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Etica
& Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2003, 2 http://www.units.it/etica/2003_2/MCELROY.htm
Gender
Feminism and Ifeminism: Wherein They Differ (*) Wendy McElroy
Currently, the dominant voice of feminism is
what the iconoclastic Christina Hoff Sommers has called "gender
feminism" -- the sort of feminism espoused by the National Organization
for Women. (1) One of the myths that gender feminists have
been able successfully to sell is the idea that anyone who disagrees with
their approach on almost any issue -- from sexual harassment to child
custody, from affirmative action to abortion -- is anti-feminist and,
perhaps, even anti-woman. That accusation is absolutely false. The truth is, there are and there always have
been many schools of thought and a broad range of opinions within the
feminist tradition. The broader feminist movement embraces a wide variety of
approaches from socialist to individualist, liberal to radical, Christian to
atheist, pro-life to pro-choice. And, when you think about it, this diversity
of opinion makes sense. After all, if feminism can be described as the belief
that women should be liberated as individuals and equal to men, then it is
only natural for disagreement and discussion to exist on what complex
concepts like "liberation" and "equality" mean,
especially when translated into the specifics of individual lives. Indeed, it
would be amazing if all the women who cared about liberation and equality
came to exactly the same conclusions as to what those abstract and
controversial terms meant in their lives.
When you uncover some of the less publicized
aspects of feminist history, it becomes clear that liberated women have
always disagreed on the specifics of important issues. Consider: although modern feminism is
critical of the Religious Right and of Christianity in general, the roots of
American feminism are largely religious, drawing strongly upon the Quaker
tradition. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton published the Woman's Bible that
condemned Christianity's view of women, she was widely rebuffed by the
feminists of her day. (2) Or consider the issue of abortion. It is
current dogma that there is only one possible feminist position on this
issue: pro-choice. But both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whom
modern feminists claim as "founding mothers," spoke out against
abortion. (3) Referring to a more modern shift of position
on issues, consider prostitution. The Prostitutes' Rights Movement first
appeared in the United States in the early '70s through the organization
known as COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Tired Old Ethics. COYOTE's
spokeswomen called themselves "liberated whores" and crusaded under
the slogan "A woman's body, a woman's right." How did '70s feminism
react? (4) In 1973, NOW endorsed the decriminalization
of prostitution. Ti Atkinson, a popular feminist of the day, expressed a
common sentiment in calling the prostitute a "truly liberated
woman." Ms Magazine lauded COYOTE and profiled favorably its founder
Margo St. James. As late as 1979, prostitutes and mainstream feminists
actively cooperated. For example, COYOTE aligned with NOW in what was called
a Kiss and Tell campaign to further the campaign for the Equal Rights
Amendment. A 1979 issue of COYOTE Howls, the organization's newsletter,
declared: "COYOTE has called on all prostitutes to
join the international "Kiss and Tell" campaign to convince
legislators that it is in their best interest to support...issues of
importance to women. The organizers of the campaign are urging that the names
of legislators who have consistently voted against those issues, yet are
regular patrons of prostitutes, be turned over to feminist organizations for
their use."(5) By the late '80s, however, prostitute
activists and feminist were in enemy camps, with feminists viewing the
prostitute as the penultimate victim of patriarchy -- that is, of white male
culture. Whenever someone refers to the positions, the points of theory that define feminism, you should always
inquire, "to which feminism or feminists are you referring?" If the
issue is abortion, then 19th century feminism would disagree with today's
movement. If the issue is prostitution, then feminists from NOW in 1973 would
disagree with present-day NOW members. There is no one feminism, there is no
dogmatic position on issues. Feminism is and should be an ongoing dialogue
among women -- and men who are 50 percent of the population -- on issues of
special interest to women. As long as the dialogue is civil, then
disagreement is a sign of health. Dissent is a vital aspect of what keeps
theory alive and true; dogma is its death.
