page_title: Free love
section_title: Enlightenment thought
hierarchical_section_title: Free love / History / Enlightenment thought
caption_attribution_description: Plate from Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy G, in the collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
context_page_description: Free love is a social movement that accepts all forms of love. The movement's initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It stated that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.
context_section_description: The challenges to traditional morality and religion brought by the Age of Enlightenment and the emancipatory politics of the French Revolution created an environment where ideas such as free love could flourish. A group of radical intellectuals in England (sometimes known as the English Jacobins), who supported the French Revolution developed early ideas about feminism and free love.
  Notable among them was the Romantic poet William Blake, who explicitly compared the sexual oppression of marriage to slavery in works such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine's apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house. His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws.  Poems such as "Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?" and "Earth's Answer" seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem "London" he speaks of "the Marriage-Hearse" plagued by "the youthful Harlot's curse", the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In Visions, Blake writes:
  Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
  
  In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
  
  Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)
  Blake believed that humans were "fallen", and that a major impediment to a free love society was corrupt human nature, not merely the intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic hypocritical nature of human communication. He also seems to have thought that marriage should afford the joy of love, but that in reality it often does not, as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy.
  Another member of Blake's circle was the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband and early anarchist, William Godwin. The ideals of free love found their champion in one of the earliest feminists. In her writings, Wollstonecraft challenged the institution of marriage, and advocated its abolition. Her novels criticized the social construction of marriage and its effects on women. In her first novel, Mary: A Fiction written in 1788, the heroine is forced into a loveless marriage for economic reasons. She finds love in relationships with another man and a woman. The novel, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, never finished but published in 1798, revolves around the story of a woman imprisoned in an asylum by her husband; Maria finds fulfilment outside of marriage, in an affair with a fellow inmate. Mary makes it clear that "women had strong sexual desires and that it was degrading and immoral to pretend otherwise."
  Wollstonecraft felt that women should not give up freedom and control of their sexuality, and thus didn't marry her partner, Gilbert Imlay, despite the two conceiving and having a child together in the midst of the Terror of the French Revolution. Though the relationship ended badly, due in part to the discovery of Imlay's infidelity, and not least because Imlay abandoned her for good, Wollstonecraft's belief in free love survived. She later developed a relationship with Godwin, who shared her free love ideals, and published on the subject throughout his life. However, the two did decide to marry, just days before her death due to complications at parturition.
  In an act understood to support free love, their child, Mary, took up with the then still-married English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at a young age. Shelley wrote in defence of free love (and vegetarianism) in 
caption: Frontispiece to William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), which contains Blake's critique of Judeo-Christian values of marriage. Oothoon (centre) and Bromion (left), are chained together, as Bromion has raped Oothoon and she now carries his baby. Theotormon (right) and Oothoon are in love, but Theotormon is unable to act, considering her polluted, and ties himself into knots of indecision.
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