Alternative Marriage in 19th Century America

Victoria Woodhull

"High priestess of Free Love"

From: Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

In the state of New York, the Oneida Community, founded in 1848, described marriage as, “contrary to natural liberty....a cruel and oppressive method of uniting the sexes.” This group practiced a form of community marriage where each woman was married to every man and each man to every woman. The Oneida Community “[rejects] conventional marriage both as a form of legalism from which Christians should be free and as a selfish institution in which men exerted rights of ownership over women”. The movement’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes coined the term “free love” and found scriptural justification for the concept: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). The Oneida Community lived together as a single large group and shared parental responsibilities.

The concept of “free love” blossomed outside of the Oneida Community. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (1872), was called “the high priestess of free love”. In 1871, Woodhull wrote:

“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 that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!”

Woodhull received fewer than sixteen thousand votes nationwide. Most Americans rejected alternative forms of marriage and pressured young people to marry conventionally. A man's credit rating depended in part on whether or not he was conventionally married and had children.

My titles on Amazon   My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Abortion in the Gilded Age (Victorian America)

Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

By the 1870s, couples in all classes were choosing to limit and plan family size “by a variety of methods within a culture of abstinence”. “Considerate” husbands, who did not insist on intercourse, were admired, not least because of the high mortality rate among pregnant women. It was perhaps a good thing that husbands had decided to privately abstain from sex, since by the mid 1870’s the United States government had invaded every bedroom in the nation. In the 1870’s a “social purity movement”, spurred on by evangelical Protestant moral reformers launched a crusade against vice, including contraception, which was considered to “lead to lewd, immoral behavior and promote promiscuity”. It is not surprising that such a movement arose. The industrialization that swept America during and after the Civil War ushered in morality problems such as widespread prostitution. As urbanization flourished so did prostitution. The majority of prostitutes were young, illiterate, and poor. Higher wages for less work appealed to many young women. With little in the way of birth control, frequent pregnancies occurred among prostitutes. Since being pregnant would put them out of work, abortion became the alternative for the tens of thousands of prostitutes in America’s teeming cities. The moral laxness sweeping much of America began to impact public opinion. Social purity advocates proclaimed, “Social crimes like infanticide, that were once placed on the same level as murder, are now not only looked upon with complacency... but are defended on principle by certain theorists.”


The social purity movement successfully pressured Congress into passing the Comstock Act (named after the movement’s leader Anthony Comstock) in 1873. The Comstock Act was a federal law which, among other things, prohibited mailing, “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion”, as well as any form of contraceptive information. Twenty four states passed similar state laws (collectively known as the Comstock Laws), sometimes extending the federal law by outlawing the use of contraceptives, as well as their distribution. The most restrictive state laws of all were in Connecticut. Married couples could be arrested for using birth control in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and subjected to a one-year prison sentence. As late as 1960, thirty states had statutes on the books (inspired by the Comstock Laws) prohibiting or restricting the sale and advertisement of contraceptive devices.

My titles on Amazon   My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Flowers in the Dustbin by James Miller (Book Review)

This book raises the question of the relationship of rock and roll to American values. Does it represent the zenith or the nadir of American culture? Miller tends to portray rock and roll as “all about disorder, aggression, and sex: a fantasy of human nature running wild to a savage beat.” (Miller, 88) Miller contends that what was unruly was not rock and roll as a cultural form, but rather the central fantasy it was exploiting. . .the fantasy of renouncing the pleasures of the mind for the pleasures of the body. (Miller, 336, 51) In the nineteenth century technology exalted human reason, but by the end of the twentieth century technologies had become so complex and inhuman that they made a mockery of the individual. The creation of the atomic bomb made technology terrifying without being uplifting. Miller hypothesizes that rock and roll represented a youth movement impulse to seek “redemption through Dionysian revelry.” (Miller, 354)


Miller’s view could be accused of lacking historical perspective. One could argue that rock and roll, with its anti-establishment impulses, represents nothing more than the most recent example of the long debate over the nature of freedom in America. For example, Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne and other nineteenth century writers perceived “the opposing forces of civilization and nature” in American culture. One of the traditional exemplars of American freedom has always been the rugged individual on the fringes of society (e.g. the lone hunter of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Natty Bumpo) who finds fulfillment in the wilderness free from any compulsion exercised by a superior authority. The wilderness allowed the individual to “step out of ordinary time and into the sacred time of an eternal present.” In this view, man finds highest freedom as he steps “out of historical time into the eternal now” (David Nye, American Technological Sublime,25). This sounds very much like the drug culture of the 1960s that was bent on changing American life and creating a new way of being through drugs and “psychedelic music that expands your consciousness.” The rugged individual reappears in a new guise, as a psychedelic musician, but continues to reflect Jean Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage”, finding freedom in a state of nature, uncorrupted by society.

