5 - Shame as a Line of Escape: Victoria Woodhull, Dispossession, and Free Love

Summary

It can now be asked: What is the legitimate sequence of Social Freedom? To which I unhesitatingly reply: Free Love, or freedom of the affections. “And are you a Free Lover?” is the almost incredulous query. I repeat a frequent reply: “I am”; and I can honestly, in the fullness of my soul, raise my voice to my Maker, and thank Him that I am, and [that] I have had the strength and the devotion to truth to stand before this traducing and vilifying community in a manner representative of that which shall come with healing on its wings for the bruised hearts and crushed affections of humanity.

(Woodhull quoted in Carpenter 2010: 51)

In a speech given on November 20, 1871, in what was “the fi rst free love lecture presented to Northeast audiences ranging from 2,500 to 4,000,” Victoria Woodhull embraced the label of “free lover” which had been conferred on her, so she could resignify its meaning in a positive light (Frisken 2004: 126). Woodhull was the most prominent advocate of free love in the United States during the nineteenth century. In her speech, she asserted that she had “an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom [she] may” and “to change that love every day if [she] please[d]” (Woodhull in Carpenter 2010: 52). Her defense of free love appealed to the right to privacy, which she borrowed from John Stuart Mill's famous defense of individual rights in On Liberty.

However, in addition to defending her position by drawing on her constitutional right to free speech, she then executed an unexpected move by reversing the accepted meaning of an injurious term—free lover—and transforming it into a term with positive connotations. Because the term free lover was used with the intention to harm, Woodhull's intention was to change a slur into a performative assertion of power. Although Woodhull pointed out that free lover operated as a shaming interpellation, she claimed that her enemies were unaware that the word was “handed over to us already coined” by associating the two most beautiful words “in the English language,” free and love (Woodhull in Carpenter 2010: 53).