A Woman’s View of It
Some time ago comrade Addis[1] asked The Firebrand women to express their opinions about free love and variety ; since then there has been a distressing silence on the part of my sex, until Mrs. B’s open letter to E. F. Ruedebusch in the issue of March 28th. Mrs. B. seems to be ‘all at Sea’ in her conception of free love, and thinks the man does not exist who would support the ‘children of one or more women,’ with pleasure and satisfaction, and that her husband ‘thinks he had a right to practice free love whenever he had money.’ As far as this is concerned Mrs. B’s husband is not a free lover, if love is his only when he has the money. He probably gets the article commonly peddled about under the name of love, sold all the way by the hour or night, or in some cases for life, in which latter case, ‘Priests the selling do.’[2]
But we all know that no golden key will unlock the casket of love, and that oft-times free love is the priceless possession of the poorest man or women on earth. Many insist on saying that ‘free love is not practicable under present conditions.’ Now I am not afraid to say that free love is all there is of love, that it was born of life and has always been with us, and is all that sweetens our onward march. If love is put in a cage, or fettered in any way, it is no longer love, but a ghastly nameless thing, that blasts the living and curses the unborn. There are not many men who expect the women to nourish their children alone. I have lived 32 years in this ‘vale of tears’ among the poor of the farming class, and the men who do not strain every nerve to provide for their children are the exception. Paternal love is as much a fact as maternal love. I have known many instances where the fathers of ‘natural children’ tried to and did provide for them. Fathers desert their bastard children for the same reason that illegitimate mothers desert and often murder them: Because Respectable People consider them a disgrace. ‘Respectability’ drove Pearl Bryan to her doom and murdered Jackson and Walling on the Gallows.[3] Had Pearl Bryan’s mother taught her how to prevent conception and all the sacredness of the maternal mystery, she would, in all probability, be a living happy woman today. And if the parents of Jackson and Walling had taught them the same truths, their strangled bodies would not be lying ’neath six feet of earth. When children are taught from their youth not to create life unless they desire to provide for that life, and also taught how they can gratify their natural desire with safety, there will be fewer instances of Mrs. B’s sad case. To say the least (tho’ her husband is probably a victim of bad training) he must be a coward to desert his children, or else physically in the same condition as the men who spend the last cent for drink, that should go to succor a dying child. Mrs. B. is a noble woman to stand alone in the world for her children.
KATE AUSTIN
Caplinger Mills, Mo.
The Firebrand 25 April 1897
Notes
1, Henry Addis (1864-1934), Portland anarchist, co-founder of The Firebrand
2, a quote from Unseen Spirits by Nathaniel Parker Willis
3, Pearl Bryan was 22, unmarried and pregnant when murdered in 1896 by her lover Scott Jackson and his friend Alonzo M. Walling. Jackson and Walling were executed on the 20th March 1897.
This letter was one of the pieces complained of in the Firebrand obscenity trial (1897), but not one that the editors were convicted for publishing. For details of the trial see: Anarchism on the Willamette: the Firebrand Newspaper and the Origins of a Culturally American Anarchist Movement, 1895-1898 by Alecia Jay Giombolini (2018) https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4471/