I am presenting a dissenting view:
individualist feminism, or ifeminism, which is a deep and rich school within
the movement.(6) The ideas of gender feminism are
diametrically opposed to those of ifeminism, and the two schools form the
extremes of theory that define the broader feminist movement itself. To
illustrate this, you should ask of feminism the most fundamental question
that can be asked of anything: what is it? What is feminism? Earlier I described
feminism as personal liberation and equality with men. I now offer a more
formal definition. Feminism is the doctrine that states, "women are and
should be treated as the equals of men." It is the political movement
that focuses on women and protests inequality between the sexes. "Women are the equals of men." As
simple as that statement sounds, debate is already enjoined: because what
does "equality" mean? For example, does the term refer to equality
under existing laws and equal representation within existing institutions,
which requires only the reformation of current society? Or is the definition
of equality more revolutionary?
Does it require existing laws and institutions to be swept away and replaced
so that society becomes different in a fundamental sense? The definition of "equality"
employed is a litmus test by which various schools of feminism can be
distinguished, one from the other. Throughout most of the 19th and 20th
centuries, mainstream American feminism defined "equality" as equal
treatment under existing law and equal representation in existing
institutions. Thus the drive for suffrage in the 19th century did not call
for an overthrow of government, only for the right of women to vote within
the existing structure. Equally, the drive for the ERA in the 20th century
did not seek revolution but reform. Mainstream feminism said, "treat us
equally under existing law. Give us
equal representation within existing
institutions." More revolutionary feminists protested that
existing laws and institutions were the source of injustice to women and, as
such, they could not be reformed. The system -- or large, defining parts of
it -- had to swept away and rebuilt according to a new vision. In simplistic
terms, the two most revolutionary traditions were socialist feminism, from
which contemporary gender feminism draws heavily, and individualist feminism
of which current ifeminism is a continuation. These two traditions argued
that equality required revolution but they differed dramatically about the
direction the revolution should take. (7) To socialist feminists, equality was a
socio-economic goal. Women could be equal only by eliminating capitalism and
the other institutions that were said to favor men, such as the traditional
family and the church. Socialist feminists declared, "don't reform
capitalism to include women in its injustice; sweep capitalism away and start
with an entirely new economic slate." As socialist feminism evolved
through the 19th into the late 20th century, it became what the key theorist
of the '70s and '80s Catherine MacKinnon called "post-Marxist
feminism" but the fundamental goal remained basically the same: a legal
restructuring of society to ensure a "just" distribution of power
and wealth. (8) The revolution envisioned by individualist
feminists was (and is) quite different. To them, equality was achieved when
the human rights -- that is, the individual rights -- of women and men were
treated equally under laws that protected person and property. Individualist
feminists said nothing about equal distribution of wealth or power. It spoke
only to the equal protection of rights. In order to concretize the difference in
approach between these two schools of feminism, consider one example.
According to gender feminism, society has a right to regulate businesses in
order to ensure the proper distribution of wealth and power in the marketplace:
that is, you have the right to ensure that businesses do not hire, fire, or
promote on the basis of gender except, of course, if it is deemed necessary
to privilege women or minorities to achieve the "correct" balance.
By contrast, individualist feminism argues that every individual -- including
employers -- have the right to peacefully use their own property and how they
use it is not open to social control. Businesses have a right to hire, fire,
and promote anyone they choose for whatever reason they choose. Individualist
feminists defend that right because they want to claim it themselves. They
want their peaceful choices to be protected by law, not punished by it. Individualist feminism's emphasis on
individual rights derives from its historical roots. In the 19th century,
individualist feminism arose from abolitionism, the radical anti-slavery
movement in the 1830s which called for an immediate cessation to slavery on
the grounds that every human being, white or black, to be a self-owner. (9) That is, everyone
simply by being human had a right to his or her own person and the products
of thereof -- that is, they had a right to their own labor and property.
