‘Together we will make a new world’: Sexual and Political Utopianism

London anarchists in Yorkshire, 1970s. Photograph of three young people walking across moorland towards the horizon. How did ideas about free love and sexual liberation change among anarchists and libertarians between the 1880s and the 1970s? This  talk, given at ‘Past and Present of Radical Sexual Politics’, the Fifth Meeting of the Seminar ‘Socialism and Sexuality’, Amsterdam October 3-4, 2003, is part of a long-term project on sexual and political utopianism. Some of the material on pp.1-4 has been re-used and more fully developed in my later article, Speaking Desire: anarchism and free love as utopian performance in fin de siècle Britain, 2009.

Download Together we will Make a New World as a Word document or as a PDF.   I hope to make an online version available at a later date. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.  Creative Commons Licence

Key Words anarchism, desire, feminism, free love, liberation, love, marriage, power, Red Collective, relationships, sexuality, sexual politics, situationism, theory, utopianism, 1890s, 1920s, 1960s

Key People Guy Aldred, Emma Goldman, Ethel Mannin, Charlotte Wilson, Rose Witcop