“Spirits Bound to the Same Haven”: American Fourierists, Marriage, and the
Political Economy of Love
Kathryn Tomasek, Wheaton College, Norton Massachusetts
Adam Tuchinsky, University of Southern Maine
I. Introduction
Nineteenth-century American apostles of the French social theorist Charles Fourier
and their twentieth-century historical chroniclers have shared at least one tendency: both
have tried to separate Fourier’s economic insights from his arguments about love,
marriage, and family. In the nineteenth century, American Fourierists followed the
practice of the French Ecole Sociétaire, claiming to separate Fourier’s industrial reform
from his cosmogony and his ideas about affective relationships. In the twentieth century,
the movement’s most thorough historian Carl Guarneri termed American Fourierism’s
post-1848 turns to dietary reform, dress reform, and especially marriage and sex reform
“diversions,” middle-class “lifestyle” reforms, foreshadowing the way “the ‘Me Decade’
succeeded the turbulent 1960s” and shifting the focus of American socialism “from
socioeconomic to personal issues and collectivistic to individualistic solutions.”1
Interpreting these developments as a retreat from profound democratic engagement with
the problems of industrial society, Guarneri has claimed that they reflected Fourierism’s
broader vulnerability to the very bourgeois values it aspired to overthrow.
We will argue that agitation over sex, marriage, and the family was in fact inseparably
connected to debates about the organization of labor. Though the structure of the family
has almost always been connected to the organization of social relations and the economy
in the modern West, this was especially the case in the United States in the first part of
the nineteenth century when the family economy was gradually accommodating itself to
the spread of the market. Efforts, then, to separate Fourier’s critique of the new industrial
order from his writings on family and marriage ignore, to borrow historian Amy Dru
Stanley’s language, “the links between market transformation and changing relations
between men and women.”2 In this paper, we will demonstrate that tensions between
family and community in the phalanxes, women’s desire for economic autonomy and
equality of status, and public intellectuals’ resistance to marriage reform suggest the
existence of a political economy of love inseparable from the industrial reform American
Fourierists sought.
II. Fourierists on Sexuality and Marriage in America
In the early stages of the movement, American Fourierists focused upon the problems
of industrial society, and the main element they borrowed from Fourier was his plan to
associate labor and capital within a benevolent community, giving to the former the full
product of its work (in both capital and wages) and to the latter security against social
warfare. Early propaganda expurgated much of Fourier’s psychological theory and
especially his writings on marriage, sex, and the family. The first major American
summary and reformulation of Fourier’s ideas was Albert Brisbane’s 1840 volume, The
Social Destiny of Man, which even more than its French models, suppressed Fourier’s
mysticism and his sexual radicalism.3
American Fourierists called themselves
Associationists to distance themselves from the immoralities of the movement’s French
1
intellectual ancestor, and in 1844 they declared at their national convention that they
advocated only Fourier’s theories on the “organization of labor.”4 These issues at the
leadership level of the movement notwithstanding, the reconstruction of gender relations
and the household were central within the communities themselves.
III. Family, Marriage, Sexuality in Utopia: Practice
If we view the twenty-six communities established by Fourierists in the United States
between 1842 and 1846 through the paradigms described by historian Helen Horowitz in
her work on ideas about sex in the nineteenth-century United States, we can see that
phalanx members occupied something of a middle ground. Falling short of sex
radicalism in the fashion of Robert Owen and Frances Wright or Stephen Pearl Andrews
and Victoria Woodhull, most residents of Fourierist communities were nevertheless of
more liberal religious persuasions than evangelical Christians who strongly voiced their
distrust of the flesh.5 Carl Guarneri has argued that the communities focused on
industrial reform and that discussion of marriage reform and other sexual liberation
occurred only late in the movement.6
In fact, most Fourierist communities were too preoccupied with the economic
challenges resulting from the prescription for vast landholdings that Albert Brisbane had
adopted from Fourier’s theories to give any attention at all to family relationships, much
less marital relations or sexual behavior. Many of those communities lasted two years or
fewer.7 Three exceptionally longlived phalanxes, Brook Farm, the Wisconsin Phalanx
(WP), and the North American Phalanx (NAP), do offer some insight into the effects of
community living on family and marriage. There is some reason to believe, for example,
that unmarried women and men in these three phalanxes enjoyed a certain amount of
freedom in their social interactions.8 But on the whole, the accusations of “free love” that
were regularly directed at Fourierist communities seem to have been more products of
their authors’ salacious imaginations than of documented behaviors within the
communities themselves.