My titles on Amazon   My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

At America’s Gates by Erika Lee (Book Review)

Lee’s central argument is that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 set America on the path to becoming a “gate keeping” nation. The Chinese Exclusion act, and its implementation, set the future pattern for the treatment of many other immigrants to America. Immigrant identification papers, border patrols, internal surveillance and harassment, and deportation were all administrative devices created by the Government in response to Chinese immigration (Lee, 42). Lee argues that America’s view of immigrants is ambivalent, and that although we are a nation of immigrants we are also a gate keeping nation. This ambivalent attitude shaped and continues to shape American immigration policy (Lee, 251).


Lee points out that admission and exclusion define national identity (Lee, 22). So then why do nations admit or exclude immigrant populations? One should first look to economic, political and social relationships for the answer. How fast can a nation safely assimilate an immigrant population without causing economic, political or social disorder? The pragmatic power relationships of a given time will determine how far “the gate” is opened to immigrants. The need for cheap labor in the nineteenth century allowed the door to swing open.

The Chinese came to America for economic gain, most with the intention of returning to China. In some ways this resembles a reverse form of economic imperialism. Just as the western powers went to China (and elsewhere) for quick profits and an improved standard of living for the mother country, so did the Chinese “fortune hunters”, come to the “Golden Mountain” (the United States), in search of quick profits. According to Lee, Chinese sojourning in America was, “...a strategy to preserve or increase wealth and to accumulate lands in the homeland....” (Lee, 122).

In an era before the establishment of a minimum wage or social safety nets, American workers rightly feared an influx of cheap foreign labor. Although it is unfair to criticize Lee for the book “she did not write”, a history of immigration would be more informative if it presented a more balanced view of the fears and concerns of those who opposed immigration and how and why these views changed as power relationships and pragmatic imperatives changed (e.g. the triumph of unionism).

As a study in inter-group power relationships Lee’s book is fascinating. The Chinese immigrants had little political power and were racially and culturally stigmatized. Despite these handicaps, as a group the Chinese were very resilient in the face of the organized discrimination of the state and the dominant society. Using a form of passive resistance (e.g. learning the loopholes in the laws, entry via Mexico and Canada) the Chinese continued to evade immigration laws. The tactics of the Chinese community is an interesting example of the “agency” of disempowered groups and the “tools of the weak.”

My titles on Amazon

My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America

Queen Victoria reigned over the British Empire, the largest and most diverse empire the world has ever known, from 1837-1901, and gave her name to the age. Among other things the Victorian Age has become known for its sexual prudery. In many things, including social customs, the United States mirrored what was happening across the sea in Britain. Women were allotted a subsidiary role, with patience and self-sacrifice the prime feminine virtues. Motherhood was idealized, alongside virginal innocence. The ideal of purity in sexual behavior became sacrosanct, at least in public.


No one better exemplifies the popular notion of the buttoned up old maid Victorian American prude than purity crusader Carry Nation. Carry Nation is best remembered for crusading against alcohol, but she was also enthusiastically against tobacco, politicians, and sex. She lectured young couples on the evils of buggy riding, she stopped women on the street to warn them against the dangers of seduction, and she wrote a newspaper column whose main theme was the evil of self abuse. After two disastrous marriages, in which her husbands resented her overzealous Christianity and she resented their overzealous embraces, Carry Nation concluded that men were, “…nicotine soaked, beer-besmeared, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils” and “two-legged animated whiskey flasks.”

  People like Carry Nation have given us a view of Victorian America.  We think we know the Victorians, but do we? The same passions, strengths and weaknesses that exist now, existed then, but people organized themselves very differently.   Read more in:  Love, Sex and Marriage in Victorian America    

  My titles on Amazon   My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens & The Making of Modern America by Mae Ngai

Ngai argues that immigration policy is fundamentally about citizenship, who is allowed to become a citizen and who is excluded from citizenship. Citizenship matters because it is citizenship that gives an individual the right to have rights within the State (Ngai, 229). With legal rights the immigrant group can vie for economic and political power within the State.

Once the criteria for citizenship which immigrants must meet (e.g. race, class, occupation, acceptable annual number of immigrants who can be absorbed into the economy) is created, an entire new category of unacceptable immigrants is also created, the excludable, the illegal alien who defies the criteria. Thus while the formal mechanisms of immigration policy stand “triple guard to repel legal immigration”; illegal immigrants swarm in at the back door (e.g. although the number of acceptable legal immigrants to the U.S. in 1953 could be measured in the hundreds of thousands, The New York Times estimated that in 1953 some 1.5 million illegal immigrants entered the United States)(Ngai, 247). The ongoing debate over which immigrants are acceptable and which are excludable is central to the fluctuating power relationships within the country. Ngai traces the transformation of U.S. immigration policy from race superiority to multiculturalism based largely on the shifting power relationships (e.g. the war against Fascism and the need to placate allies, the Cold War and the need to embrace the world role as “leader of the free world”).

