Free Love

Free Love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual and romantic matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It stated that such issues were the concern of the people involved and no one else. The movement began around the 19th century, and was advanced by hippies during the Sixties.

Quotes

• My great worry is the problem of poverty … Instead of prisons, I would have schools, art and vocational academies, free trade, free love, the abolition of marriage and the substitution of private property for public property.
  • Luisa Capetillo (1911). A Nation of Women. translated from Spanish.

• Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere.
  • Emma Goldman (1911). "Marriage and Love" in Anarchism and Other Essays.

• [Woman's suffrage and free love are] as distinct as freedom and slavery; the one is destined to end the other.
  • Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Revolution. Quoted in Charlotte Waldman (2020). "Polygamy, Free-love, and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage: The National Woman Suffrage Association and Fringe Marriage Ideology Suffragists, 1869-1890". The Macksey Journal. Vol. 1. Article 20.

• Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing else.
  • Victoria Woodhull (Nov. 20, 1871). "And the Truth Shall Make You Free: A Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom". Delivered at Steinway Hall in New York City. Quoted in Olivia B. Waxman (2021). "The 19th Century Advocate For ‘Free Love’ and Women’s Liberty". Time Magazine.