Not all feminists shared this binary view of female sexuality, however. Numerous prominent feminist thinkers participated in 19th-century radical sex reform movements which argued for greater sexual freedoms for men as well as women. Libertarian, anarchist, and communist thinkers attacked obscenity and anti-homosexuality laws, calling for access to birth control information, abortion, and ‘free love’ between equal partners within a freely chosen bond. Echoing earlier attacks on the institution of marriage by feminist pioneers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, they rejected the marriage contract as founded upon the economic and physical appropriation of women by men, though most free love thinkers encouraged monogamous relationships. Free love was promoted by freethinkers, anarchists, and socialist feminists such as the Americans Emma Goldman and Lillian Harman, or Ito Noe in Japan, who was murdered with her male lover by Japanese military police in 1923. The German Verband Fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine (League of Progressive Women’s Associations) proposed a boycott of marriage and celebrated sexual pleasure for women as well as men, while the English Legitimation League, originally created in 1893 for the defence of the rights of children born out of wedlock, called for the merging together of ‘two of the noblest principles of human relations — freedom and love’. Alexandra Kollontai, the most prominent female communist revolutionary in the early decades of the Soviet state and founder of the Zhenotdel (Women’s section of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party) in 1919, argued that the family, like the state, was a capitalist institution which would wither away with the future development of the socialist ‘heaven on earth’. ‘The family’, she wrote in 1920, ‘is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole.’ As she put it in her 1920 text Communism and the Family:
Instead of the conjugal slavery of the past, communist society offers women and men a free union which is strong in the comradeship which inspired it.
Since female sexual exploitation was linked to the economic dependency of women on men of the capitalist system, prostitution, she believed, would also ‘automatically disappear’ in the radiant communist future. The sex drive, which she saw ‘not as something shameful and sinful but as something which is as natural as the other needs of a healthy organism, such as hunger and thirst’, should not be restrained as long as sexual excess, which threatened workers’ capacity for productivity, was avoided, as she wrote in her 1921 text Theses on Communist Morality in the Sphere of Marital Relations.
Kollontai’s views were rapidly sidelined by Lenin, while free love thinkers in capitalist societies generally encountered hostility from mainstream suffragist organizations which feared that sexual libertarianism would undermine the social respectability of wider campaigns for women’s rights (much as socialist organizations generally feared that support for ‘free love’ would alienate their working-class members). Sexual radicals and mainstream feminists agreed, however, on women’s right to refuse ‘unreasonable’ male sexual demands and excessive numbers of pregnancies, and to ownership over their own bodies, promoting the concept of ‘voluntary motherhood’. Whereas some saw the solution in greater access to sex education and contraceptive information and methods, others called upon men to exercise greater self-control and chastity, leading the Victorian physician William Acton to complain in 1871:
During the last few years, and since the rights of women have been so much insisted upon… numerous husbands have complained to me of the hardships under which they suffer by being married to women who regard themselves as martyrs when called upon to
fulfill the duties of wives. This spirit of insubordination has become intolerable.
Free love feminists saw the liberation of sexuality as crucial for a wider transformation in the social position of women, in a context in which there was no legal abortion, methods of birth control were largely unreliable, mortality rates of women in childbirth or from backstreet abortions were high, and women were profoundly dependent upon men.