or legalizing marriage through the court system.
