The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CONTINENCE AND PSYCHIC LOVE
birth control as wrong. We know well that it would open the
way to demands from men that would amount to a new tyranny.
We do not want more tyrannies, but more practical love.’ 24
To modern ears the words ‘free love’ are likely to conjure up
an image of casual promiscuity. In the 1890s a body of feminists
who were rejecting marriage and entering into what they called
‘free love’ unions with men meant something very different. These
women were as enthusiastic about continence and psychic love
as any others in the women’s movement. The impetus towards
‘free love’ came from an understanding that the marriage laws
constrained women and subjected them to the power of their
husbands, particularly in respect of marital rape. ‘Free love’ seemed
preferable because it could give them more power to control
access to their own bodies, not because it allowed them to escape
from lengthy monogamous unions. Mona Caird wrote of a new
ideal of marriage which would suffer no interference from society
or the law and which would be based on the full understanding
that woman had an obvious right to ‘possess herself, body and
soul, to give or withhold herself, body and soul, exactly as she
wills’. 25 Arabella Dennehy, writing of the ‘Women of the Future’
in the Westminster Review, expressed her reasons for choosing
‘free love’ in much the same way:
Is woman to remain the physical and moral slave of man, or
is she to determine her own future? Is marriage a mere piece
of social mechanism for subjugating women and allowing
men to gratify their basest desires while outwardly
conforming to conventional regulations? If so, then true
morality would lead to this inevitable result—abolish
marriage, establish free union in which each sex would have
an equal voice, and make love the only law regulating the
relationship of the sexes. 26
Effie Johnson, while debating Marriage and Free Love in the
same journal, plumped for ‘free love’ because ‘that most
effectively leads to the goal towards which both Evolution and
Progress press—viz, Spiritually’. 27 Johnson’s aim was similar
to Wolstenholme Elmy’s. It was ‘spiritual love which is the
apex of all material evolution, the flower which aeons of slowly
developing animal organisms at length bear.’ Johnson was
extremely scathing about the current form of marriage, which
after the many forms taken throughout history, had evolved
into ‘that terrible growth, prostitution, linked with a miscalled
Monogamy, which admits a one-sided licentiousness under
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