A FREE-LOVE WIDOW.

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(FROM THE SATURDAY REVIEW.)

Last week a great Woman's Suffrage Convention was held in New York, at which Mrs Woodhull presided, and she and other leaders of the woman's rights party in the United States delivered thrilling harangues. It appears however that, although the demand for votes is still kept up by a certain class of American women, it is rather as a matter of form and in vindication of a principle than with a genuine and anxious desire that it should be successful. They seem to have come to the conclusion that, while they are logically bound to assert their equality in all respects with men, votes are of comparatively little consequence to them, and that they would perhaps be better without them. What they are most intent upon attaining is not so much political as social freedom. As one of them eloquently expresses it, "The old tyrannies are trembling for their power, not at the ballot-box, but at the fireside." If they could only erase all traces of the seventh commandment from modern legislation, or at least from the social compact, they would be pretty well satisfied. Mrs. Woodhull, for example, claims "an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love for as long or as short a period as I can, and to change that love everyday if I please." Under these conditions Mrs. Woodhull has no objection to marriage, and until a few weeks since she and her two husbands— we are not quite sure whether we should not say two of her husbands — made be happy trio in the same house. It appears that her first husband died on the 6th of April, and a graceful in memoriam from the bereaved widow, who has, however, still one husband at least left to console her, appears in the weekly paper which she edits and publishes. She is constrained to admit that " our former husband and later friend and brother," was by no means a perfect character. "Certain unhappy habits of life, with peculiarities of constitution, placed a not indefinite tenure upon the extension of his physical life." Dr, Woodhull, we gather, was too partial to the bottle; but then, as Mrs. Woodhull remarks, people are born to be what they are. Some people are constitutionally drunkards ; others are constitutionally sober. "In either case there is neither merit or dismerit (sic), since both are alike the result of circumstances and causes beyond individual control." There is no use in struggling against fate, Mrs. Woodhull's own case is a remarkable illustration of this, for her biographer states that her second marriage was decreed by "those spirits whom she is ever ready to follow, whether they lead her for discipline into the valley of the shadow of death, or for comfort into those ways of pleasantness which are paths of peace." The dictates of the spirits, it may be observed, are always interpreted by Mrs. Woodhull herself. Colonel Blood, "the legal partner of a morally sundered marriage" — that is, he had a wife already but was tired of her — called on Mrs. Woodhull one day, and the instant she saw him she fell into a trance, during which she announced that his future destiny was to be linked with hers ; and as he had no objection, so it was. After her divorce from Woodhull and marriage with Blood, she retained her first husband's name, and she and her two spouses, and her children by the first marriage, all lived together, a happy and united family. Dr. Woodhull, she says, felt the change severely, but "he was just enough to rejoice in knowing that the changed conditions offered a wider field of usefulness and happiness to us." The doctor, it is evident, took a broad view of things, and was of an unconventional type.
 Mrs. Woodhull confesses that at first, not being quite emancipated from old social prejudices, she rather shrank from having it known that she was keeping house with a couple of husbands. "It became a rod in the hands of unscrupulous persons, held in terror over our heads, to compel us to do their bidding, and most cruelly and unrelentlessly did they make use of it." This, however, was only one of the trials reserved for all good and heroic people in this narrow-minded and uncharitable world ; and she had the consciousness of her own moral elevation to sustain her, as well as the counsels of the spirits. But when, after the doctor's death, it was suggested that perhaps an inquest would be necessary, " this," Mrs. Woodhull acknowledges, " was almost more than we could philosophically accept." It may be admitted that it is not agreeable to live in an atmosphere of suspicion of this kind, and we are afraid that Mrs. Woodhull can hardly say that her ways of pleasantness have been paths of peace. She appears, however, to have been exceptionally happy in finding a couple of husbands who took to each other with such frank and cordial affection as Dr. Woodhull and Colonel Blood, and who were so superior to worldly prejudices. "These two people," she assures us, "were not rivals; they were brothers ; and in spite of all the attempts to make them enemies, they remained friends to the last ; he who is still with us watching over the death bed of him who has gone, with all the sleepless anxiety that danger imparts to those we love." Mrs. Woodhull will not say that she does not care for the approval of the world, but she prefers that of her own conscience and of the spirits; and perhaps on the whole it is just as well for her own peace of mind that she should do so. She is described by one of her admirers as the best representative of aggressive ideas in America ; but very aggressive people find it difficult to command the good opinion of society, especially when their aggressions are of the peculiar kind in which Mrs. Woodhull delights. Even King Arthur found his "white blamelessness" accounted blame, and a free-love heroine must not be surprised if the world does not all at once accept a mode of life which it has been accustomed to associate with harsh epithets as on embodiment of a highly superior kind of modesty and morality. It is difficult for a lady to pose as Sappho in these days without exciting unpleasant remarks. Indeed it appears to he one of the grievances of Mrs, Woodhull and her sisterhood that certain opprobrious names which we need not particularise are applied to women, while there are no corresponding names to apply to loose men ; and one of the clauses of a bill which had been drafted by the woman's rights people, and which is published in Woodhull's Weekly, makes it an offence to designate any woman by these disreputable names. In the meanwhile it is open to the women to invent any names they like, and to apply them to men.
