Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
as men’.10 Amy Linnett challenged Elmina Slenker in Lucifer in the same year, taking up the cudgels on behalf ‘of our younger radical women . . . who are not ashamed to avow the deliciousness of their sex, as Walt Whitman put it’.11 When a male contributor argued in the journal that October that women were the moral regulators of sexual relationships, Elizabeth Johnson responded indignantly that ‘woman’ should have the ‘right to use her functions as she pleases’. She declared: ‘Stop setting woman on a pedestal, recognize her as an equal and half the problem would be solved.’12
Within the lofty discourse of free love it was somewhat difficult for women to assert an active desire which might make them seek more than one man. But Rosa Graul raised the question of women choosing differing fathers in her utopian novel Hilda’s Home, serialized by Lucifer in 1897:
if a woman desires to repeat the experience of motherhood, why should it be wrong when she selects another to be the father of her child, instead of the one who has once performed this office for her? Why should the act be less pure when she bestows a second love, when the object of this second love is just as true, just as noble, just as pure-minded as was the first one? Why should an act be considered a crime with one partner which had been fully justified with another?13
She added bravely, ‘My words are backed by personal experience and observation, experience as bitter as any that has been herein recorded.’14 On her visit to Britain in 1898, Lillian Harman also defended variety. ‘I consider uniformity in mode of sexual relations as undesirable and impracticable as enforced uniformity in anything else. For myself, I want the right to profit by my mistakes.’15
The aim was the right to be happy and to make independent choices. In 1891 the anarchist Lillie White, Lizzie Holmes’s sister, defined this as a self-conscious awareness of individual autonomy: ‘When women learn that their best and highest object in life is to be independent and free, instead of living to make some man comfortable; when she finds that she must first be happy herself before she can make others happy, we shall have loving, harmonious families and happy homes.’16 For White, an assertion of self was necessary in order to bond as equals.
Despite the rationalism in both the free-love tradition and the radical utilitarianism of Chernyshevsky, anarchist women also insisted on romance. Clashing in the pages of Liberty in 1888 with the Russian anarchist Victor Yarros, who believed in conventional family life, Sarah Holmes insisted that in the future ‘the love of men and women will not take the form of violets first, and beefsteak but no violets ever after.’ Her ‘most yearning wish’ for her own daughter was that
she may never, in all her life, look into the eyes of an old-time lover and say: You used to bring me violets. I want men and women to keep their love as fresh as the baby-life to which such love gives birth; to be true, honest, strong, self-sustaining men and women first; and then to love; to love one or to love many – fate and the chances of life must settle that – but, one or many, I want each love to be as full of its own essential fragrant essence as a violet’s breath.17
Elmina Slenker was a great enthusiast of Diana-style marks of tenderness, while Rosa Graul expressed a desire for romance in Hilda’s Home. In Graul’s co-operative community of the future, ‘liberty’ meant ‘life will be a constant wooing’.18
Echoing the early nineteenth-century utopians, the anarchist Kate Austin suggested that free love carried a promise of what might be. Writing in Firebrand, she argued in 1897:
We all know that no golden key will unlock the casket of love, and that oft-times free love is the priceless possession of the poorest man or woman on earth. Many insist on saying ‘free love is not practicable under present conditions’. Now I am not afraid to say that free love is all there is of love, that it was born of life and has always been with us, and is all that sweetens our onward march. If love is put in a cage, or fettered in any way, it is no longer love, but a ghastly nameless thing, that blasts the living and curses the unborn.19
Women advocates of free love were, however, all too aware that it was easier to express new ideals of sexual relationships than to live them. Lizzie Holmes’s novel Hagar Lyndon (1893) detailed the practical obstacles her heroine encountered when she sought to be free, to love passionately and to survive in a hostile world. Eventually she was compelled to renounce passion for autonomy. When the journal Discontent, produced in the anarchist Home Colony in Washington, serialized a free-love novel by Nellie M. Jerauld, Holmes wrote a letter pointing out that free-love couples could be as demanding and possessive as married ones; moreover they, too, could be forced to stay together by economic pressures, especially after they had children.20
Although free-thinking and anarchist women were on the whole hopeful about the possibility of mutual understanding between men and women, they could be critical of men’s gender blindness. In 1895 Edith Vance, a convinced free thinker associated with the Legitimation League, raised the differing consequences of heterodoxy for two Leeds members, the Dawsons, who lived in a free union:
I did not know until I had a talk with Mrs Dawson afterwards . . . what a very great deal she has to endure, it is very easy – perhaps it is fun to you gentlemen – to be twitted about your connection with the League. You can bear it with fortitude, and perhaps rather like it than otherwise, and if the conversation gets too bad, you can knock the man down but Mrs Dawson is not in a position to thus deal with her slanderers, men or women, and in most cases the women are the worst.21
Women in free-love circles knew from experience that abstract ‘free-love’ prescriptions could overlook the complexities of actual situations and needs in relationships, and that refusing marriage was no guarantee of happiness. Not only was it evident that cultural attitudes were far less forgiving towards women’s sexual deviance than men’s, but some suspected that enthusiasm for autonomy and the value of ‘experiences’ could be cynical male ploys. Nellie Shaw describes how a man who arrived at the Whiteway Tolstoyan anarchist community in the British Cotswolds during the early 1900s, advocating ‘varietism’, was sent packing. Autonomy was about women expressing their individuality within monogamy, as far as she was concerned.22
The dilemmas and arguments continued in the early twentieth century, though the context changed. The American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre regarded sex as one aspect of experience, and believed in a state of permanent flux and autonomy. Writing in Mother Earth in 1908 she plumped for ‘ecstasy’ rather than permanent free union. ‘Never allow love to be vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communion.’23 The problem was, when freedoms conflicted who was to decide? Jealousy too proved particularly resistant to free-love reasoning. Women advocates of free unions might insist they were motivated by a higher, inner-directed morality rather than old-style competition for men, but their rivals were not necessarily convinced.
Some of the free lovers’ assumptions about the need for self-ownership and greater choice and control were shared by the ‘new women’ writers of the late nineteenth century. In 1888 the British novelist Mona Caird was insisting on the need for a ‘full understanding and acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul’.24 New women, however, were inclined to be more sceptical than anarchist women about the possibility of co-operating with men; as Caird declared, ‘The enemy has to be met and fought within men’s soul’.25 Like anarchist free lovers, new women like Caird believed that women’s dependent status was deeply embedded not only within existing family relations, but in established institutions such as the church and the state; however, their strategies for change differed. While free lovers stressed individual direct action in defiance of the law, Caird was prepared to accept that self-ownership required legislative reforms such as female suffrage, equal parental rights, and divorce, along with marriage as a free contract, co-education and the abolition of segregated patterns of work. Like the free lovers, though, Caird asserted that woman’s self-possession involved the right ‘to give or withhold herself . . . exactly as she wills’.26