Lewes were actual y similar to other adulterous middle-class cohabitees.
They lived as if married, and Marian took George’s name and referred to
him as her husband. Neither opposed marriage in itself, but they dissented
from marriage law. In the end, the apparent success of their union argued
for reform without any public campaigning.
Other mid-Victorian reform movements followed radical ideas while
avoiding open free unions. This period saw the beginnings of the National
Secular Society and the Malthusian League, with the former promoting
rights for atheists, and the latter for birth control. These movements shared
many adherents, and all were careful to avoid ‘free love’. Supporters either
settled for platonic relationships, as with Charles Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant, or they said they were ‘married’.5 The leaders of the Malthusian
League for most of the nineteenth century, Charles Drysdale and Alice
Vickery, for example, were close partners, but their marital status is unclear.
Rosanna Ledbetter argues that they married in the early 1870s, but kept
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
the marriage a secret. J. Miriam Benn, in contrast, insists that they never
married, since no marriage certificate has come to light.6 The evidence is
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living in sin
not strong enough either way to make a definitive statement. Vickery and
Drysdale later became active in the Legitimation League, which worked for
the registration of acknowledged illegitimate children, so they may have
had a personal stake in this issue. In addition, Alice regarded coverture as
the worst aspect of English law, comparing it to slavery. She resented the
loss of identity for married women, and sometimes signed her articles with
her maiden name.7 In the end, their actual status matters little, since they
let people believe that they were married. They championed controversial
causes, so they avoided any appearance of impropriety. The disadvantages
of their discretion (if they were not married) was that they could not use
the undoubted success of their partnership as an example of a happy free
union.As these examples indicate, rationalists of the early nineteenth
century had a long legacy of marital and gender reforms, tempered by the
strict morality of the mid-Victorian years. But what of the religious dissents
from marriage? Some of these groups continued into the 1850s; the Abode
of Love still existed in the 1860s. But these groups were dwindling, and few
new ones emerged. The one major movement was that of James Hinton,
and most of his influence was in the late nineteenth century, when people
like Havelock Ellis, the sexologist, read his work. Hinton, a doctor, had
become a philosopher in an effort to remove his spiritual doubts. He argued
that because of constant change, moral codes had to adapt. A strict moral
code was often immoral in practice; one should, then, follow the spirit,
not the letter, of the law.8 Oddly, from this, Hinton developed a theory of
marriage. He identified prostitution as the main problem of his age, and
his solution was polygamy. Women should be willing, as moral beings, to
share their husbands, as long as all the unions were love matches. Since
men were natural y polygamous, and women natural y monogamous, they
must compromise in order to be happy.9
Not surprisingly, Hinton’s ideas had a limited appeal. Edith Ellis
pointed out that he assumed that women must do all the sacrificing
and serving, while men reaped the rewards; his polygamy was actual y
polygyny. As Olive Schreiner later asked in a letter to Havelock Ellis,
‘Would he have been satisfied if his wife had had six “spiritual husbands”’?
In addition, he made no effort to deal with women’s dependence, simply
changing its legal status. Hinton’s celebration of women’s sexual feelings
gained him some followers before his death, and he had a great influence
on many later reformers.10 But his sexual theories made others suspicious,
especial y because of Hinton’s own reputation. Emma Brooke, a late
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
nineteenth-century feminist, accused him of trying to seduce her when
she was young. When she refused, he ‘had the hypocrisy to add that he
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radical couples, 1850–1914
wished to teach me the duty and loveliness of yielding myself to “others
[sic] needs” & wishes, and of over-coming all “self-regarding” impulses’.
Other women also complained of his advances, and rumours circulated
that he kept mistresses, went mad, or had syphilis.11 Whatever the truth
of these accusations, they indicate how wary men and women were of any
promotion of free love. Hinton’s female followers were a small group, and
few lived out his precepts. And his reputation suffered further when his
son Howard deserted his wife and then committed bigamy in 1886 with
Maud Weldon, the mother of his twins.12 Religious radicalism, never a
large movement, shrank even smaller in mid-century.