Otherwise stated: humanity was the primary characteristic from which human
beings derived the right to freedom. Secondary characteristics -- such as
gender, race, religion, or hair color -- were just that: secondary. In fighting for the rights of slaves,
abolitionist women began to ask themselves a question. They asked, "do
we not have these rights as well?" The abolitionist Abbie Kelley
observed, "we have good cause to be grateful to the slave...in striving
to strike his irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled
ourselves." What manacled them were laws that discriminated against
women in a manner strikingly similar to how they discriminated against
blacks. In short, the original individualist
feminists sought to destroy the institution of slavery and to rewrite the law
from scratch so that it made no distinction between black or white, male or
female. They wanted the law to speak only of equal human beings. That was
their revolutionary vision. How does the foregoing analysis translate
into modern terms? Previously, I stated that gender feminism and individualist
feminism define the two extremes of the movement. In
a brief essay, it is not possible to render an adequate sense of how
dramatically these two revolutionary traditions differ but it is possible to
contrast one or two of the key concepts. Having examined
"equality," consider the concept of "class." Again, the most fundamental question that can be asked of anything:
"What is it? What is a class?" A class is an arbitrary grouping of
entities that share common characteristics. The arbitrary part is that the
person doing the grouping does so solely for his or her own purposes. For
example, a researcher studying drug addiction may break society or his
research subjects into classes of drug using and non-drug using people, into
classes of cocaine and caffeine addicts. Classes can be defined by any factor
salient to the definer: hair color, sexual orientation, deodorant use... For gender feminists, gender is the salient factor. There is nothing inherently wrong about using gender to separate one
class from another. Indeed, many fields use biology as a dividing line. For
example, medicine often separates the sexes in order to apply different
medical treatments and techniques; women are examined for cervical cancer and
men for prostate problems. But, in dividing the two genders into classes,
medicine does not claim that the basic biological interests of men and women
as human beings conflict. Medicine recognizes that the two sexes share a
biology that requires the same basic approach of nutrition, exercise, and common
sense lifestyle choices. In short, although the biologies of the genders may
be classified differently for the purposes of the medical definer, there is
no attempt to say that the two biologies are not fundamentally the same or
that men and women are not the same species, with the same requirements for
oxygen, Vitamin C, and so forth. By contrast, gender feminism advocates a theory of fundamental class
conflict based on gender. It makes two claims: first, males share not only a
biological identity but also a political and social one; and, second, the
political and social interests of men necessarily conflict with those of
women. Gender feminism claims that there is no common political interest
between men and women based upon their shared humanity. Thus, what many of us
would consider a basic human right shared equally by both genders and
benefiting each equally -- such as freedom of speech -- becomes a tool by
which men oppress women. Speech must be controlled to prevent it from being
used by men to oppress women and, so, we have speech codes on campus,
anti-harassment speech laws in the workplace, hate speech laws in
society. How did the idea that men and women are separate and antagonistic
classes become so entrenched within society? The concept of class conflict is
widely associated with Karl Marx, who used it as a tool to predict the
political interests and social behavior of individuals. Once the class
affiliation of an individual was known, his or her behavior became
predictable. To Marx, the salient feature defining a person's class was his
relationship to the means of production: was he a capitalist or a worker? Gender feminism adapted this theory: thus, MacKinnon's reference to
gender feminism as "post-Marxism." By the reference, she meant that
gender feminists embrace the general context of Marxism but do not believe
economic status is the salient factor that determines a class. For them, it
is gender. Are you male or female? Being male becomes so significant that the
classification predicts and determines how the individuals within that class
will behave. Being male -- regardless of who you are as an individual --
defines what is in your self-interest because "maleness" is your
class affiliation and that overrides your individuality. (10) Thus, gender feminists can level accusations of "oppressor"
at non-violent men because every man is a beneficiary of patriarchy, of
"the rape culture" and, so, every man oppresses every woman. In
other words, men as a class are said to have constructed institutions that
oppress women as a class. To eliminate the oppression of women, it is
necessary to deconstruct those institutions, such as the free market and the
traditional family, and to reconstruct them according to a gender feminist
vision. By contrast, individualist feminism looks at
men and women and sees -- first and foremost -- individual human beings with
a common, shared humanity. Just as men and women share basic biological
needs, we share the same basic political needs: the same rights and
responsibilities. The most basic political human right is to the peaceful enjoyment of our own bodies and of our
own property. The most basic political human responsibility is to respect the peaceful decisions other people
make with their bodies and their property. At bare minimum, we must legally
tolerate the peaceful choices of others, even if we do not personally respect
or consider those choices to be moral.
In short, the highest political good for both
men and women doesn't come from their sexuality but derives, instead, from
their status as human beings. Although men and women can be sorted into
separate classes for many valid reasons -- from medicine to marketing
strategy -- their basic political rights and responsibilities cannot be
sorted in a similar manner. Those rights and responsibilities precede any
consideration of sexuality just as they precede any consideration of skin
color: they are fundamental. Laws protecting those rights and enforcing those
responsibilities should make no distinction between men and women. Accordingly, for ifeminism, the burning
priority is to remove from the law all privileges and disadvantages based on
sex, which includes removing privileges for women such as affirmative action.