If marriage and sexual behaviors were seldom challenged within the phalanxes,
families did find themselves in tension with their communities on numerous occasions.
At the Wisconsin Phalanx, for example, families constituted rival economies in
competition with the community economy because women continued to cook and wash
clothes for their families separately from the phalanx. Tellingly, the community’s first
annual report declared, “In this statement, the washing is not included, families having
done their own.” Use of the word “families” in this report conceals the labor of women
and the ways in which hidden, unpaid labor within the private economy of families
competed with the larger more public economy of the phalanx.9
At the North American Phalanx in New Jersey, families presented a source of
disagreement when the community debated its economic responsibilities to children.
Those on one side believed that since people’s private actions determined whether or not
children were born, the economic responsibility for children should rest with the parents.
Those on the other side favored a system closer to Fourier’s notion that all members of
phalanxes should be treated as individuals. Only the decision to close the NAP finally
put the question to rest.10
IV. Women’s Reflections on Marriage and Family
2
When women articulated their own ideas about Fourier’s theories, they tended to
emphasize the economic autonomy that Fourierism offered women and its relationship to
equality of treatment between women and men. Mary Gove, who elsewhere explored the
ways in which Fourierism might help her obtain economic freedom from her abusive
husband, published two pieces in the Phalanx that together suggested the relationship she
saw between Fourierism and marriage reform. In a letter to “Friend Brisbane,” she
argued that Fourier’s theories offered the only real solution to the problems caused by
Civilization’s efforts to obstruct the passions.11 In a short story entitled “Luigi Carlini;
Or, the Redemption,” Gove confronted directly the tension between Civililzed views of
marriage and more radical notions about the genuine union of compatible souls. She
related the experiences of a Florentine artist who bitterly regretted the results of his
experimentation with ideas about sexual freedom. His lover Beatrice had eventually
yielded to his claims that “LOVE IS MARRIAGE,” but she had continued to present
herself in society as a single woman. When she had accepted a rich count’s marriage
offer, Carlini had cut off all contact, believing that she had prostituted herself by
marrying for money rather than for love. Read in concert with the letter to “Friend
Brisbane,” “Luigi Carlini” implied that Gove perceived Fourierism to be the solution to
the contradictions in which Beatrice and Luigi found themselves ensnared.12
Objections to Civilized marriage also characterized the work of Transcendentalist
Margaret Fuller, who sought independence for women so that they could develop fully as
individuals. Fuller considered Fourier’s most significant contribution on this score to lie
in his notion that women and men should be individually compensated for their work.
Women’s resulting autonomy would eradicate the economic component of marriage.
Defining the best marriages as more high-mided unions of souls, Fuller argued that
women could not achieve recognition as men’s spiritual equals without first developing
the self-reliance that accompanied economic autonomy.13
Like Fuller, Maine writer and editor Jane Sophia Appleton saw hope for real equality
between women and men in economic independence for women. In her utopian short
story, “Sequel to the Vision of Bangor,” she argued that Fourierist plans for shared
housekeeping and community kitchens and laundries would free women to develop their
minds and to become self-supporting. Fewer marriages would occur, since women and
men would marry only out of genuine desire for such union. Appleton envisioned
conversation without flirtation and flowery compliments that diminished both parties.
She imagined women and men attending social events “for the pure interchange of social
joys … to meet each other as friends and companions, as spirits bound to the same haven,
and created for the same objects.”14
Mary Gove, Margaret Fuller, and Jane Appleton shared the Fourierist notion that
women should be economically autonomous so as not to have to marry for money. They
might or might not have agreed on the question of whether truly compatible souls must
accept the forms of legal marriage. But accusations of “free love” aside, at least some
Fourierist women in the United States agreed with the classic socialist dictum that
marriage is prostitution.
