State of 'The Union'

Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s

Sandra Schroer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135498597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study of the Free Love Movement in the mid-to-late 1800s examines the situated knowledge of women and men who participated in the movement, how they articulated the platform, and contributed to its exposure by writing and publishing their ideas, arguments and concerns. While all Free Love participants claimed benefits and freedoms from the practice, this book is the first to compare the benefits and political agendas experienced by the male participants with those experienced by the females. The importance of this work lies in its potential to inform current political resistance against the inequality inherent in legislation that strives to restrict sexual freedom in the United States, and its potential to contribute to the overall well-being of women, men and the society they live in.

Chapter One

Introduction and Theory

INTRODUCTION

In August of 1999, the World Association for Sexology (WAS) constructed a Declaration of Sexual Rights. It states that all human beings are entitled to the following sexual rights: the right to sexual freedom, sexual autonomy, sexual privacy, sexual equality, sexual pleasure, emotional sexual expression, sexual education, sexual health care, to sexually associate freely and to make free and responsible reproductive choices (Ng, Borras-Valls, Perez-Conchillo, and Coleman, 2000). Their collective stance is that sexual well-being is necessary for individual development as well as societal development, and is obtainable through the interaction of the individual with social structures.

While this may sound progressive and new, it is a political position, which historically has reoccurred in waves or has existed in small pockets of influence throughout history in the United States. An early example is documented by William McLoughlin (1974) where, he explains, a movement in favor of Free Love and social perfectionism was active in Cumberland Rhode Island between the years 1734–1755 during the first great awakening. A second wave, which is the focus of this research, gained momentum in the mid-to late 1800s during the second Great Awakening, and was known as the Free Love Movement.

Sexual rights have increasingly become an important topic for feminists who stress the necessity of researching the social and political context of sexuality. However, in the United States, funding for sexuality research has been disproportionately supportive of biological research on sex. According to Leonore Tiefer (2001), medicalization of sexual functioning tends to focus on prescribing and demarcating sexual interests, activities, norms and interests “in the language of sexual health and illness” (p. 65) as it relates to males. Coupled with the confusing sexual messages from the media and consumer hype over sex consumption, the biological/medical sexual industry overlooks the social and political aspects of sexual functioning, as well as the impact of a medical sexual market on social norms and standards.

While the media and pharmaceutical industries clamor for consumer dollars, men and women in the United States are dazzled by the illusion of opportunities for unbridled sexual expression and equality while remaining unaware of the social and political maneuvers taking place to restrict their sexual freedoms, rights and privacy. According to a New York Times article dated January 12, 2003, in the two years prior President Bush enacted a calculated series of anti-choice regulations and administrative decisions that undermine the fundamental right to reproductive freedom, health and privacy for women. According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2003), Bush's “pernicious web” includes reducing access to family planning, building a platform to outlaw abortion, redefining the legal status of the fetus, packing the courts with pro-life judges in order to overturn Roe-v-Wade, dismissing scientific findings in favor of right-wing ideology, and censoring free speech. If Bush and his proponents are successful, the WAS Declaration of Sexual Rights will become meaningless in the United States, and the work of generations of feminist men and women will be dismantled.

Considering the conservative sexual political agenda of the Bush administration, now more than ever women and men need insight into how they came to experience the sexual freedom they have, and the history of that struggle. Without a complete understanding of where we as a nation have been in our sexual political history, it is difficult to avoid committing similar mistakes over and over. According to Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon (1989), a return to radically conservative sexual politics is to be expected when historical research on sexual politics is not pursued. This call for historical sexuality and gender research is supported by Liz Stanley (as cited in Reinharz, 1992) who stated “in understanding our past we can better know and act upon our present” (p. 159). In addition, by studying the power relationships in gender and sex, in historical context, and in bringing it to the attention of people today, new understandings are developed to inform the relationship between power, sex and gender for historically oppressed populations such as women (Di Mauro, 1995).

The following study of Free Love in the mid-to late 1800s examines the situated knowledge of women and men who participated in the movement, how they articulated the Free Love platform, and contributed to its exposure by writing and publishing their ideas, arguments and concerns. By looking at the writings of Free Love participants, this research considers how they conceptualized Free Love in its historical context. While all Free Love participants claimed benefits and freedoms from the practice, it is reasonable to suspect that females and males experienced different types of benefits as a result of participating in the lifestyle. Furthermore, the political agendas of females and males may or may not have been the same. Therefore, what Free Love meant to women and men was most likely different. Through a content analysis and critical discourse analysis of the published writings of Free Lovers, the situated knowledge of female Free Lovers and male Free Lovers is compared in this study. The following questions guided this research:

1.Why were women and men involved in the Free Love movement of the mid-to-late 1800s?