Some of the ideas of the early nineteenth century, then, persisted
into the 1870s. Rationalists remained committed to women’s rights and
to reforming marriage laws. Indeed, they could celebrate some victories,
including the founding of women’s colleges and the Matrimonial Causes Act
of 1857. In particular, the debates over the latter gave critiques of marriage
law a very public forum. Legislators argued over the definition of marriage
– a relationship, a contract, a sacrament, or all three? – and delineated
the power relations between husband and wife, frankly accepting the
sexual double standard. Such a compromised bill offered more fodder for
reformers and critics in mid-century and beyond, as well as secularising
marriage and divorce, a major goal of groups like the Radical Unitarians.13
In fact, freethinking, though still a minority, grew in both numbers and
influence. Obviously, institutionalisation was a step forward, but it also
meant that reformers became a part of the system. As a result, their
members conformed to conventional norms in their own lives.
Feminism and marriage
The 1850s saw the beginning of a formal feminist movement and the
establishment of the Englishwoman’s Review, led by Barbara Leigh Smith
and Bessie Raynor Parkes. The Langham Place group attracted a number of
women who concentrated on legal and economic changes to help women.
Smith, for example, stressed the disabilities of married women, and many
<
br /> women shared her reservations. For example, Florence Fenwick-Miller did
not take her husband’s name when she married in 1877; others omitted the
word ‘obey’ from their ceremonies.14 In short, like the Radical Unitarians,
most mid-Victorian feminists chose to marry, if on liberated terms. In
Barbara Caine’s words, most concluded that ‘unless they proceeded in a
decorous and cautious way, they would have no chance of succeeding’.
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
And they were correct; only middle-of-the-road feminists gained much
support. Smith, illegitimate and unconventional, stayed in the background,
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living in sin
agreeing that ‘[r]espectability was the key to acceptance’.15
The partnership of Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill shows this
new dynamic. Although chronological y they belonged in Chapter 8, their
actions were more typical of mid-century. Harriet Hardy was a member of
Fox’s South Place Chapel. She married John Taylor in 1826 and had three
children, but she soon grew bored with her husband and resented his sexual
demands. She went to her minister, Fox, for advice, and he introduced her
to Mil , the great liberal philosopher. They became close friends, sharing a
belief in feminism and divorce reform. Though emotional y intimate, they
did not elope. Mill feared the scandal, and Taylor was uncertain that Mill
would be any less demanding than her husband. Eventual y, the couple
formed a platonic union, and Harriet never broke with her husband. Thus,
they avoided an open breach and scandal. This concern for public probity
continued after Taylor’s death in 1849; Harriet insisted on a long mourning
period before she married Mil .16
Taylor and Mill worked for women’s rights and for divorce reform after
their marriage. Both agreed with previous reformers that first marriages
were often made by people too young and thoughtless to know what they
wanted. As a result, Mill argued that the law should allow childless couples
to change partners until they found one that suited them. Taylor, for her
part, critiqued marriage because it was more binding on the wife than
the husband. Nevertheless, their main rebellion was not to cohabit, but to
register a protest against coverture when they married. In this way, they
acted as a bridge between the two halves of the century.17
Thus, the majority of Victorian feminists who disapproved of
marriage chose celibacy rather than free unions. Moreover, the few
feminists who did try unconventional arrangements had great difficulties.
Smith, independently wealthy, was one of the few mid-century feminists
to consider doing so. In 1855, John Chapman urged her to live with him.
Barbara was attracted to the idea, probably because of her disgust with
women’s position in marriage. However, Benjamin Smith was horrified
and insisted that she abandon the idea (though he had two cohabiting
relationships and eight illegitimate children himself). Barbara, after a
considerable struggle, did so.18 Eventual y, she resolved her dilemma by
marrying Eugene Bodichon, who gave her enough personal freedom to
pursue her interests. She made concessions to society, then, but retained
much of her independence.
