The Panic Over 'Free Love' and Women's Rights in Early Seattle
An editorial from the Puget Sound Dispatch decries the growing suffrage movement, labeling advocates as threats to the 'sanctity of the marriage relation.'
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
It cannot be possible that the many highly respectable matrons and maidens of unblemished reputations who publicly identified themselves with the so-called 'Woman’s Rights' movements, under the teachings of Miss Anthony, Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Duniway, and the acknowledged leadership of Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others of that ilk, can be aware of the character of their exemplars and the design and inevitable tendency of their teachings. Emancipation from political disabilities is but the initiatory step by which they propose to abolish all the social and moral restraints heretofore thrown around woman to protect her from the unrestrained licentiousness of the base sex. Miss Anthony, in her lectures to our unsophisticated women, carefully avoided what might alarm or shock their virtuous prejudices or innate delicacy, but commended to their reading and reflection the more advanced and carefully prepared works of Mrs. Woodhull, Mrs. Stanton and others upon the social side of their proposed reform. All the authors recommended are open advocates of 'free love' in its widest range, and condemners of the sanctity of the marriage relation. One of them declared in public print that she hoped the time was not far distant when a woman could have six children by as many different fathers, if the race is improved thereby.
“Emancipation from political disabilities is but the initiatory step by which they propose to abolish all the social and moral restraints heretofore thrown around woman.”
This editorial reflects the intense moral panic that met the early suffrage movement in Washington Territory, where critics weaponized anxieties about 'free love' to discredit the quest for political equality. It serves as a reminder that the path to women's voting rights was not just a legislative battle, but a deep cultural struggle against the policing of women's private lives.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.