V. Socialist Propagandists and Post-Experiment Reflections on Marriage and
Family
3
As noted above, accusations of “free love” that were regularly leveled at the
communities had little to do with reality, but they did provoke vigorous defense which
itself evolved into public discussion amongst socialists themselves about the relationship
between conventional marriage and social reform. In the United States, the site of much
of that debate was Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, the newspaper in which Brisbane
first introduced a popular version of Fourierism to a mass reading audience and what
abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson called “the working centre of much of the
practical radicalism of the country.” The most significant of these was a multi-sided
debate between Greeley, Henry James, Sr., Stephen Pearl Andrews, the religious press,
and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, all provoked by the 1852 publication of Marx Edgeworth
Lazarus’ Love vs. Marriage, a free-love tract that argued that marriage was the source of
human unhappiness and an institutional arrangement whose true nature was not unlike
prostitution or slavery. Lazarus played no role in the subsequent debate surrounding his
book, but his anti-marriage cause was taken up by fellow traveler, Stephen Pearl
Andrews.15
A disciple of proto-anarchist Josiah Warren, Andrews was one of the foremost
apostles of free love in American during the 1850s. He helped found the Modern Times
community in 1851, and later the “Free Love League.” In the controversy that erupted
around Lazarus’ book, Andrews took the extreme anti-marriage position, to the left of
Henry James, Sr. who argued for liberalized divorce laws, and Greeley who insisted upon
indissoluble unions. More radical than the others, he claimed that there was little
difference between liberalized divorce and no marriage institution at all. Like James,
Andrews thought traditional marriage degraded by its dependence upon “the police
office,”16 but the logical outcomes of that position is a morally neutral free-love position
that left the “dissolution of Marriage” relationships entirely to the contracting parties.
Both James and Greeley were repulsed by the extent of Andrews’s moral laxity.
James ignored “Mr. Andrews’s queries,” but they occasioned a more formal response
from Greeley. Greeley had been down this road before. In 1846-47, he defended
socialist marriage from the right, when future former founder of the New York Times
Henry Raymond charged that under Fourierism, “a wife, if the term be then retained, will
keep her own name, retain her liberty of heart and of action” and marriage would be
reduced to little “more than a copartnership for certain purposes between the two?”17
Greeley had always acknowledged that Association might very well dismantle the
individuated structure of the modern family (particularly child-rearing and domestic
labor) but maintained in a broader sense that socialism was the means to build an
economy and a society modeled upon a familial ethos of mutual responsibility. But in
1847, still optimistic about the prospects of Fourierist reform, so he was never able to
develop a coherent or convincing response to Raymond’s moral charges. Andrews,
however, was a more savory target given his conservative instincts. Part of Greeley’s
opposition to divorce rested upon traditional assumptions about sex and gender, but it
was also based upon a similar intellectual foundation as his socialism. It reflected his
deep abiding distrust of market individualism. Greeley argued, in short, that free divorce
extended the values of the free market into the realm of the family. It was, in effect,
sexual laissez faire. Promulgated under the principle of “‘the Sovereignty of the
Individual,’ ” free divorce in Greeley’s view—the “right of every one to do pretty nearly
as he pleases”—mirrored “free trade” sophistries and reflected the point of view of those
4
who resisted efforts to elevate and enrich the character of public life. 18 From Greeley’s
perspective, the family, the most central of bourgeois institutions, ironically, called forth
a host of what might be called counter-bourgeois values—benevolence, love, obligation,
intimacy, care, protection, transparency, and community.
VI. Conclusion
What the debate within the left revealed more broadly, among women and socialist
public intellectuals was the way in which moral questions, particularly those surrounding
marriage, family, and sexuality, were related to parallel discussions about political
economy, particularly during a period in which the household economy had been rapidly
giving way to market relationships. Throughout the early nineteenth century, the
institution of marriage itself had been evolving slowly from an austere economic
relationship of utility to a more individualistic, romantic and sentimental companionate
form based, ideally, upon the spiritual and emotional affinity of its partners. The glacial
pace of marriage’s emotive and institutional transformation was dramatically accelerated
during the 1840s as conceptions of sex, marriage, and the family underwent systematic
and popular critique. Feminists raised the issues of health, dress, property, and divorce,
conservatives called for laws that would punish seduction and adultery, utopian
religionists like the Mormons and Oneida Perfectionists challenged the conventional
Christian basis of nuclear family, and sentimentalists who pushed in both prescriptive
literature and popular fiction for a new emotive or companionate style of marriage.
