Feminism and Free Love

Feminism has maintained a relationship with free love as ancient as it is fruitful, traversed by tensions that remain unresolved and that I believe are important to continue exploring. From its origins, the women’s emancipation movement has raised the question of relational forms: can marriage, a central institution of patriarchy, be reformed or must it be abolished? Does free love constitute a path to emancipation, or on the contrary a new terrain for male exploitation?

A Constitutive Tension

These questions, formulated as early as the 18^th century by Olympe de Gouges, taken up by the utopians of the 19^th century, then radicalized by the anarcha-feminists of the 20^th, resonate with an intensity experienced by many women today. Contemporary debates on polyamory, the “decolonization of affects,” and what might be called « patriarchal feminism »—this paradoxical tendency of emancipation movements to reproduce the very structures they combat—can only reawaken these questions, I think!

I propose a historical and philosophical journey through this dialectic, from the first revolutionary critiques of marriage to the decolonial perspectives that are renewing, in my view, our understanding of relational forms today.

Olympe de Gouges: Marriage as a “Tomb”

In 1791, Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793) published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a foundational, essential text in which she laid, among other things, the groundwork for a radical critique of marriage. In the Postamble of this declaration, she writes this phrase: “Marriage is the tomb of trust and love.”

Her revolutionary proposal went far beyond the idea of simple reform: she advocated for divorce, free union, and the recognition of children born out of wedlock. By articulating political emancipation and the transformation of intimate relationships, Olympe de Gouges anticipated by more than a century the analyses that would make the “personal” an eminently “political” terrain.

Her guillotining in 1793, for officially political reasons but in which her transgression of gender norms certainly played a role, testifies to the subversive nature of this articulation between women’s rights and amorous freedom.

Charles Fourier: The New Amorous World

Charles Fourier (1772-1837), to whom the invention of the word “feminism” is attributed, develops in The New Amorous World, a manuscript written around 1816 but so audacious that it was not published until 1967, a utopian vision in which the transformation of amorous relationships constitutes the very lever of social change.

“Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social decline is brought about by virtue of the decrease in women’s liberty.”

(Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 1808)

In the phalanstery, the ideal community imagined by Fourier, exclusive monogamy gives way to a diversity of affective and erotic bonds. Fourier vigorously criticizes the asymmetry of bourgeois morality, which tolerates male infidelity while demanding female chastity. He sees in this a structural hypocrisy revealing the patriarchal foundations of the social order.

Anarcha-Feminism: “Neither God, nor Boss, nor Husband”

La Voz de la Mujer: Birth of a Movement
In 1896, in Buenos Aires, La Voz de la Mujer (1896-1897) appeared, the first anarcha-feminist publication in the world. Its epigraph, “Ni dios, ni patron, ni marido,” condenses in one formula the articulation between anti-capitalist, anti-statist, and anti-patriarchal struggle. Virginia Bolten (1870-1960), a leading figure of this publication, embodies this convergence of struggles.

Anarcha-feminism considers men’s domination over women as one of the first manifestations of hierarchy in contemporary societies. As Susan Brown formulates it in The Politics of Individualism (1993): “Since anarchism is a political philosophy opposed to all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist.”

Voltairine de Cleyre: The Freedom to Desire
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912), whom Emma Goldman considered “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America has ever produced”, develops as early as 1890 in her essay Sex Slavery a radical critique of what she calls “sexual slavery.” Marriage constitutes in her eyes a “legal rape,” an institution where initial consent amounts to a permanent abdication of freedom.

But Voltairine de Cleyre also introduces an essential nuance: she warns against men who might instrumentalize the discourse of “free love” to multiply conquests without concern for their partners, as usual in bourgeois patriarchal societies. Sexual emancipation cannot be reduced to the male freedom to desire; it implies the “freedom to desire” for all, under conditions of real equality.

This is very important, because for example the “sexual liberation” after 1968 was primarily a “freedom to sexually dominate” granted to men, since contraception was, and unfortunately still is today with so little questioning, almost entirely on women’s shoulders (hormonal changes due to the pill with all their side effects, a foreign body within oneself with the IUD and its potential consequences, the temperature method being completely hypothetical, or risk-taking whose management of potential unwanted pregnancies is borne by women), while men can use condoms or resort to vasectomy—in short, take their responsibilities. This shows that these ideas, more than a century old, have still not fully made their way!

Emma Goldman: Marriage as Legal Prostitution
And Emma Goldman (1869-1940) pushes the analysis even further. In her essay Marriage and Love (1914), she writes:

“The popular notion about marriage and love is that they are synonymous, that they spring from the same motives, and cover the same human needs. Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition.”
(Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love, 1914)

She describes marriage as “legal prostitution,” an economic arrangement disguised as a sentimental union. She herself practices free love and defends the right to love “whomever one wants and as many people as one wants”. When asked about the possibility of loving several people simultaneously, she responds: “I don’t see why not—if one finds the same qualities one loves in several people.”