The law must become gender-blind and no longer see men or women but merely
individuals. The concept of 'class' is only one of many areas of ideological warfare
between gender and individualist feminism. Another concept is "justice."
Gender feminism approaches justice as an end state; this means it
provides a specific picture of what constitutes a just society. A just
society would be one without patriarchy or capitalism in which the
socio-economic and cultural equality of women is fully expressed. In other
words, justice is a specific end
state, a specific arrangement of society that embodies well-defined economic,
political, and cultural ideals. For example, the gender feminist ideal
dictates that employers pay men and women equally, pornography and
prostitution does not exist, sexual comments in the workplace disappear...and
so forth. By contrast, the individualist feminist approach to justice is
means-oriented, not ends-oriented. In other words, its concept of justice
refers to the method by which society operates and not to any particular
arrangement of society itself. The methodology has been called by different
names: "anything that is peaceful," "society by contract," "the
non-initiation of force," voluntaryism.
In other words, any outcome to which all of the people involved have
consented is, by definition, just. The only end-state
individualist feminism envisions is the protection of person and property --
that is, the removal of force and fraud from society to protect the method of
choice. After peaceful choices have been protected, whatever society results
is a just society. If that society
is socialist, fine. If it is capitalism, fine. Perhaps it will express both
ideals in a manner similar to the rural Canadian county in which I live: the
booming commerce of a small town abuts a large Amish community. Because both
arrangements are voluntary, both arrangements are just. Another way to approach an understanding of
justice being ends-oriented or mean-oriented is by applying it to a specific
issue, such as marriage. Gender feminists have specific answers to the
question, "what is a proper or just marriage?" They believe that
the definition of marriage should include gay couples; it should be a 50/50
arrangement in terms of responsibilities; the traditional family is flawed
because it is a prop of patriarchy, etc. By contrast, individualist feminism
argues that any arrangement to which the people involved have freely
consented is a "proper" marriage. The specific arrangement is not
important; the method by which the arrangement is reached is. Not every peaceful choice will be moral. For
example, a voluntary society may have strains of racism. I am anti-racist. I
have married into an Hispanic family and I feel very strongly about anyone
slandering, arbitrarily refusing to hire, or otherwise demeaning members of
my family. Anyone who refuses to hire my nieces or nephew because of their
race can take my business as a customer, my contract as an employee and tear
it in two. I would use every peaceful means at my disposal to change the
vicious behavior of those who so discriminate. What I couldn't use is force -- either
directly or in the indirect form of government -- to make people treat my
family differently. Why? Because freedom of association means that other
people have the right not to
associate with me or mine for any reason they see fit, including race or
gender. They have a right to not
invite me into their homes and to not
hire me. I have no right to use force to override their judgment however
wrong or immoral I believe that judgment to be. Again, the compelling is I
want my family to be able to exercise an identical right to shut their door
on the people they do not wish to invite into their homes, on people they do
not wish to hire. The conflicting concepts of justice between gender and individualist
feminism highlight, in turn, a key difference in their approaches to social
problems: namely, gender feminists are willing to use the institutionalized
force of the State and individualist feminists are not. This difference is
not surprising when you realize that the gender feminist ideal of justice can by established by the use of
force, by the State. Gender feminists aim at particular end-states and it is
possible to impose specific arrangements on society. For example, you can
impose affirmative action and arrest or otherwise penalize people who engage
in "wrong" hiring practices. Individualist feminism doesn't have the option of using the State to
impose an end-state. It is not possible to impose the methodology of a
voluntary society: such an attempt reduces to a contradiction in terms. Guns can never establish a voluntary society
because you cannot put a gun to a person's head and say, "you are now
free to choose." Freedom of choice involves taking the gun away. And, in
the final analysis, this is what individualist feminism advocates, over and
over again: Choice. In the place of violence, individualist feminism seeks
private solutions to social problems. It recognizes the right of a human
being to pull a gun on another only in self-defense against a direct attack
