Free Love

The Russian Socialist revolution has been an area of interest for many decades now. This period not only witnessed a reordering of political and social organisation, along with the overthrow of the Tsar, coming of the Bolsheviks  to power and formation of the first ever socialist state; but also the active participation of both men and women in imagining and bringing to life these changes. A rich source of information of the happenings of these times are available to us in the form of books, essays, speeches, newspaper articles, letters and even legal documents of the time.Women like Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya vigorously participated in the women's section of the Communist Party (1919–1930), also known as the Zhenotdel, to make working class and peasant women aware of the revolution, of their civil and political rights and their right to education and equal pay.  Although not a lot of written material is preserved on these women and their ideas, Alexandra Kollontai and Rosa Luxemburg’s works are available to us. However, their radical ideas which often critiqued the workings of the party itself, have been erased from collective memory, forgotten even by Marxist and feminist scholars.
In the following essay, I will look at some of the ideas that Kollontai brought up through her political and fictional writings and ponder onto why they should be brought to focus again.

Es un compilado de textos del siglo XVIII y XIX sobre amor libre. La noción de amor libre apunta no a la mera posibilidad de tener múltiples relaciones sexuales sino a la de amar a varias personas al mismo tiempo. Reintroduce la noción de camaradería, de compañerismo afectivo. Afirma que se puede querer bien a (querer el bien de) dos o más seres simultáneamente. Insiste en que uno siempre está amando a varios al mismo tiempo, aunque con diferentes intensidades y propósitos. Apuesta, por lo tanto, a una nueva educación sentimental.

This is the first and only comprehensive review of Walt Whitman's Quakerism, encompassing: (1) an overview of 19th-century Quakerism; (2) the forgotten aspects of antebellum life which enabled Quakers to be such leading players; (3) new Light on the Hicksite Schism; (4) the forgotten Hicks sermons referenced in Whitman’s marginalia; (5) Whitman’s “Good Gray Poet” brand; (6) Whitman in the context of recurring historic intersections between Gay and Quaker history; (7) the uneasy creation of Whitman’s botched Elias Hicks essay; (8) the theme of tolerance as “the Spirit of New York;” and (9) 20th-century Quakers's forgetting their close association with Walt Whitman.

Since the 1980s, historians have known about a series of letters between the famous anarchist Emma Goldman and her lover Ben Reitman. The letters show deep contradictions in her radical philosophy of free love. Goldman, who wrote extensively on her support of open relationships was suddenly overwhelmed by a passionate and possessive love for Reitman. This new information demanded reconciliation with what previous historians had written of her.

The Spanish Flu was only one short episode in a long line of illnesses for Edvard Munch (1863-1944), but it gives us an example of an artist who incorporated a pandemic into his art, and, once we relate his paintings about the 1918 Pandemic to his central works, we see just how this greatest of Norwegian artists used his creative work to frame his own past into a more positive, or at least consoling, view of life.

My research has radically expanded upon Frederick Tolles's 1938 finding that Transcendentalism essentially represented a secular Quakerism in four ways, by: (1) revealing Hicksite Perfectionism as an incendiary movement of sexual liberality; (2) suggesting that Whitman grasped and promoted a secularized Quaker theology as early as 1842, and showing the tacit contemporary understanding of Quaker tolerance for extramarital sex rapidly decayed following Whitman's death in 1892; (3) documenting the evolution of “God Within” ideology in the secular Free Love movement; and (4) revealing for the first time the moment at which the Inner Light became secularized — albeit only implicitly and contextually — for the defense of sexual self-determination during the early career of Frances Wright, at the peak of the Hicksite Schism. This is a full decade in advance of Emerson’s introduction of Self Reliance.