Mujeres Libres: The Revolution Within the Revolution
In April 1936, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada, and Amparo Poch y Gascón founded Mujeres Libres (Free Women), the first autonomous proletarian feminist organization in Spain. This organization, which would count up to 20,000 members in 1937, published an eponymous journal (1936-1939). Its objective: to end the “triple enslavement of women: ignorance, capital, and men”.

Faced with the sexism of their own male anarchist comrades, the Mujeres Libres affirmed that women’s emancipation would not follow “automatically” from social revolution if it was not put into practice immediately. They thus rejoined almost exactly the ideas of Olympe de Gouges, who could not imagine that the founding of a democracy would be done by excluding women and slaves from power, though they too were full human beings! Intersectional feminism was formulated as early as 1791. This lucidity about the reproduction of domination patterns within revolutionary movements themselves anticipates contemporary analyses of what might be called “patriarchal feminism.”

Pedagogies of Emancipation: From Lamotte to hooks

The anarcha-feminist critique of marriage is articulated with a broader reflection on education as a terrain of struggle. For it is from childhood that patterns of domination and emotional dependency are internalized.

Émilie Lamotte: The Child as Genius
Émilie Lamotte (1876-1909), French anarchist pedagogue, unfortunately so little known, published The Rational Education of Childhood (posthumous publication, 1922). In it she denounces the school as an “apprenticeship in docility”:

“From the impetuous, free, and willful child, one will make inert and docile material, suited to all slaveries and all resignations.”

(Émilie Lamotte, Le Libertaire, 1905)

Her revolutionary proposal: to consider the child not as a vessel to be filled, but “as a genius to whom we must provide the material for their discoveries and the instruments for their experiments”. This vision prefigures what Paulo Freire, then bell hooks, among others, would develop. I made a short film summarizing Émilie Lamotte’s teaching method, « Rational Education of Children ».

Paulo Freire and Conscientization
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) by Paulo Freire (1921-1997) lays the foundations for a truly liberating education. His approach to “conscientization” (the awareness of relationships of oppression) makes it possible to “politically articulate lived experience” with the structural critique of dominations. This is what I personally call today “deconstruction of systems of domination.”

Paulo Freire’s method inspires and finds a direct echo in the feminism of the 1970s, which affirms that “the personal is political.” Feminist pedagogy draws from Freire to rethink power relations, in the classroom as in intimacy.

bell hooks: Love as a Practice of Freedom
bell hooks (1952-2021) brings about the synthesis between critical pedagogy and intersectional feminism. In All About Love (2000), she defines love not as a passive feeling but as an active practice:

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

(bell hooks, All About Love, 2000)

In Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), hooks insists on the importance of cultivating bonds between women that do not pass through male validation. This reflection extends to all relational configurations: in ethical polyamory as in monogamy, what matters is the quality of the bond, authentic presence, the refusal of possession.

Decolonial Perspectives: Monogamy as a Colonial Project

The work of Geni Núñez, psychologist and Guarani activist (Brazil), renews, I find, quite profoundly the understanding of these issues. In Descolonizando afetos (2023, translated into French as Décoloniser les affects by Paula Anacaona at Éditions Anacaona, 2025), she shows that monogamy is not a spontaneous organization of human relationships, but the result of a colonial imposition project intimately linked to Christianity.

Monotheism and Monogamy
Núñez establishes a structural link between monotheism and monogamy:

“The Christian god only feels loved if he is loved uniquely, which is also the main precept of monogamy: the non-concomitance of amorous relationships as a criterion of fidelity.”

(Geni Núñez, Decolonizing Affects, 2023)

The missionaries, she recalls, “were obsessed with the eradication of indigenous non-monogamies: without adherence to monogamy, baptism would be impossible”. The imposition of monogamy was part of a global civilizational project aimed at inculcating Christian morality as the only possible one.

Decentralizing Sex, Recognizing Interdependence
Núñez invites us to decentralize sex in our understanding of relationships. At the moment of family formation, why should the main criterion be the sexual relationship rather than other forms of bond?

She opposes to the neoliberal ideal of autonomy a vision of interdependence: “We human beings are not self-sufficient, and never have been. Our interdependence and our circular care make for the health of life.” Romantic love, by promising that everything will be provided by a single person, exhausts that person just as the earth becomes sterile when it is abusively exploited.

Living Without Possession
Núñez concludes with a linguistic proposal that is also an existential proposal:

“In the Guarani language, instead of saying that we possess something, we say that we are in its company. This idea of property, so present in dominant society, is not part of our indigenous perspectives. To live well is to live without possession.”

(Geni Núñez, Decolonizing Affects, 2023)

The Paradox of Patriarchal Feminism

The history of anarcha-feminism and of Mujeres Libres teaches that emancipation movements can reproduce the structures they combat. This paradoxical dynamic deserves examination.

