The Battle over Free Love and Obscenity

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter examines the contested idea of free love in the Gilded Age, showing how it sparks fierce debate over marriage, morality, and women’s rights. It traces Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s effort to link free love to gender equality, contrasting her vision with critics’ fears that it destroys Christian marriage and social order. The chapter focuses on Victoria Woodhull, whose flamboyant embrace of sexual freedom, women’s suffrage, and freethought makes her both a celebrated reformer and a scandalous figure, especially after her exposure of the Beecher-Tilton affair and subsequent prosecution. It then turns to Anthony Comstock, whose anti-obscenity crusade, culminating in the 1873 Comstock Act, expands into a broad assault on contraception, abortion, freethought, and radical reformers such as Ezra Heywood and D.M. Bennett, provoking deep divisions within the liberal movement. Finally, the chapter highlights how the battle over free love and obscenity fractures reform coalitions, sets Comstock against freethinkers, and leaves lasting tensions between sexual freedom, religious morality, and freedom of expression in American society.</jats:p>