Changes in the economy and in the institution of the family were intimately
interconnected.19
The spread of the capitalist market led to the rise of the nuclear family, and the new
middle-class family was the “cradle” that conditioned those who succumbed to the
market’s opportunities and discipline to survive and prosper within a radically new
economic environment. Among those who eyed the rise of market capitalism with
disease, though, there were profound disagreements about the relationship between
“family values” and the vast social changes taking place around them. What made the
marriage question so discomfiting was that everyone agreed that the family institution
bore some relationship to the emerging bourgeois order, but there was little consensus
about what exactly that relationship was.20 Throughout the period, Americans of a
variety of ideological stripes were attempting to work out answers to a number of
fundamental questions raised by the emergence of the free labor paradigm: what forces
would sustain a society constructed upon free contract and mutual self-interest, and in
such a society, what place was there for the market’s counter-values: familial love,
dependence, and self-sacrifice. When socialists set out to reform or even overthrow the
emerging economic order, then, there was genuine division over the place of the family
within that order. In one form or another, these debates remain with us today.
1
Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press), 349, 368. For an interpretation of the continuity of American radicalism, see
Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 18481876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
2
Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the Morality of the Market,” The Market Revolution in America,
Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds. (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 76.
3
Weekly Tribune (hereafter WT), April 15, 1843.
5
4
See Redelia Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography (Boston: Arena, 1893), 194-95;
Parke Godwin, A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1972;
rpt., 1844), 74 and Godwin to Dana, l7 September 1844, Bryant-Godwin Papers, NYPL. For an overview,
see Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 93-98.
5
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in
Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002).
6
Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 353 ff.
7
Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 407.
8
Rebecca Codman Butterfield, “Brook Farm Founded in 1841,” unpublished typescript, CodmanButterfield Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts; Julia Bucklin Giles, “North
American Phalanx,” unpublished typescript, [c. 1929], North American Phalanx Collection, Monmouth
County Historical Society, Freehold, New Jersey; Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement,
1830-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 197 ff.; see
also Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and
Walden (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark
Side of Utopia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
9
Wisconsin Phalanx Papers, Ceresco Community Papers and Microfilms, State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin; “Annual Statement of the Condition and Progress of the Wisconsin
Phalanx, for the fiscal year ending December 1, 1845,” Harbinger 2/3 (December 27, 1845).
10
Proceedings of the North American Phalanx, 1847-1849 and 1854, North American Phalanx
Collection, Monmouth County Historical Society, Freehold, New Jersey; Kathryn Tomasek, “Children and
Family in Fourierist Communities,” Connecticut History, 37, no. 2 (Fall 1996-Spring 1997): 159-173.
11
Mary Gove, Letter to “Friend Brisbane,” Phalanx 1/5 (February 5, 1844): 64-64. On Gove, see Jean
L. Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002); Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2003).
12
Mary Orme [Mary Gove], “Luigi Carlini; Or, The Redemption,” Phalanx 1/19 (October 7, 1844):
290-292.
13
Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845; Mineolo, New York: Dover Publications,
1999), 66, 75, .
14
[Jane Sophia Appleton], “Sequel to the ‘Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth Century,’” in Voices
from the Kenduskeag, [ed. Mrs. C.C. Barrett and Mrs. M.L. Appleton] (Bangor, Maine: David Bugbee,
1848), 243-265; Kathryn Tomasek, “Not a Nervous Man: Gender Anxiety and Women’s Rights in
Antebellum Bangor, Maine,” in Of Place and Gender: Essays on Women in Maine History, ed. Marli F.
Weiner (Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 2005), 27-50.
15
See Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 353-63; Taylor Stoehr, Free Love in America: A Documentary
History (New York: AMS Press, 1979); Sidney Ditzion, Marriage Morals, and Sex in America: A History
of Ideas (New York: Octagon Books, 1969); Wonderlich, Modern Times, 53-90; Spurlock, Free Love.
16
Andrews, Love, Marriage, and Divorce, 46, 48.
17
Courier and Enquirer, Feb. 10, 1847; James Parton, Life of Horace Greeley (Boston, 1872), 171.
Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 275-6, on the 1850s bourgeois turn of American socialist reform, see
335-67.
18
Andrews, Love, Marriage, and Divorce, 53, 50, 51.
19
The literature on marriage and the family is vast. See, Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women,
Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1989); John Spurlock,
Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825-1860 (New York: New York UP,
1988), esp., 1-22; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class
Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982); William Leach, True Love and Perfect
Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989);
Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, l790-1865 (New
York: Cambridge UP, 198l). Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in
Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
6
20
See esp., Lystra, Searching the Heart; Spurlock, Free Love, esp., 1-22; Halttunen, Confidence Men
and Painted Women; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. Timothy Messer-Kruse argues that out of the free
love movement of the 1850s sprung the most vigorous faction of the postbellum American wing of the
International Workingmen’s Association, Messer-Kruse, The Yankee International, l3.
7