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Forgotten ‘free lovers’ dreamed up many of the assumptions eventually destined for 1920s modernity. In the late nineteenth century, high-minded clusters of free lovers were bringing individualist ideas of the inviolability of the person to their conceptions of personal relations; Lillian Harman insisted in Lucifer in 1897 that ownership of oneself was integral to women’s inner ‘self-respect’.¹ Placing a great emphasis on ‘self-control’, free lovers also believed that a frank and rational approach to love would prevent much unnecessary suffering, and enable people to understand and control their feelings. Sarah Holmes, who became one of Helena Born’s friends in Boston, was, like Born, associated with Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Zelm’, she insisted in 1889 that ‘Honesty is the best policy in love, because it is the only policy that ever gets love – love being the sympathy of those who can understand our real selves.’² Unlike the twentieth-century moderns, however, free lovers did not seek out unconscious motivations. Instead they took as their mentor the Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel What Is to Be Done (1863) adopted a highly rationalist stance toward alternative ways of living and loving.

In their campaigns for honesty, frankness and the right to knowledge, free lovers were confronted by a resolute foe. The campaigner for social purity Anthony Comstock had managed to get a law passed in 1873, banning the distribution of ‘obscene’ literature through the mail. The ‘Comstock Law’ meant that free-love advocates could be criminalized; the editor of Lucifer, Moses Harman, Lillian’s father, went to jail several times for defending women’s sexual freedom, including the right to resist rape in marriage. As late as 1905 Moses Harman was back in prison, for publishing articles by the birth controller Dora Forster on ‘Sex Radicalism’. Forster argued that the worst kind of prostitution occurred in conventional marriages in which women were taught to use their bodies for economic and social advantage. She asserted that few married women experienced sensual enjoyment, and maintained that sex should not be restricted necessarily to one partner. She also defended sexual play in childhood, and advocated sex education.³

Women free lovers wanted to democratize personal relationships and extend possibilities of choice and control. When in 1898 Lillian Harman came to speak in London to the British free lovers in the Legitimation League, she put the case not simply for ‘freedom in sexual relationships’ but for extending the spaces for wider forms of personal encounter between men and women. She considered that the tendency for women’s ‘expression of friendship’ to ‘be construed into an invitation to flirtation’ distorted relations between the sexes. She wanted women to be able to define whether relationships were to be sexual or not, rather than simply having to respond to the terms set by men. Women’s freedom was one aspect of a wider ‘freedom in social relationships’.⁴

The women free lovers’ campaigns for the right to knowledge involved not simply access to information but self-knowledge, an inner awareness which could foster empathy with others. Writing in Liberty in 1888, Sarah Holmes connected self-control to ‘self-understanding’. Replying to a worried young anarchist whose girlfriend Minnie had been shocked by his views on free love, Holmes explained to him how Chernyshevsky had demonstrated that a troubled love was not real love. We could not rely on our ‘natural, spontaneous feeling’, because ‘We are taught the traditions of slavery’. Constant struggle and ‘watchfulness’ were needed ‘against lapses and mistakes’. In believing he loved Minnie ‘instead of some woman who was a theoretical free lover’ he was, she suggested, emotionally ambiguous about his own free-love ideas. She then proceeded to propound to him the alternative Holmes ideal of ‘free love’. Love was part of a process of harmonized development through which a person grew ‘wholly . . . not unevenly’, and it required ‘latent sympathy in ideas’. She thought that love became ‘a quiet, gentle, normal, life-giving impulse and power only as fast and as far as this sympathy is found and its free expression made possible. It becomes a troubled, wild, anxious, life-destroying fever and madness as fast and as far as this sympathy is lost sight of, or jarred upon, or intercepted in its manifestation.’⁵

Similarly idealistic, perfectionist aspirations to wholeness, harmony and control recur in the writings of other free-love women. Elmina Slenker proposed ‘Dianaism’, a non-penetrative sexuality advocated by Tolstoy, as a means of gaining wisdom and poise. In December 1889, she assured readers of Ezra Heywood’s Word that this was not a ‘cold, apathetic, distant, unnatural Love’ designed to deny sex feeling.⁶ Eight years later in Lucifer, Slenker – who believed as did many feminists in this period that women were more spiritual than men – was still explaining Dianaism: ‘The little touches, pats and caresses tokens of love. The clasp of the hand, the glance of affection, the tone of the voice, and all that speaks of genuine kindliness and friendliness; this we offer in place of the overmuch sexing, that is murdering millions of wives and scattering syphilis all over the world.’⁷ Accepting that ‘the masses’ would move slowly towards Dianaism, she suggested that meanwhile small groups could set an example by adopting alternative ways of making love. Drawing on a metaphor of thrift, common in nineteenth-century free-love discourse, Slenker advised readers of Lucifer that they should ‘Conserve the life forces and not needlessly waste them in mere paroxysms of pleasure’.⁸ Other women in free-love circles were also interested in changing sexual practices. Alice B. Stockham, a friend of Lillian Harman, argued in Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896) that copulation should not be regarded as simply a means for procreation; rather it should be ‘a blending of body, soul and spirit’.⁹ Prolonged intercourse without orgasm for either men or women, Stockham maintained, was both pleasurable and a form of soul union.

However, women’s supposed spirituality proved contentious. While some women free lovers agreed with Slenker that the ‘sex instinct’ was stronger in men, others angrily asserted women’s physical desires. In 1897 Dora Forster told a London meeting of radical sexual reformers at the Legitimation League that the suppression of desire resulted in ‘morbidity’, insisting that women ‘suffer as much from enforced celibacy 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

Voltairine de Cleyre (Labadie Collection, University of Michigan)

Self-ownership, greater equality in sexual relationships, interconnections between personal behaviour and external political demands, along with free love, were all being discussed in the socialist movement during the late nineteenth century. Edith Lanchester’s free union in defiance of her family in 1895 brought the issue of sexuality out into the open and caused ripples of controversy. However, prominent women socialists, whose position was already socially and culturally precarious because of their politics, were inclined to be wary. As the Independent Labour Party activist Margaret McMillan put it, ‘Marriage is bad and Free Love is worse’.²⁷

Many women who sought to live more autonomously were inclined to associate sex with danger. Meridel LeSueur, who would become a novelist, came from a left-wing background in the Mid-West and her mother was a feminist. As a young woman in Greenwich Village before World War One, she met and admired Emma Goldman, but contrasted Goldman’s frank acceptance of sexual pleasure with the attitudes of her mother’s generation.

Many of them felt sex was a humiliating force, symbolic of their repression – of marriage and child-bearing – and it represented to them violence, rape, and enslavement. Many of them at that time felt a woman had only two choices: living her own life with a career and calling as a radical, or marriage with sex and children.²⁸

In the late nineteenth century the conviction that women needed to be protected from male sexuality encouraged women reformers in both countries to become involved in efforts to eradicate prostitution. An unintended consequence was that over-zealous police harried women they thought were not ‘respectable’. In Britain in 1885 a broad coalition led by the supporter of women’s rights, Josephine Butler, secured the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Act which had sanctioned forced physical examinations of women whom police suspected of prostitution. The National Vigilance Association was formed as a result of the campaign. However, divisions arose between women concerned to protect working-class prostitutes from destitution, and vigilance campaigners who wanted to close brothels by force. Among the latter was Laura Ormiston Chant, a supporter of the Liberal Party, women’s suffrage, temperance and social purity. Although initially distrustful of state intervention, Chant and other social-purity activists began to shift from simply campaigning to seeking changes in local and national government policy. In the 1890s Chant, with allies from the British Women’s Temperance Association, successfully put pressure on a coalition of Progressives on the London County Council to restrict licences to music halls that featured acts of which they disapproved. In 1901 a vigorous campaign against prostitution was mounted by Progressives, evangelicals, feminists and temperance supporters against prostitution; it targeted the women rather than their male clients, an approach which caused conflict among social-purity feminists.²⁹

Social purity was also a powerful force in the United States. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union could mobilize women on a mass scale, while women’s clubs and women in social settlements combined with members of the Christian League for the Promotion of Social Purity and the Mothers’ Congress, not only in the campaigns against prostitution but in attempts to regulate theatres, dance halls and the new cinemas. As in Britain, voluntary groups began to press for municipal and legislative intervention. Some moral reformers also came to realize the need for practical services to support and retrain prostitutes. The Florence Crittenton homes provided a refuge for young girls as well as training them in domestic service and nursing.³⁰

If the reformers’ zeal could be coercive and repressive, the social-purity movement nonetheless contained several subversive sub-texts. Some moral campaigners demanded equal moral standards for men and women, while their efforts to curb incest, rape and violence within families broached the question of the extent to which relations within the family were to be regulated. Moreover, by marshalling powerful emotive arguments, they generated a public discussion of hitherto unmentionable topics such as venereal disease. The social purity regulators, like their antithesis the free lovers, contrived to bring sex into the public arena.

When social-purity women spoke out on platforms and in committees, it was evident that the boundary between women actively asserting their allotted ‘female’ role of moral purification in a public context, and breaking through the prevailing conventions about the woman’s sphere, could be frangible. Indeed, Chant’s efforts to close brothels led to her being castigated as a ‘new woman’.³¹

From the 1880s¸ moral reformers who went into the urban slums to rescue the poor from drink, vice and family violence could find themselves moving on to other social issues. In both countries, social purity contributed to the emergence of broader reform coalitions which sought to tackle urban problems in the early 1900s.³² The attempt to redeem could shake assumptions. When the future campaigner against lead contamination, Alice Hamilton, braved a brothel in Toledo to rescue a prostitute, she found, instead of the victim she had expected, ‘a woman of mature years, handsome, dignified, entirely mistress of herself’ in a house that was ‘luxurious but vulgarly ugly’. The meeting was an occasion for mutual incomprehension. The young idealistic reformer heard the calculating voice of a tradeswoman. ‘I might make a good saleswoman . . . for I spend my time persuading men to spend money on what they don’t really want.’ For her part, the prostitute was appalled by Hamilton’s altruistic settlement life in the Chicago slums: ‘That is not the sort of thing I could possibly do,’ she observed with disgust.³³ The reformers’ values could also be challenged. From 1910 the upper-middle-class Bostonian Fanny Quincy Howe regularly corresponded with a Jewish prostitute and morphine addict, Maimie Pinzer, who told Howe she regarded divorce as ‘a lot of foolishness and a marriage ceremony the worst lot of cant I ever heard’.³⁴ Such encounters resulted in a steep learning curve.

As moral reform fused with wider action in communities, perspectives could subtly alter. By 1915, when the radical Mary Beard wrote Woman’s Work in Municipalities, reformers were looking at preventative action and trying to understand the social and cultural bases of moral problems. So while club women in Pittsburg, Kansas were busy securing the censorship of ‘all films depicting scenes of crime, drinking scenes, and suggestive “love scenes”’, more imaginative reformers sought not simply to ban, but to influence the content of the new leisure industry in an effort to ensure pleasurable improvement.³⁵

The new approach of positive intervention also led them to embark on sex education. Beard reported that by 1914, women’s meetings were being held to discuss teaching ‘sex hygiene’. Speaking to the Council of Jewish Women, Dr Rosalie Morton pointed out that women must take on the issue in their own homes rather than leaving the topic of sex to men alone. In the past she claimed women had been ‘too sentimental, they have been too ignorant of their limitations in the world of practical affairs; they have lacked well-balanced judgment as to how it was best to teach, how it was best to help’.³⁶ The Women’s Municipal League of Boston began to give sex lectures, ‘realizing the physical misery which is resulting from ignorance in regard to matters of sex, and the spiritual degradation following the wrong conception of the high purpose of the sex function, to which must be added the loss of efficiency in human ability’. The League believed that there were too many dangers to justify ‘a further continuance of . . . silence’.³⁷

Sex was a social issue, not simply a personal one. In both the US and Britain, sex hygienists approached the topic in terms of efficiency and regulation. Warning of the dangers of promiscuity in lurid terms, their emphasis was on the interests of the body politic, which they equated with the heterosexual family and parenthood. Nonetheless they too were part of a profound cultural shift. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, private intimacies were coming out into the public gaze and becoming a topic for public discourse.

