8. Convert to Marxism for Free Love
While hippies are typically given credit for the free-love movement, it would be more accurate to thank Marxists. Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, wrote that the personal is political, meaning that marriage, the division of domestic labor, are political matters and shouldn’t be hidden from view as “personal” affairs. Taking his theories even further was Victoria Woodhull, a Marxist theorist who was also the first woman to run for president in the United States.
Woodhull described herself as a “free lover” and was a fierce advocate of the burgeoning movement of feminist Marxism alongside visionaries like Rosa Luxemburg. She argued that to have true equality and freedom, she must be free to love whomever she wanted for however long she wanted with no legal interference or repercussions.
In a statement that would strike many as radical even today, she decried marriage as “sexual slavery.” She argued that with the right to sexual freedom outside of marriage “neither you nor any law you can frame has any right to interfere.” While social conservatism became tied to Marxism through the dictatorship of Josef Stalin, historically Marxists have been on the frontlines of questioning the gendered division of labor and the role of economics in marriage.