Elizabeth Wolstenholme was another feminist who dissented from
marriage. Wolstenholme cohabited with Ben Elmy, most likely beginning
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
in 1874. Elmy was a freethinker, while Wolstenholme had worked for the
women’s movement since the early 1870s. Both came from, in Sandra
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radical couples, 1850–1914
Stanley Holton’s phrase, ‘the Manchester school of liberalism’. Thus, they
wanted no part of a religious ceremony and were committed to women’s
rights. They probably went through an informal ceremony early in 1874,
but did not marry legal y for months, and then only under pressure from
women’s rights’ workers. Wolstenholme was pregnant, and her colleagues
feared that a scandal would damage the movement. Reluctantly, Elmy and
Wolstenholme married in the autumn of 1874, but even then Wolstenholme
did not regain her position in the movement.19 The sexual limits for
feminists at mid-century could not have been clearer.
Feminism became more radical and assertive in the 1880s and
1890s. Women’s rights workers celebrated controversial figures such as
Wol stonecraft and argued for women’s independence. As Lucy Bland has
shown, feminists fiercely criticised marriage as immoral and campaigned to
change both its laws and social conventions. Stil , most of them, in Bland’s
phrase, ‘did not reject marriage per se. On the contrary, they wished it to
be radical y reformed.’ Rather than arguing for free sexuality for women,
they instead demanded chastity from men and regarded divorce with
horror. Most also saw cohabitation as just another opportunity for male
sexual aggression. A more common strike against marriage was lifelong
spinsterhood, and even this choice was less popular than marriage.20
As a result, Edwardian feminists who emphasised women’s
sexual freedom were outside the mainstream. One such group was the
Freewoman circle. The Freewoman, edited by Dora Marsdon from 1911 to
1913, published frank articles about sexuality. The major editorial stance of
the journal was that women should be self-supporting and marriage must
change radical y. A typical article insisted that ‘Indissoluble-Monogamy
… is an unjustifiable tyranny, and psychological y monstrous and moral y
dangerous … marriage is not marriage when love is dead.’ The editors also
insisted that the expression ‘free love’ was redundant: ‘All love is free. When
love is bound it shows the modifications of its nature which will soon turn
it into something else.’ In other articles, writers bluntly asserted that legal
marriage was little better than prostitution, while others argued for legal
recognition for mistresses and illegitimate children.21
That some readers of the journal took part in free unions is probable,
though the evidence is thin. One couple, Mary and Stanley Randolph,
identified themselves as partners in a free union in June 1912. They asserted
that they did not want to ‘suffer so subtle and pure a thing as love to have
attached to it even that amount of mistrust that the legal union postulates.’
The couple had lost their jobs through their decision, and wrote to find
Copyright © 2008. Manchester
University Press. All rights reserved.
like-minded people. The difficulties of such couples came out in the next
few weeks, since another correspondent, B. L., criticised their sharing of the
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living in sin
same last name. Mary and Stanley claimed they left out the second name
only because of limited space, but B. L. insisted ‘it will be futile for people
to carry out “free unions” and then conceal the fact from the world’.22 The
Randolphs were ostracised for being too radical on the one side, and not
progressive enough on the other. Little wonder, then, that few couples
followed their example. But B. L.’s argument for openness was typical of
the period, repudiating the ‘hypocrisy’ of mid-Victorians.
Though the circulation of the periodical was smal , it sponsored
Freewoman discussion groups who heard papers from such people as
anarcho-communist Guy Aldred and sexologist Havelock Ellis. These
circles collected together men and women who became increasingly
thoughtful about marriage and free unions. Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson
were lower middle-class women (from working-class families) who were
radicalised by their association with the Freewoman circle. Both wanted
independence, but both also wanted unions with men, and these were
often contradictory desires. Eva was not against marriage, since she did not
think free unions would work: ‘I see grave difficulty in women continuing
to support themselves by employment, at any rate during maternity.’
Ruth, similarly, was a feminist who married because of the lack of good
alternatives. She and Hugh Jones became lovers in 1918. According to Tierl
Thompson, ‘they would have preferred not to marry’, but were unwilling to
upset their families, so married in December of 1918.23
Ruth’s decision to marry legal y may also have been influenced by the
experiences of her friend, Françoise Lafitte. Lafitte came from a middle-class
French family, but her father lost all his money, so she came to England to
teach French. While there, she got involved with the Freewoman Circle and
Living in Sin Page 40