This transposition presented a dilemma about how to discuss sexual practices and relationships. The free lovers Ezra and Angela Heywood advocated words in common use. Angela Heywood wrote in 1887: ‘Such graceful terms as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking, throbbing, kissing, and kin words are telephone expressions, lighthouses of intercourse centrally immutable to the situation; their aptness, euphony and serviceable persistence make it as impossible and undesirable to put them out of pure use as it would be to take oxygen out of air.’³⁸ Common usage or not, the Heywoods had to write ‘c—, c— and f—’ or go to jail.³⁹

In 1897 the British free lovers in the Legitimation League were puzzling over the existence of ‘two forms of speech or language in connection with sex matters’. One was scientific and the other ‘the bald, rugged phrases of the gutter and the market-place’. In an article headed ‘Wanted: A New Dictionary’, the League asserted that raising ‘the discussion of sex matters to a higher plane’ required the ‘formulation of a vocabulary’.⁴⁰ This anxiety about language partly expressed a recognition of the practical threat they faced. They had to position themselves on the ‘higher plane’ if a line between sexual radicalism and obscenity was to be drawn. This strategy was not always successful. In the late 1890s the police were hounding the League; they seized Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, despite its academic tone, because it was published by a press used by the League. A later generation of women sex reformers, the birth controllers Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, adapted this ‘higher plane’ tactic by developing a high-flown prose style.

For ‘advanced’ women the search for a new language of sexuality was part of a wider struggle for a self-defined cultural space. Between 1885 and 1889, the female members of the Men and Women Club in London found themselves confronted by a group of radical men, who had adapted Darwinian evolutionary theories in an abstract and distanced manner to the discussion of sexual questions. The men set the terms of debate. One woman member, Maria Sharpe, reflected that she and the other women ‘even in general discussion . . . had to learn a partially new language before they could make themselves intelligible’.⁴¹ While the women in the club expressed frustration in curbing their subjectivity, they also discovered that ‘objectivity’ could provide a useful cover for personal feelings. Yet Sharpe still felt embarrassed when she returned the books she was reading on prostitution in the British Museum.

The free thinkers and anarchists in the US created a similarly hard-won space for the study and discussion of sexuality. In 1891 Lizzie Holmes affirmed the value of the voice Lucifer gave to radical women, and upheld women’s own experiences against received knowledge:

It is the mouthpiece, almost the only mouthpiece in the world, of every poor, suffering, defrauded, subjugated woman. Many know they suffer, and cry out in their misery, though not in the most grammatical of sentences. . . . A simple woman may know nothing of biology, psychology, or of the evolution of the human race, but she knows when she is forced into a relation disagreeable or painful to her. Let her express her pain; the scientists may afterwards tell why she suffers, and what are the remedies, if they can.⁴²

The creation of an explicitly female counter-cultural space in which to articulate wants and desires continued to preoccupy early twentieth-century women writers seeking to understand and alter sexual customs and behaviour. The editor of the Freewoman, Dora Marsden, deplored ‘the failure of language’ to express a new sexual awareness among women.⁴³ She spoke for a group of rebel feminists who believed in tackling sex head-on, rejecting what she dubbed ‘the great soporifics – comfort and protection.’ Echoing the heroic individualism of the anarchists, she declared that free women would stand alone, convinced of their own strength, and claim all experience. For Marsden this could involve being ‘content to seize the “love” in passing, to suffer the long strains of effort and to bear the agony of producing creative work’. She believed that through asserting their power as individuals, women would learn ‘that their own freedom will consist in appraising their own worth, in setting up their own standards and living up to them’.⁴⁴ Similar ideas circulated in Greenwich Village where Mabel Dodge Luhan, too, was demanding the right ‘to encompass all experience’.⁴⁵

This mixture of aggressive will and sexual appetite appalled some women. Olive Schreiner complained to Havelock Ellis that the Freewoman ‘ought to be called the Licentious Male . . . It is the tone of the brutal self-indulgent selfish male.’⁴⁶ Conflict erupted on the Freewoman’s letters page with a feminist, Kathlyn Oliver, expressing the view that ‘freewomen’ would not be ‘slaves of our lower appetites’.⁴⁷ When a ‘New Subscriber’ wrote in defending women’s right to sexual experience, Oliver assumed the correspondent to be male. But it was the Canadian birth control campaigner, Stella Browne, quoting Havelock Ellis on ‘auto-eroticism’.⁴⁸

Ellis’s diligent observation documented a wide range of sexual practices and wants – including his wife Edith’s attraction to women. Ellis’s method of case studies, combined with his stance as a scientific observer, established an idiom for talking about sex. Instead of appealing to either morality or an ideal of free love, he had devised a standpoint from which he could catalogue and consider what his subjects declared as their wants. The study of sex psychology created a platform of ‘objectivity’ which could provide a reference point beyond subjectivity and be a means of comprehending feelings and behaviour which did not ‘fit’. However, in creating a new terrain for sexual expression he, along with other sex psychologists, also defined and constrained women’s varied experiences and desires; both by imposing their own categories and by the ponderous scientific terminology which pinned down individuals according to type, rather in the manner of nineteenth-century natural science’s specimens of butterflies. Nevertheless, Ellis’s assumption of the role of the distanced expert gave a new, secular, scholarly significance to personal testimony. He helped to establish a conduit for sexual observation which broke with the confessional and the peep show: observation of sexual feelings and behaviour was transmuted into a field of study. An important space had been opened.

Even Ellis had found that his writing on homosexuality and lesbianism could be castigated as ‘obscene’, and any public assertion of same-sex desire remained well-nigh impossible. Instead women tentatively expressed their emotions in private correspondence. Edith Ellis, an anonymous witness in her husband’s volume on ‘inversion’, confided in the socialist and sexual radical Edward Carpenter, whose openly lived homosexuality gave him a kind of gender neutrality. Following the death of her lover, Lily, in 1905, Edith Ellis wondered why she was getting headaches after years without them, and concluded that ‘the need of the lusts of the flesh – like mine – was the reason.’⁴⁹

Edith Ellis (Carpenter Collection, Sheffield Archives)

Women communicated their own responses to sympathetic male friends, explicitly distinguishing those who evinced a capacity to observe and listen, and they made a selective use of the writings of male sexologists in relation to their own perceptions. When in 1915 Stella Browne gave a paper at the newly formed British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology on ‘The Sexual Variety and Variability among Women’, she explained carefully:

I have tried to say nothing in this paper, that was not known to me, either through my own experience, or the observation and testimony of persons I know well. My conclusions are based on life, not on books, though I have been confirmed in my personal opinions and conclusions by some of the greatest psychologists, especially Dr Havelock Ellis, whose immense research is fused and illuminated by an inspired intuition.⁵⁰

Stressing the need to relate experience and theory, Browne also explicitly addressed the need for women to devise a new discourse. ‘The realities of women’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary. While her brother has often learned all the slang of the street before adolescence, the conventional “decently brought-up” girl, of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences.’⁵¹

Like the rebel free lovers, Browne challenged the idea that women did not possess a ‘sex impulse’, arguing instead that women’s desires were diverse, differing not only between individuals but in the same individual over time. She did not believe their varied sexual needs could be expressed or satisfied within either patriarchal marriage or its corollary, prostitution. While Browne, the modern woman, absorbed earlier arguments from the sex-radical tradition, she was well read in contemporary European sexual theory, and familiar with the new philosophic trends which stressed energy and flux. Like her counterparts in Greenwich Village, she was aware of the new context psychoanalysis was creating for personal testimony. Browne and her contemporaries not only invoked reason; they were seeking a space for a more complex cultural expression of contradictory feelings.

Interest in sex psychology and psychoanalysis was part of the wider contemporary preoccupation with self-observation. In 1916 Elsie Clews Parsons, reflecting 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.