Free Love Supporters Protest at Faneuil Hall
On this day in 1878, several thousand supporters of Ezra Heywood held an "Indignation Meeting" at Boston's Faneuil Hall. They were protesting his conviction and imprisonment on obscenity charges. Educated for the ministry, he had come to reject all forms of social control. He was an ardent abolitionist and, after the Civil War, a strong supporter of women's rights. He sought not just suffrage for women but their right to be free from the "sexual slavery" he believed marriage entailed. Together with his wife Angela, he published a journal and pamphlets that advocated free love and birth control. In doing so, he knowingly violated federal obscenity laws. He paid for his beliefs with his own freedom, spending two years at hard labor in a Dedham jail.
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