on person or property. Theory can be a dry thing and individualist feminism is not a dry pursuit. It is not just a network of theory or a set of positions of issues, such as affirmative action. Individualist feminism is an entire system of thought, with a unique history and a unique interpretation of historical events such as the Industrial Revolution, with poets and novelists, with heroines and heroes. It is a rich tradition that can be appreciated, perhaps, through considering a tiny sliver of its significance. Imagine it is 1889. You are sitting in a print shop in Kansas that
publishes a pro-birth control periodical entitled Lucifer the Light Bearer. (11) You open an envelope and begin its contents, written by an average
woman who is struggling to feed her family. The woman pleads: "I know I am dreadful wicked, but I am sure to be in the condition
from which I risked my life to be free, and I cannot stand it...Would you
know of any appliance that will prevent conception? If there is anything reliable, you will
save my life by telling me of it." A woman wrote that exact letter to Lucifer
-- published and edited by Moses Harman -- because, in the late 1800s, Lucifer was one of the few forums
openly promoting birth control, insisting that women's self-ownership be
fully acknowledged in all sexual arrangements. Accordingly, Lucifer was also one of the first
periodicals in North America to argue that forced sex within marriage should
be considered rape. In advocating women's sexual self-ownership in Lucifer, Harman ran counter to the Comstock Act of 1873, which
prohibited the mailing of obscene matter including birth control information
and the discussion of graphically sexual issues like rape. A witch hunt
ensued. In 1887, the staff of Lucifer
was arrested for the publication of three letters and indicted on 270 counts
of obscenity. One of the offending letters had described the plight of a
woman whose husband forced sex upon her even though it tore the stitches from
a recent operation; another letter advocated abstinence as a form of birth
control. Interestingly, when the authorities came to arrest Harman in 1887, his
16-year old daughter Lillian was not present. She had been imprisoned earlier
for being wed in a private marriage ceremony: that is, a ceremony consisting
of a private contract, without Church or State involvement. At the ceremony,
Moses had refused to give his daughter away, stating that she was and should
always remain the owner of her person. The arrest of Moses Harman is not part of individualist feminist
history because he championed birth control: a number of feminist traditions
did that. Harman is part of individualist feminist history because of the
ideological approach and the methodology he employed in fighting for women's
reproductive rights. Harman based his arguments on women's self-ownership and
he extended that principle of self-ownership to all arrangements -- sexual
and economic -- of all people, male and female. In terms of methodology, he
refused to use the State to intrude his definition of "justice"
into personal relationships because he considered the State -- at least as it
existed then -- to be the institutionalization of force in society. The State
did not protect the person and property of people; it controlled them -- and,
to that, he was unalterably opposed. He so vigorously opposed laws
restricting peaceful behavior that his legal battles against the Comstock
laws continued from 1887 through 1906. Harman's last imprisonment was hard
labor for a year, during which he often broke rocks for eight hours a day in
the Illinois snow. He was 75 years old at the time. Harman was not an obscure figure. He was acknowledged by both Margaret
Sanger and Emma Goldman as a pioneer in the area of birth control without
whom their work would not have been possible. On September 26, 1905, on the
front page of the New York Times, the British playwright George Bernard Shaw
stated, "...a journal has been confiscated (meaning Lucifer) and its
editor imprisoned in American for urging that a married women should be
protected from domestic molestation when childbearing." Two years later,
Shaw explained to London journalists why he never visited America. "The
reason I do not go to America is that I am afraid of being arrested...like
Mr. Moses Harman...If the brigands can...seize a man of Mr. Harman's advanced
age, and imprison him for a year under conditions which amount to an indirect
attempt to kill him, simply because he shares the opinion expressed in my Man
and the Superman... what chance should I have of escaping." (12) Moses Harman was a prominent figure in the life-and-death fight for
women's sexual freedom. Where in the canons of feminist orthodoxy is this man
celebrated? His status should equal or surpass that of Margaret Sanger. Where is the nod of gratitude and acknowledgement to Lillian Harman?
Nowhere. Where is the biography of Gertrude B. Kelly, a political activist
and medical doctor who specialized in caring for poor tenement women in New
York City? (13) Where in feminist literature
can you read about J. Flora and Josephine S. Tilton -- two sisters who toured
the Northeastern states and Canada, going into factories to pass out birth
control literature to working people, and being arrested for their efforts?