 It is well known that nothing pays better than notoriety in America, and Mrs. Woodhull appears to have found it not unprofitable in her own case. She and one of her sisters carry on business as brokers ; they have a weekly newspaper, which professes to be edited in one world and published in another ; and they also do a good business as lecturers and spirit mediums. It is evident that Mrs. Woodhull has a good many irons in the fire, and when the first sorrow is over she may perhaps find it a relief, in the midst of such varied avocations, to have one husband the less to look after. Mrs. Woodhull's journal is described as "a medley of polities, finance, free love, and the pantarchy;" and we find in the number before us some practical hints as to the free-love system. It is suggested that, as a matter of social convenience, it might be as well for free-love couples to give intimation to their friends and the public in some formal manner when a union is formed or dissolved. This regulation, it is urged, would be one of convenience only, and in no degree an oppressive abridgement of personal freedom. It would leave every person to form a "marital alliance," and equally free to dissolve it. In the same number there is a stirring appeal to women to take up the work of effete and useless man. This poor creature, it seems, has done his part, and now he can only "move in a circle and repeat in his revolutions societary arrangements that have existed in the past." It appears that "he has arranged society in the structural form after the pattern of the stellar compacts and their rocky fragments," and it has now become the business of women to "arrange it in organic form after the patterns of the plant world." We gather that marriage as a limiting and enthralling institution is especially obnoxious to the plant world, and that one of the first things to be done is to get rid of it. Man, however, is not expected to submit to the proposed changes without a struggle. "It is not in man's aggressive nature," the writer fears, "to stop in a maddened revolutionary descent till he is at the bottom of the circle, drunk with blood and desolation ; but on recovering from the stupor of desolation, he is ever ready again to ascend in the circle of progress to the summit of his capability," If "suitage," whatever that may be, were substituted for marriage, the power of the bloodthirsty monster would be effectually controlled. We hardly know whether it is male ribaldry or mere quackery, but in another part of the journal a pamphlet is advertised, under the title of "The Road to Power: Physical and Mental Regeneration," which the author asserts to be "priceless to wives and mothers, and such as are trying to be men." Seeing what creatures men are, it might be imagined that it would be a more beneficial process to make men feminine than to make women masculine.
 It would be absurd, of course, to attribute any deep or serious influence to persons like Mrs. Woodhull, or to publications such as her weekly journal, but worthless straws will show how the wind blows, and the connection between the free-love movement in America and the agitation for what are called women's rights is too close and conspicuous not to be remarked. Whatever gloss may be put upon it there is no getting rid of the fact that the cardinal principle underlying the demands which are raised for a female franchise, for the legal independence of married women, and so on, is simply that marriage shall cease to be an absolute and permanent union in the sense in which it has hitherto been understood, and that it shall be reduced to a mere commercial partnership with limited liability. From this to free love is only a step, and not a very wide one. Under the new system a woman would be taught to regard herself as a person with separate rights and interests from her husband ; the legal facilities which would be provided in order to enable her to assert her independence would supply a constant incentive to do so; and whenever any serious difference of opinion, or quarrel arose, the minds of husband and wife would be turned, not as at present in the direction of compromise and conciliation, but rather to immediate separation. When married people know that they must make the best of each other, they naturally try to do so ; but if it were once to be understood that they have separate interests and possessions, and a distinct legal existence, and that the only tie between them is a mere matter of commercial convenience, the natural consequence would be to destroy that unity of thought and sentiment upon which the permanent happiness of such a union so vitally depends. Of course, if personal convenience is to be the ruling principle of marriage, it would seem to follow that a marriage should be dissolved when the convenience ceases, and thus we get to Mrs. Woodhull's theory that the duration of marriage should be measured solely by inclination, and that a woman has a right to take a new husband every day if she likes!

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Monday 5 August 1872, page 4