(R)Evolutionary Rhetorics: Science and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Free-Love Discourse

Abstract

Nineteenth-century women speaking to promiscuous audiences about the taboo topics of sex and sexuality found evolutionary science an ally, rather than an enemy, to their aims. Feminists arguing for free love promoted their arguments with the popular evolutionary discourse. This essay identifies three warrants in their arguments with a basis in Darwin's theories of evolution and sexual selection.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewer Vicki Tolar Burton and Jeanne Fahnestock for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

²See Sears and Passet, for example.

³Passet's work has documented the women's involvement in this radical movement, building on the work of historians Sears and Spurlock, who portray the movement as male-dominated. The sections on free love in D'Emilio and Freedman also highlight male contributions.

⁴On language, many preferred “plain speech” or scientific terms to discuss sexuality, while others, such as the radical Angela Heywood, used language considered “vulgar” even by today's standards. They also differed on support of birth control, because many supported it only as an unfortunate necessity since women did not have the freedom to choose when to have children.

⁵Passet's work examines how rural women from around the country participated in the movement by writing letters to free-love periodicals.

⁶In 1873 moral reformer Anthony Comstock lobbied successfully to pass a law that made it a crime to send “obscene” materials through the mail and enforced it as an agent of the post office. He then pursued and arrested many editors of the free-love periodicals.

⁷Gove Nichols participated in free-love discourse earlier in the century and thus did not use Darwinian discourse to the same extent as later free-love feminists.

⁸They did not vary in race, as it was a Caucasian movement. Black women had a very different discourse of sexuality because they were overly sexualized in contrast to the discourse that defined white, upper-class women as “passionless.”

⁹Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, broke the scandal that esteemed preacher Henry Ward Beecher had an affair with the wife of his protégé, Theodore Tilton. Woodhull claimed it was her duty to expose such a scandal, particularly since Beecher had been outspoken against her and her support of free love. She pointed out the hypocrisy of his words, calling him a practical free lover because of his affair (Tried).

¹⁰Reformer and philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews is credited as the author of her presidential campaign speeches and probably wrote much of her Steinway Hall speech. While Tried as by Fire contains ideas common to the Andrews speeches, it was most likely written by Woodhull (Underhill 259). The collaboration between the two fits Lindal Buchanan's revised model (133).

¹¹See Cayleff and Passet for more on women's involvement with water cure.

¹²Russett endorses this view when she analyzes how Darwin's ideas on the differences between the sexes reinforced female inferiority and set the stage for later psychologists (40). Erskine also provides a feminist analysis, finding implicit views of female subordination in Origin and more explicit condemnations of females in Descent (99–101).

¹³Fee notes that popular science journals often espoused more feminist ideologies because of women writers and subscribers (iii).

¹⁴This phrase was used by both Woodhull and Potter-Loomis to describe women's status in marriage.

¹⁵See Frankel, Russett 89–92.

¹⁶See Russett 40–44; Erskine; Stepan 272.