Maintained by the International Institute of Social History. Hall , Wellcome Library, London '"No sex please, we are socialists" the British Labour Party closes its eyes and thinks of England' summary Petra de Vries , University of Amsterdam 'Dutch libertarian socialist movement and prostitution at the end of the 19th century' summary Writing on sexuality: desires and norms Peter Drucker , International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam 'More freedom' or 'more harmony'?
Henriette Roland Holst, Jacques Engels and the influence of class and gender on socialists' sexual attitudes workshop paper, PDF file, 13 pp. From political sexuality to alternatives? Beginning with Gerrard Winstanley's seventeenth-century critique of the English Ranters for their profound interest in "meat, drink, pleasure and women" and continuing on until the present there has been a split in the modern revolutionary tradition between an ascetic, patriarchal brand of political radicalism and a more indulgent form of cultural radicalism that rejects inequality and injustice in private life as well as in the marketplace.
While for a few brief moments political and cultural radicals have joined together in common cause, the relationship between these two reform traditions can at best be characterized as strained if not openly antagonistic. A good example of the conflict between these two radical visions can be seen in the struggles within the American labor movement over the role of women in the socialist future. This issue, known as the "woman question," was tied not only to discussions on women's relationship to the market economy but also to the erotic and emotional life that men and women would experience in the coming "cooperative commonwealth.
They thus concerned themselves with "bread and butter" issues and encouraged all reformers to do likewise. Moreover, from honest conviction as well as from political expediency, they celebrated monogamy and the nuclear family and did everything in their power to distance themselves from the charge that socialism led to "free love. While they agreed that women's oppression was an outgrowth of the rise of private property and an exploitive economic system, they argued that the political radicals' program to end women's economic dependency on middle-class men would not at the same time eliminate their dependency on their working-class husbands.
Combining a cultural component to their critique of capitalism, they argued instead that economic changes alone would not inaugurate the utopian future they envisioned. Turning Marx on his head, these cultural radicals maintained that public life was shaped by the institutions that regulate private life and insisted that economic revolution would only occur once the emotional and sexual lives of men and women had been fundamentally transformed. As Moses Harman, the editor of the Free Love newspaper Lucifer, the Light-Bearer argued in , all forms of social conflict and economic exploitation, from the gold standard to the unearned salaries and interest stolen by the "ruling classes" from the labor of "the masses," were merely a continuation of the "logical sequence" established by an "older and deeper laid conspiracy against freedom and justice known as the marriage institution.
