Join us on Tuesday, February 23, 2021 for a panel featuring Maggie McNeill, Christian Hertenstein, and Liz Wolfe.
Free love. It’s a phrase that tends to conjure things like hippie communes and sexual license. But “free love” was a feminist and classical liberal rallying cry long before boomers started treating their hookups like revolutionary praxis. And while the free love movement that sprung up in the 1800s did concern itself some with sexual mores, it was also broader than that—encompassing activism around everything from egalitarian relationships to marriage, contraception access, parenting, and much more.
Free love and laissez-faire economics were ethical counterparts, suggests Hal D. Sears in the 1977 book The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America.
“Free love declared all sexual matters to be the province of the adult individuals involved, not of government,” explains Wendy McElroy in Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century: Collected Writings and Biographical Profiles.
It included fighting against laws that made it illegal to marry in a non-state ceremony and laws that made it illegal to mail information about birth control. It’s proponents included the likes of Victoria Woodhull, Lillian Harman, Ezra Heywood, Frances Wright, Josiah Warren, and Voltairine de Cleyre.
What sorts of issues and ideas would these radicals for equality be concerned with today? How do we bring their wisdom and experience to bear when it comes to modern policy battles and culture wars around things like marriage, monogamy, sex work, kink, plural relationships, sexual orientation, birth control, and gender norms in relationships?
Join us on Tuesday, February 28, as we discuss!
This virtual panel will feature Maggie McNeill, Christian Hertenstein, & Liz Wolfe in a discussion with Feminists for Liberty’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Kat Murti. (Audience members will be invited to ask questions, too.)
Start asking your questions on Twitter now using #F4Lchats!
To tune in, you must register in advance.