2.Are there differences between what men and women saw as important issues relating to Free Love?

3.Are there differences in the way women and men wrote about Free Love?

4.Is there agreement or disagreement between female and male authors? If so, what issues did they differ on? What issues did they agree on?

Aside from being the only known sociological research on Free Love, the importance of this research lies in three specific outcomes. First, this research contributes a detailed analysis of one wave of the politically radical sexual movements, which have occurred throughout history in the United States. Through content analysis, this study contextualizes the writings of Free Lovers in their historical situation, enabling us to understand the connections between their experiences, limitations, goals and the public issues of that time period. Second, no existing study has examined the writings of female and male Free Lovers to compare their issues or how they expressed their public positions on such issues. This research explores such gender comparisons through critical discourse analysis. It investigates what Free Love meant to women and men, as well as why it was meaningful to them.

Third, this research contends that the Free Love movement was not simply another form of patriarchal exploitation of women and sex, as critical research by Foster (1981) and Kern (1981) has implied. Rather, it was a complex form of political resistance against institutionalized social inequality. Institutions such as marriage maintained the subordinate economic position of women, as well as control over the family and class structure in the United States. The importance of this work lies in its potential to inform current political resistance against the inequality inherent in legislation that strives to restrict sexual freedom in the United States, and its potential to contribute to the overall well-being of women, men and the society they live in.

THEORY

The theoretical construct used in this study is standpoint theory, which recognizes the value of situated knowledge. This theory is particularly useful for historical research and gender analysis, because it supports looking beyond socially prescribed gender roles for both women and men, and privileges the voice of individuals in the context of their social position, as they participate in material life. The benefit is that by acknowledging standpoints, gender comparisons can reveal more than the differences between men and women. They can also reveal levels of differences within gender categories, as well as the social situations and social institutions that create and define those levels. A study, based on standpoint theory, can reveal individual perspectives as well as group perspectives in relation to the ruling forces that create those perspectives.

Standpoint theory encourages the use of text for analyzing the historically situated perspectives of people. Text is recognized as a valid source of individuals' expressions, perspectives and social situations. Furthermore, Dorothy Smith (1990) writes that text becomes the source for understanding the relations of ruling that structure those perspectives.

Standpoint theory, as well as situated knowledge, acknowledges the political position of the body within the context of time and place. The body and all its senses are conceptualized as a collection of filters through which one experiences the world and contributes to its way of functioning (de Beauvoir, 1993). These filters include, but are not limited to one's sex, gender, sexual orientation, level of physical ability, and one's race and ethnicity. When analyzed within the context of historical situations, social class, and physical location, the written experiences of individuals become a powerful source of data from which social critique emerges. For this reason situated knowledge has been primarily a research tool used by feminists to challenge the status quo and critique the dominant perspective. This study builds on that use and applies situated knowledge to the analysis of the differences between male and female Free Lovers, as well as the institutions and organizations that influenced those experiences and perspectives.

The main proponents of situated knowledge include theorists such as Dorothy Smith, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill-Collins and Nancy Hartsock. While each of these women advocates the necessity of a standpoint in research, they are not homogenous in their views. Diversity among proponents of standpoint theory is as common as diversity among human beings. Furthermore, to researchers who demand objectivity, standpoint appears to fly in the face of true scientific research. However, standpoint intentionally rejects the “positionless account” (Smith, 1987, p. 54) characteristic of the positivist canon.

Sandra Harding (personal communication, 10–04–01) states that the social sciences need their own methods outside of objective methods originally developed to study nature, such as trees and rocks, because trees and rocks do not make meanings. People make meanings; therefore, a science that studies humans should do three things. First, it should strive to reconstruct the subject's world. Second, it should use mathematical language sparingly, identifying that it is not the only language with which one can interpret social life. Finally, studies must include women's ways of knowing and indigenous knowledge, because each culture is its own scientist.

Harding (1997) points out that standpoint theory has been important to the development of useful ways of conceptualizing and researching “the production of knowledge in local and global politics” (p. 382). Like Patricia Hill-Collins, she stresses that the focus of standpoint theorists is the relationship between knowledge and power (Harding, 1983).

Patricia Hill-Collins (2000) is best known for her research in race and social relations, but her use of standpoint reaches beyond race relations. She writes that one way a dominant group takes or maintains power is to remove the history of the group or reframe their history for them, from the dominant group's viewpoint. The loss of accurate documentation leads to confusion and insecurity about the oppressed group's position. This in turn leads to fragmentation and the “seeming absence of dissent” (p. 3). This is offered by the dominant group as evidence of the willingness of the subordinate group members to “collaborate in their own victimization” (p. 3). She states, “suppressing the knowledge produced by an oppressed group makes it easier” (p. 3) for others to dominate them.