Ngai indicates that illegal immigration is the central and singularly intractable problem of immigration policy (Ngai, 265). Ngai intimates why this is so without engaging the issue in sufficient depth. Macro-economic forces create the need for labor. Immigration is encouraged to fill this need. The immigration policy of the State manages the human aspects the importation of cheap labor based on the social norms and needs of the State. (Thus “guest worker” programs or contract labor programs are often acceptable to nativists while legal immigration which implies the ultimate achievement of economic and political rights is not.) Ultimately the entire notion of importing cheap immigrant labor (or for that matter siphoning off the top professionals from emerging economies, the so-called brain drain) supports a pyramid of economic self-interest, what Ngai cites as socio-political selfishness (Ngai, 252). At a micro level, immigration is not about the equitable distribution of the fruits of production, it is about maximizing the economic good of the employer. (Thus the Texas farmer preferred to employ illegal Mexicans rather than legal Mexican “braceros”, because the illegals were cheaper, more docile, and did not require as much “red tape”) (Ngai, 255). At a macro-level immigration policy aims at economic progress to create a “national island of relatively homogenous and comfortable people” (Ngai, 252).

Ngai correctly indicates that immigration policy within nation states is not keeping pace with the fluid trans-national movement of capital and labor, “It may be that illegal immigration will persist as long as the world remains divided into sovereign nation-states and as long as there remains an unequal distribution of wealth among them” (Ngai, 269). It is the economic needs of employers that fuels illegal immigration when legal immigration does not satisfy those needs. The employer acts to optimize his economic utility at the expense of the citizen worker, the illegal alien and the broader society.

My titles on Amazon   My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.

Book Review: The Promised Land by Mary Antin

Antin’s book is a book of personal reminiscence rather than theory, and as such, we must de-construct the work to appreciate what it meant at the turn of the 20 century to become a “typical” American. Antin, a person of rare intelligence, sensitivity and aspirations can hardly be portrayed as typical in any country in any time. Certainly Antin was no more the typical immigrant than Viktor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) was the typical Holocaust inmate. She did however, live the life and is able to reveal (sometimes unintentionally) the forces at work in transforming immigrants into Americans.

Antin begins with a portrayal of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia. The environment is one characterized by both external and internal restrictions. The external restrictions began with the geographic confinement of Jews to a certain area, “the Pale” (Antin, 7). Even within this geographic area, Jews were subject to persecution and prejudice, forcing the Jewish population to engage in “humiliating dissimulation” when dealing with officials and Gentiles in general. Jews lived in constant fear of bloody pogroms (often tacitly encouraged by the Government), and were continually required to pay fees to avoid brutalization or to enjoy rights readily available to Gentiles (Antin 10-17). Internal restrictions centered on the rigidity of Jewish religious customs which limited the horizons of people such as Antin’s father (Antin,53). The lot of women was even more restricted since education (which was entirely religious, secular education being effectively denied to Jews) was largely a male prerogative. Even marriages were arranged by families with little input from the bride (Antin,32). Antin compares the lot of women to that of a “treadmill horse” (Antin, 78).

In America, the external restrictions of Russia vanish. Antin notes that in America the immigrant is free to reside, travel and work wherever he pleases (Antin, 160). Above all, education is free, and Antin is free to “fashion my own life” (Antin, 156), as equal under law as any other person and a “fellow citizen” as worthy as the most notable (e.g. George Washington)(Antin, 177). Internal restrictions (immigrant customs) give way too. Antin’s father, who even in Russia was a man aspiring to a new way of life/thinking, permits his wife to pursue Jewish customs so long as orthodoxy does not interfere with American progress (Antin, 195). The collapse of traditional customs as the normative standard for behavior is bewildering to the first generation and leads to a certain disintegration within the family (Antin, 213).

Perhaps a more typical immigrant is Mary Antin’s sister, Frieda, who goes into the workplace and then marries a laborer. According to Mary, Frieda lives “vicariously” and is apt to have been the type of immigrant most influenced by the cinema and mass culture. Similarly, when Mary’s friend, Goldie’s, father tells his daughter “everything is possible in America if you work hard”, and promises to support her educational efforts, the girl responds that after graduating from grammar school she intends to get a job at Jordan Marsh’s big store, earn three dollars a week and have lots of fun with the other girls. This immigrant’s world is being fashioned by consumerism and mass culture.

Mary Antin was intellectual and poetic by nature; reading, writing, and corresponding with the great men of the day and concerned with the poetic, political and metaphysical. Hers was a highly individual path. The more typical immigrant was primarily the consumer of mass culture.

My titles on Amazon     My titles at Barnes & Noble

Download Free Kindle Reading Apps:

The best reading experience on your Android phone or tablet, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Windows 8 PC or tablet, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone.