Abstract
This article argues that British and American free lovers – radical sexual reformers committed to the cause of ‘sexual freedom’ – came together through print to build a transatlantic community at the fin de siècle. Challenging existing narratives that characterize free love as isolated or incoherent, it argues that through print free lovers from Britain and America were able to forge links with each other, and to construct an important, coherent collective identity that transcended national boundaries. In doing so it makes two major interventions. First, it provides unique new insights into the history of free love in both the British and American contexts, placing a new focus on often overlooked transnational connections and exchanges that helped to shape late nineteenth-century free love campaigns. Second, it encourages historians to rethink the ways we look for and make sense of cohesive international reform communities more broadly in this period. By exploring how a small, radical group like the free lovers were able to cohere through processes of contestation and negotiation played out entirely in print, this article will show that, where necessary, print was enough for transatlantic reformers to construct common identities and negotiate coherent reform ideas. As such, it argues that historians of fin-de-siècle social reform should look again at the print culture of other contemporary reformers otherwise labelled divided, isolated, or marginalized to look for threads of cohesion, cooperation, and compromise.
Highlights
This article argues that British and American free lovers – radical sexual reformers committed to the cause of ‘sexual freedom’ – came together through print to build a transatlantic community at the fin de siècle
In the summer of 1898, the secretary of the British free love organization The Legitimation League was charged with publishing obscene articles on free love and radical sexual reform in The Adult – the League’s monthly paper of which he served as editor.[1]
By exploring how a small, radical group like the free lovers were able to cohere through processes of contestation and negotiation played out entirely in print, this article will expand on important work being done into nineteenth-century print culture to show that, where necessary, print was enough for transatlantic reformers to construct common identities and negotiate coherent reform ideas at this time
Summary
Factors such as technological innovations, falling production costs, and increasing literacy rates ensured that the late nineteenth century was a ‘watershed moment’ in the rise of print production.[14]. These networks of distribution certainly helped foster a sense of belonging, or at least of shared enterprise; William Duff, a member of the Legitimation League who acted as an agent for Lucifer in Glasgow, for example, told his American associates that he saw his agency as a way to ‘spread the truths we all have at heart, or perhaps I should say, in mind’.25 Such a network of texts, authors, and distributors played an important role in creating a sense of cohesion – ensuring that, for all their differences, free lovers from both sides of the Atlantic were consuming the same literature, encountering the same ideas, engaging in the same debates, and developing a common vocabulary through which to discuss their ideas about sexual reform. Far from being incoherent or isolated, print gave diverse and distant free lovers sufficient opportunities to coalesce and cohere – to draw previously distinct British and American free love groups into a loose-knit, but cohesive Anglo-American free love community
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