Dreamers of a New Day. Sheila Rowbotham
on subjective knowledge, noted: ‘At times testimony about the private life takes on a sufficiently public significance to free it from ridicule or the charge of bad taste.’52 Greenwich Village bohemians, male and female, were fascinated by the dual processes of self-examination and self-revelation. Intimacies were common knowledge, corresponded about, written about in novels and plays and openly discussed. Christine Stansell comments on how their ‘talking about sex’ was created by an ‘amalgam of feminism, cross-class fascination with working-class mores, and a belief in the power of honesty between the sexes’.53 The bohemian and anarchist Hutchins Hapgood, who had pioneered the impressionistic documentation of ‘outsiders’ in the 1890s by writing on immigrant life, wanted to apply the same conscious scrutiny to sex. He and the novelist Neith Boyce set out to be sexual chums. ‘I begin to feel we are a couple of sports’, Boyce declared in 1899.54 But when they had children, it was to be Hapgood who retained the freedom to roam in a quite conventional manner. ‘Varietism’, Boyce concluded in 1905, using the free lovers’ terminology, was so ‘crude and unlovely – and besides it takes the zest out of sinning.’55
Emma Goldman, whose eclectic openness caught the mood of the Village perfectly, acted as a crucial intermediary between free lovers and twentieth-century bohemians. Goldman possessed a unique capacity to look backwards, outwards and forwards. She was familiar with the little clusters of American free-thought and free-speech groups, as well as Russian writers such as Chernyshevsky, while being equally well versed in Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, Carpenter, Ellis and Freud.56 Even as the Villagers took over some of the watchwords and demands of the free lovers, they re-routed and transposed the old ideals, shaping them into the new set of assumptions about sexuality which would surface in mainstream culture during the 1920s. Confident in the infinite possibility of ‘being’ amidst a booming America vibrant with energy, the bohemian rebels stressed release and expression rather than the conservation of energy, Slenker-style. The free lovers’ ‘self-control’ morphed into Margaret Sanger’s term ‘birth control’, and their interest in therapeutic cures and closeness to nature fed into a concern to manage the body through diet and exercise, in accord with the early twentieth-century American ‘can-do’ approach to mind and body.
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