Angela Fiducia Tilton Heywood

• Angela Fiducia Tilton Heywood
• Born: 1840
• Died: 1935

Sex reformer and feminist, was introduced to extremely advanced ideas about sex, along with a wide range of current New England reform movements by her mother, Lucy M. Tilton. Her mother and two of her sisters were active in the later reform efforts of Angela Tilton and her husband, Ezra H. Heywood, whom she married in Worcester, Massachusetts, on June 6, 1865. She fully shared Heywood’s Garrisonian-abolitionist and philosophical-anarchist opinions, to which she added a romantic gloss symbolized in the names of their four children: Vesta Vernon (1869), Hermes Sidney (1874), Psyche Ceres (1881), and Angelo Tilton (1883). In 1871 the Heywoods moved from Worcester to nearby Princeton, Massachusetts, where as the Cooperative Publishing Company they issued a series of radical pamphlets, including Uncivil Liberty, on women’s rights, and Cupid’s Yokes. The latter advocated free love as a replacement for the system of legal marriage, which the Heywoods considered not only oppressive to women and slavery’s “twin relic of barbarism,” but also an intrusion by a third party, the state, into a private relationship. In 1873 the Heywoods formed the New England Free Love League to fight, on free speech grounds, the so-called Comstock Law of that year, which prohibited sending obscene matter through the mails. The League’s conventions held in Boston provided an opportunity for Angela Heywood to address large audiences. Contemporary observers describe her as a highly effective speaker. Anthony Comstock himself described one of her speeches as “the foulest address I have ever heard ... an offensive tirade against common decency. . . She seemed lost to all shame .. .,” adding that the “audience cheered and applauded . ..” He would doubtless have been more outraged if in her public speaking Angela Heywood had not regretfully used the term “generative sexual intercourse” instead of what she elsewhere called the “four-letter word everybody knows the meaning of.”

Angela Heywood frequently spoke to audiences of several hundred, and the Heywoods’ sex-reform pamphlets, to which she contributed, were circulated to many thousands, but the most influential instrument for the expression of her sex-reform views was a widely read and often-quoted periodical, The Word, published from 1872 to 1893. The Word’s masthead, which advocated the abolition of the state and unearned income, and of the subjection of labor and women, listed Ezra Heywood as sole editor. But under Angela Heywood’s influence the paper’s radicalism was soon focused on feminist and free-love topics, along with the related issue of free speech.

Because her contributions were not always signed or credited and were sometimes edited to make them more readable it is difficult to know just how much of The Word was written by Angela Heywood. Still, her prose style was quite distinct from the pedantic and heavy-handed writing of her husband, and contemporary connoisseurs of free-love publications were sure that The Word’s unique tone, described by one correspondent as “angelically voluptuous” was attributable to Angela Heywood. The paper’s wide appeal, especially to female readers, was certainly increased by her writings, which were heavily laced with Transcendentalist rhetoric, clearly regarded intellect as subordinate to Nature and were addressed to ordinary people rather than to philosophic intellectuals. Most of her ideas were typical of the extreme feminist views of her time; she advocated women’s suffrage, equal career opportunities and free access to birth-control information and technology, including abortion. But her most frequent and passionate contention was that women’s capacity for sexual enjoyment was equal to men’s, and that sexual expression could not be liberating for either gender until it was openly and candidly recognized, and discussed in commonplace earthy language. The Word itself set the example for such discourse, using mainly the Anglo-Saxon forms of the word “fuck,” with the result that, as its editorial column admitted unrepentantly, “both Mr. and Mrs. Heywood have been severely criticized for making pretty free use of the names designating the organs and functions of the sexual parts.” Angela Heywood always thought it was she who should have been arrested instead of her husband, who served two prison terms for violating various obscenity statutes.

Angela Heywood also believed, however, that sex played a different role in the lives of men and women. In her essay, The Ethics of Sexuality, she made the distinction between love and passion only for men, and implied that for women they were identical. She apparently believed, along with her husband, in the moral superiority of women and she certainly believed in different social roles based on gender. She deplored feminist antagonism to the term “wife” as a term of subordination; on the contrary, she felt, being a wife “announced an equality with man in the realm of service” inhabited by both men and women, and she proclaimed that “We are here, with all our capacity for work, to transcend tragic evil in ecstatic good.” These views may have been partly dictated by circumstances, since her domestic life was one of constant hard work and penury, interspersed with periods of downright hardship. She turned her home into a summer hotel; she sold pictures of her family, and with the help of her sister, peddled her pamphlets at various public meetings. She often had to depend on the charity of friends and neighbors, and twice while her husband was in jail, she was forced to sell her house and possessions to support her children. But throughout all vicissitudes she remained, as a fellow reformer said, “seemingly utterly destitute of fear. She laugh [ed] and rollick[ed] over what seem[ed] to the onlooker a fearful precipice,” and “she never backed down an inch from her full claim to the right to say her full thought in her own words.” But there were limits to her independence, and she never attempted to publish The Word in Ezra Heywood’s absence. With his death in 1893, a few months after being released from prison, The Word also died. With it went, evidently, Angela Tilton Heywood’s career and even her record. Facts about her life before and after her marriage are very difficult to find, and although she and her husband were apparently well-liked and even well-respected citizens of their town, no mention of either The Word or Angela Tilton Heywood appears in the History of Princeton (1915).

Page Smith discusses Angela Tilton Heywood in a chapter on the free love movement in The Rise of Industrial America (1984). A fuller account is found in Hal Sears’ The Sex Radicals (1977). A few letters from Angela Tilton Heywood to Ezra Heywood are in the collection of his letters at the University of Michigan. Brown University has a complete file of The Word.