Hill-Collins (1997) stresses the group identity in standpoint theory, not the individual's isolated experience. This does not mean an individual's experience is unimportant. Instead, she clarifies, less emphasis is placed on “individual experiences within socially constructed groups than on the social conditions that construct such groups” (p. 375). However, the daily experiences of the individual resemble those confronting all members of a group, especially if membership in the group is an ascribed status such as one's sex. She states that the “first notion of standpoint refers to historically shared, group based experiences” (p. 375). These “historically shared, group-based experiences” become elements in the overall socialization of the individual members of the group, giving them an inside understanding, either conscious or subconscious, which may be referred to as situated knowledge.

A second feature of Hill-Collin's (1997) conceptualization of standpoint stresses the position of common experiences in relation to power hierarchies. Power hierarchies continually define the experiences of groups and, thus, the individuals within. For example, Anthony Comstock was empowered by law to arrest those who attempted to publish and disseminate Free Love and contraceptive literature (McGarry, 2000). This is evidence that the group experience of Free Lovers was not autonomous, but was a reflection of the powers and structures within which it existed.

Nancy Hartsock (1997) moves standpoint from theory to an episte-mological and ontological position. Hartsock views the feminist standpoint as a tool “for understanding and opposing all forms of domination” (p. 216). Like most proponents of standpoint theory, she uses a broad application for standpoint and its associated methods. According to Hartsock, standpoint is not exclusively related to feminism, but instead challenges the oppression of all minorities, including women and persons of color. She argues the dichotomous view of nature and culture in the development of people and their experiences is not entirely correct, nor is it entirely wrong. She states that as human beings, we are constructed by both the natural and the cultural, and through standpoint the two are recognized as equally influential and equally influenced in conjunction with each other (1997). Standpoint informs epistemology, or ways of knowing.

Hartsock (1997) identifies five reasons for studying the material life of women in support of standpoint. First, she states that studying material life exposes further understanding of life structures. Rather than viewing mind/body or natural/cultural as dualities, standpoint draws them together as interconnected means of experiencing life, and thus producing knowledge. Second, female experiences expose hidden forms of masculine power in structure. Third, standpoint recognizes the influence of power and reveals ways that the ruling group “may be both perverse and made real” (p. 220) because they alone define what the power structure will be for the community. The fourth strength of standpoint is that the standpoint itself must be achieved through research and analysis. It is not an immediate understanding. It requires careful consideration of the material and nonma-terial experiences of production.

“Production,” for Hartsock, refers to what one produces in order to live, as well as the production of ideas. This is important when researching gender comparisons because females and males view production differently. According to Hartsock (1997), males tend to see production as something outside of themselves, but a result of their embodiment. This outside production often represents their level of achievement. Women, on the other hand, tend to not separate production from the self, because their bodies are mechanisms of production. Therefore, for women, production is the self, not a separate representation of self.

Regarding the fourth strength of standpoint, Hartsock states that traditional means of scientific research may be well suited for studying some aspects of men's lives, where one can see and measure production separate from the self. However, this leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation of the meaning production may have to the individual. Standpoint, on the other hand, must be achieved through intellectual reconstruction of the historical and contextual situation of the individuals and the individuals' activities. Finally, because it deals with both life and thought, standpoint can be the platform from which one moves beyond existing power relationships. It can serve as a foundation for social change.

Dorothy Smith, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill-Collins and Nancy Hartsock represent only four of the many feminist theorists who apply standpoint theory, or situated knowledge, to their research in the lives of women and other marginalized groups. Each applies the concepts of standpoint theory to rediscovering lost histories and experiences of groups of people. While they are not women who identify with each other as having shared experiences, what they do share is a belief in research rooted in ways of knowing and methods that embrace the subjugated voice of individuals in historical context.

Standpoint theory is relevant to this study because it directly confronts the issues of how knowledge and comprehension can only be understood as situated in social and historical contexts. It privileges the voices of both men and women, recognizing that their experiences may have been different, and also may have been reactions to different influences. Standpoint recognizes and integrates the social positions of actors (writers), and the issues they were facing, the institutions and organizations that constructed their daily lives, and the laws and policies that restricted and privileged individual choices. Furthermore, standpoint privileges the view from those who were oppressed and whose voices are rarely heard.

This study uses standpoint theory to reveal the situated knowledge of men and women who identified themselves as Free Lovers or supported the Free Love movement by contributing articles to pro-Free Love publications. Evidence of their situated knowledge is expressed in th...