When the roots of modern-day polyamory, sexual freedom, and “free love” are discussed, they’re often traced back to the 1960s—the era of hippies, the movement for queer rights, and the “sexual revolution.” But in the U.S., those ideas are a century older still: The above video looks back at the life and legacy of Victoria Woodhull who, in the 1870s, was advocating for people to have the rights to love who they loved—without interference from the government.
“She was probably the most famous woman in America at the time,” says Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States and Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University.
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Woodhull was a stock broker and newspaper publisher best known for being the first woman to testify before a U.S. House committee in 1871—in favor of women’s suffrage—and as the newly formed Equal Rights Party’s first candidate for President in 1872. (Woodhull lost to Ulysses S. Grant, but her Party’s ideas have, in many senses, lived on.) Woodhull and activists formed the Equal Rights Party as a kind of “People’s Party” to challenge the fact that women couldn’t vote, and to raise awareness social issues from labor union rights to temperance, according to Lisa Tetrault’s The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898.
Woodhull’s platform was also inspired by aspects of the “Free Love” movement, a grassroots movement that believed “the state had no right to dictate how people led their personal lives around romance and sexuality,” according to Bronski. Utopian socialist and philosopher John Humphrey Noyes has been credited with coming up with the term “free love” in 1848 and for starting a swingers communities in upstate New York, one of several communal living experiments that cropped up nationwide in the mid-1800s as a reaction to the industrial revolution’s emphasis on capitalism.
Woodhull learned about the movement from Stephen Pearl…
Source : time
