Ezra Hervey Heywood

• Ezra H. Heywood
• Born: September 29, 1829
• Died: May 23, 1893

Free love advocate, abolitionist and temperance reformer, was born in the country village of Princeton, Massachusetts, the son of Ezra Hoar, a farmer, and Dorcas (Roper) Hoar, a collateral descendant of the British philosopher John Locke. After Hoar’s death in 1845, his children adopted the name of Heywood. Ezra Heywood attended Westminster Academy and was graduated from Brown University in 1856; he remained there for two additional years as a divinity student. An unconventional thinker at college, he chose for his commencement address topic “Milton—The Advocate of Intellectual Freedom.”

While still at Brown he became interested in women’s rights, one of the many causes he was to espouse. Shortly after college he became an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society after meeting William Lloyd Garrison at an abolitionist rally. Heywood then began to speak, often to receptive audiences, on the slavery issue; but he also developed pacifist views that led him to oppose the Civil War. These views traced to his religious beliefs as a Presbyterian clergyman, which he had become after graduation from divinity school.

Heywood married Angela Fiducia Tilton of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1865, a woman who shared many of his reform ideals. The couple lived in Worcester until 1871, then returned to Princeton. Their marriage was not only happy but also fruitful, producing four children named Hermes, Angelo, Vesta, and Psyche Ceres.

The Heywoods set up The Cooperative Publishing Company, sustained by the labor of the entire family, which printed a variety of appeals for their reform causes. These included, in their abbreviated titles, Uncivil Liberties, a feminist statement of which they struck off 80,000 copies; The Labor Movement; Hard Cash ; Free Trade ; The Great Strike .. of 1877. Tracts on temperance and social ethics also flowed from the Heywoods’ press.

The most important historically of the Heywoods’ publications was The Word, a monthly periodical started in 1872, and written and edited by both Ezra Heywood and Angela Tilton Heywood. Angela Heywood has been called the journal’s “dominant force,” and there seems to be no question that she was a person of incisive intellect. Both Heywood and his wife invoked Christian ideals in their articles, with Heywood once describing the Bible as “a labor reform book of the most radical kind.” The Word, the couple said, was dedicated to the “abolition of speculative income, of Woman’s slavery, and war government.”

One direct result of publication of The Word was the founding, in 1873, of the New England Free Love League, with headquarters at Mountain House, the Heywood home in Princeton. The Free Love League adopted the year of its establishment as Year One of the Year of Love, or Y.I.

Heywood made a frontal attack on conventional marriage in 1875 in a twenty-three page pamphlet called Cupid’s Yoke, which carried the subtitle The Binding Force 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 Sexual Self-Government. The pamphlet’s purpose, Heywood wrote, was to “promote discretion and purity in love by bringing sexuality within the domain of reason and moral obligation.” The work urged “the expulsion of animalism, and the entrance of reason, knowledge, and continence,” to the end that the “sexual instinct shall no longer be a savage, uncontrollable usurper but be subject to thought and civilization.”

Heywood was singled out for prosecution for Cupid’s Yoke by Anthony Comstock, the “vice” crusader. Support for Heywood’s right to publish came from the National Defense Association, which invoked the First Amendment to the Constitution and its guarantees of free speech. A rally of 6,000 persons backing Heywood was held in 1878 in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, with Elizur Wright, the seventy-four-year-old initial secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the chair. President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood in the aftermath of the meeting.

More outspoken than her husband, Angela Heywood wrote in The Word that men as much as women were victimized by prevailing sexual attitudes. Love, she argued, could not be free until existing taboos of “sexual” words had been demolished. In this vein, one of the words most often appearing in The Word was the Anglo-Saxon “fuck.” She lamented that in her public lectures she was obliged to employ the term “generative sexual intercourse” when “fuck” was what she really wanted to say. “Three words, twenty-seven letters to define a given action ... commonly spoken in one word that everybody knows the meaning of,” she asserted. “Such graceful terms as hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, fucking, throbbing, kissing, and kin words, are telephone expressions, lighthouses of intercourse centrally immutable to the situation; their aptness, euphony and serviceable persistence make it impossible and undesireable to put them out of pure use as it would be to take the oxygen out of the air.”

Angela Heywood further shocked conventional opinion by celebrating, in The Word, the delights of sexual intercourse and by arguing that a woman’s capacity for pleasure was at least equal to that of a man. Both Heywoods vigorously attacked the double standard of sexual conduct and male chauvinism, which they la-bled the “Penis Trust.” In opposition to it, they proposed the “Fucking Trust”—which they defined as “a collective effort to bring the moral, social & physical uses of sex-meeting into the domain of reason and moral obligation.”

The explicitness of articles in The Word, especially those from the pen of Angela Heywood, aroused prosecutors from time to time. Ezra Heywood was twice arrested for printing obscenities after his presidential pardon in 1878, but ultimately he was convicted in 1890, for printing an alleged obscenity written by his wife, and served two years in prison. He died in Boston shortly after his release and received a secular funeral.

With Lois Waisbrooker, Lillian Harman, Victoria Woodhull, Elmina Drake, and Moses Harman, Ezra Heywood was a daring middle-class sex reformer. His ideas, and those of his wife Angela, not only illustrate the extent to which the most enlightened exponents of American bourgeois culture of the Victorian era were willing to explore sexuality—a point central to Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience (1984)—but also illuminate the feisty and combative nature of postbellum reform.

The Heywoods declined to yield to persecution. They and other reformers of their era ultimately rested their case on moral and ethical grounds—as indeed had reformers before them. The moral component is perhaps America’s most striking and original contribution to the reform movement in the Western world.

In addition to the pamphlets cited in the text, see the file of The Word, Brown University Library; the library also has many Heywood letters, a death mask, and a photograph.

There is no full-length biography. For a sketch, see The Dictionary of American Biography (1932); additional material is contained in W. Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980); M. S. Marsh, Anarchist Women 1870-1920 (1981) and P. Smith, Industrializing America (1984). A further reference is in H. Broun and M. Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord (1927). Obituary articles appeared in the Boston Herald May 23 and 25, 1893; and in The Providence Journal June 28, 1893.