Where is Angela Heywood who wrote what I believe to be the first defense of
woman's right to reproductive control based explicitly on "a woman's
body, a woman's right." Angela agitated and wrote for decades advocating
women's rights; she was instrumental in high-profile organizations like the
New England Labor Reform League. It cannot be that these men and women are
too obscure for feminism to even mention them in passing within a footnote. Consider Angela's husband, Ezra Heywood. Heywood was arrested in 1877
under the Comstock laws for distributing a birth control pamphlet entitled Cupid's Yokes, which argued for
abstinence. In protest, a petition for his release received over 70,000
signatures -- the largest number of signatures in U.S. history to that date.
(14) Six months after his
imprisonment, Heywood received a full pardon from President Hayes. Where is
feminism's tribute to Ezra Heywood? Look in standard reference works, you
will not find the names of these heroic people. Nor the names of dozens and
dozens of other women and men who suffered and fought to secure the rights
and dignity of every women. They deserve better. Feminism deserves better. Feminism needs to have fresh air blowing through its moribund
corridors; it needs new ideas and vigorous debate. Feminism needs to respect
the voices of women, especially the voices of women who disagree because that is where women's liberation has
always resided: in the words, "I disagree." Notes
(*) First delivered as a lecture 09/27/03 at
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, sponsored by the Institute for
Humane Studies. (1) A description
of gender feminism: "A fundamental move for early feminism was to
distinguish between sex and gender, where sex, male or female, is about
physical differences between the sexes, while gender, masculine or feminine,
is about characteristics of behavior, demeanor, or psychology which feminism
wished to claim are culturally constructed and conditioned and so ultimately
arbitrary. Since the moral and political program of "gender
feminism" was essentially to abolish gender differences, so that men and
women would end up living the same kinds of lives, doing the same kinds of
things, and perhaps even looking pretty much the same in "unisex"
grooming and clothing, it was important to distinguish between the class of
cultural and alterable items, matters of gender, and the class of physical
and unalterable items, matters of physical sex differences." http://www.friesian.com/feminism.htm -
note-0Christina Hoff Sommers popularized the term "gender
feminism" in "Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women
(New York: Touchstone/Simon & Shuster, 1994). (2) "The Woman's Bible" by Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Other Members of the Revising Committee as Named with Their
Comments al. was published in two parts in 1892 & 1895. (Online: http://www.undelete.org/library/library0041.html.) (3) In her periodical "The
Revolution," Anthony referred to abortion as "child murder."
4(1):4 July 8, 1869. In the same periodical, Stanton called abortion a form
of "infanticide." 1(5):1, February 5, (4) For more information, see Wendy McElroy,
"Prostitution" in Sexual
Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women. (North
Carolina: McFarland, 1996), pp. 119-134. (5) COYOTE Howls 1979,p.1. (6) See ifeminists at http://www.ifeminists.net/ (7) For a more extensive discussion of the
difference between gender feminism and ifeminism, see Wendy McElroy (ed) Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in
the Twenty-First Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002). (8) Perhaps the best single presentation of
Post-Marxist feminism is Catharine A. MacKinnon's Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard
university Press, 1989). (9) Overview of this key period of
individualist feminism can be found in Lewis Perry's Radical Abolitionism: Anarchism and the Government of God in
Antislavery Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973) and Blanche
Glassman Hersh's The Slavery of Sex:
Feminist Abolitionism in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1978). (10) For more on the difference between gender
feminism and ifeminism on the subject of class analysis, see Wendy McElroy
"Mises Legacy to Feminism," The Freeman, September, 1997, Vol.47,
No.9, pp.558-563. Available online, http://www.zetetics.com/mac/mises.htm. (11) For more on the Lucifer circle, see Hal D. Sears's The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America (Lawrence,
Kansas: Regents Press, 1977). (12) Letter reprinted two years later in London Opinion, 30 January 1909,
p.202. (13) For more on Gertrude B. Kelly, see http://www.independent.org/tii/news/981000McElroy.html (14) Cupid's Yokes: The Bidning Forces of
Conjugal Life: An Essay to consider Some Moral and Physiological phases of
Love and Marriage, Wherein is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of
Self-Government (Princeton, Mass., 1876) had a circulation variously
estimated at 50,000 t0 200,000. Many of Heywood's essays can be found in The Collected Works of Ezra H. Heywood
(Weston, Mass.: M&S press, 1985). A microfilm run of The Word is available from the Massachusetts Historical Society. |