The concept of “patriarchal feminism,” quite violent in itself, I admit, designates those situations where the pursuit of emancipation relies on unconscious presuppositions that keep the very logic of domination intact. As Judith Butler points out in Gender Trouble (1990):

“The structures of power through which one seeks emancipation are very often the very structures that produce subordination.”

This dynamic manifests itself, for example, when people, seeking to “take back power” in their relationships, adopt strategies that keep them in a position of waiting for male behavior. The demand that the male partner “take initiatives,” “assume his feelings,” “project himself into the future” can paradoxically reaffirm male centrality in the very definition of what a successful relationship is.

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks warned against a sisterhood that would become prescriptive rather than emancipatory:

“When sisterhood becomes a means of policing other people’s behavior, when it becomes a tool to tell one another how one should love, whom one should love, and how one should manage one’s intimate relationships, then it ceases to be liberating and becomes a new form of patriarchy exercised by some over others.”

Compersion: Beyond Jealousy

Faced with possessive logic, the concept of “compersion” coined in the 1970s by the Kerista community of San Francisco, designates the joy felt at the happiness of the loved one with others. This emotional disposition, the opposite of jealousy, is not a natural gift but the fruit of work on oneself.

As Geni Núñez recalls: “We, non-monogamous people, were not born with special enlightenment. We are confronted with the same challenges regarding jealousy and insecurity. The difference is that we seek other ways to manage this, without wanting to imprison the autonomy of others as a means of soothing our fears.”

This perspective joins that of Françoise Simpère in her famous Guide to Plural Loves (2009):

“Love is not a cake that you share and that diminishes as you distribute the slices. Love is like a flame: you can light a thousand candles without the first being diminished.”

Monogamy and Deconstruction: A Structural Tension

The examination of this long history suggests a structural tension between the feminist project of deconstructing relationships of domination and the traditional monogamous form of amorous relationships.

Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving (1956), distinguished immature love (“I love you because I need you”) from mature love (“I need you because I love you”). Yet the exclusive monogamous structure tends to favor the first form: when a single person becomes the receptacle of all emotional needs, compensating for emotional deficiencies, reassuring fears of abandonment, they cease to be loved for who they are and become function, role, emotional prosthesis.

Serge Chaumier, in Fissional Love: The New Art of Loving (2004), analyzes this tension between the desire for fusion and the need for independence. Ethical polyamory, by diversifying sources of attachment, can allow one to escape this logic where the other becomes responsible for our happiness.

Victoria Robinson summarizes this position in her article “My Baby Just Cares for Me: Feminism, Heterosexuality and Non-Monogamy” (1997): “Institutionalized monogamy has in no way served women’s interests.” This radical formula invites us, in my view, less to proscribe monogamy on principle than to question its “institutionalized” character—that is, the obviousness with which it imposes itself as the only legitimate relational form, what’s more, naturalized.

Toward a Plurality of Emancipations

At the end of this brief history, I would like to specify that my aim is not to postulate new certainties. I do not think that there exists a universally emancipatory relational configuration, for the simple reason that each person is born into a culture and must struggle with naturalized rules to deconstruct, which can be very different depending on countries, regions, families, and even the professional and friendship groups whose codes one unconsciously integrates, which are not necessarily emancipatory!

Thus, some people find their fulfillment in exclusive relationships, and others flourish in more open configurations, still others prioritize celibacy and independence—this may vary over the course of life, needs, and the evolution of one’s level of consciousness, which may need experiences to grow. Thus, none of these paths is in itself more “feminist” than the others. What might be “feminist” is the will to question the system that precisely one usually does not question, and the will toward movement.

Thus, what matters is the possible and real freedom to choose, and the ethical quality of the way one lives these choices. Honesty rather than lies. Attention to the other’s experience and to the system in which one is inscribed rather than self-centeredness. The capacity to question oneself rather than the certainty of having “understood everything.”

Feminism, in its emancipatory vocation, must in my view guard against promoting a single model of the “good relationship.” Its task consists rather in dismantling the structures that prevent people from living according to their deep aspirations, in bringing to light the mechanisms of domination wherever they may be found, including within the movements that claim to combat them.

As Audre Lorde recalled in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984): “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This self-critical vigilance is not a weakness but a strength: feminism’s capacity to question itself, to evolve, to recognize even its own contradictions in order to better overcome them.

The question is therefore not: must one be monogamous or polyamorous to be feminist? It is rather: how can we live relationships that nourish our mutual growth rather than our reciprocal dependence? How can we cultivate compersion rather than possession? How can we invent, together, relational forms that correspond to the singularities of each relationship, without constantly referring to an external model of what love should be?

These questions remain open. That is perhaps their dignity: they call not for definitive answers but for singular paths, prudent experimentations, endless conversations between those who seek, together, to live and to love more freely.