Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality Jessica Moran Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality. By Joanne E. Passet. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003. ix, 259 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-252-02804-X. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality takes a detailed look at the history of the nineteenth-century sex radical movement. Passet's volume is an important contribution to this history in two distinct ways. First, she examines this history by going to the sources, the voices of the men and women (mostly women) who constituted the grass roots of the movement. Second, in researching and discussing these men and women and what they wrote about sex radicalism, feminism, anarchism, socialism, and so on, Passet uses the rich history of small newspapers and periodicals that were circulated at the time to show how a print culture or community was created through these radical papers. Passet argues that although the history of free love and sex radicalism has been examined in earlier histories, most notably in Hal Sears's The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977) and Martin Blatt's Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), no book has looked explicitly at the role of women in the movement, and neither has any book used the correspondence of women in sex radical and free love periodicals to bring these women's lives and ideas to the forefront of scholarship. Passet looks at what she calls "nonelite" women, "members of the urban working class as well as those living on farms, ranches, and in small agricultural communities . . . whose voices seldom are heard in national-level debates" (4). By examining what these women had to say about free love and sex radicalism in radical periodicals, Passet shows how important the creation of a print culture was for women living in disparate and sometimes isolated places across the country. By subscribing to, supporting, and circulating free love, anarchist, socialist, and freethought periodicals, a culture and movement was created through the written word, a movement that, because these women were little known or unknown during their day, has for the most part been ignored in earlier histories of both the women's movement and the free love movement. While not specifically about libraries, Passet's discussion of the creation of a radical movement through active reading and writing will be of interest to anyone studying print culture and women or print culture and social movements. Passet's volume would be a valuable addition simply for its bibliography, which gives an almost exhaustive list of periodical, archival, and book sources on the free love movement. But Passet's use of these sources is also impressive. The discovery and discussion of the free love movement, as seen through the letters, comments, and articles of women in a variety of periodicals, have uncovered a rich movement, full of women who had much to say and much for us to study. It was a pleasure to read this well-written book and discover a new discussion of women whose names I have only ever come across in the pages of the periodicals themselves, never in the history books. Recently, I went back to one of these journals to remind myself; in the pages of the Portland, Oregon, anarchist communist paper Firebrand one can rediscover conversations from over a hundred years ago of women across the country working out for themselves what freedom means in plain language, taking responsibility for their own lives, and creating a community through their written and published words. Passet's Sex Radicals goes a long way toward rediscovering the history of sex radicalism through excellent use of primary sources that privilege history's unacknowledged voices. Passet's book illustrates that the history of women's rights [End Page 334] in the United States is not only the history of middle-class suffragettes, reformers, social workers, and well-known writers. Instead, she shows that the urban working-class and poor and rural agricultural women had an impact (and much to say) about their own rights...