Ezra Hervey Heywood (/ˈheɪˌwʊd/; September 29, 1829 – May 22, 1893),[1] known as Ezra Hervey Hoar before 1848,[2][3] was an American individualist anarchist, slavery abolitionist, and advocate of equal rights for women.
Ezra Heywood | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Ezra Hervey Hoar September 29, 1829 United States |
| Died | May 22, 1893 (aged 63) United States |
| Occupation(s) | Activist, abolitionist |
| Spouse | Angela Heywood |
Activism
editHeywood co-founded the New England Labor Reform League in 1869 with individualist anarchist William Batchelder Greene. The league advocated for the "abolition of class laws and false customs, whereby legitimate enterprise is defrauded by speculative monopoly." and favored "[f]ree contracts, free money, free markets, free transit, and free land".[4]
In May, 1872 Heywood, a supporter of women's suffrage and free love activist Victoria Woodhull's free speech rights, began editing individualist anarchist magazine The Word from his home in Princeton, Massachusetts.[5] He was tried in 1878 for mailing "obscene material", his pamphlet Cupid's Yokes: or, The Binding Forces 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, which attacked traditional notions of marriage – at the instigation of postal inspector Anthony Comstock, who also had Truth Seeker editor D. M. Bennett arrested. Convicted of violating the 1873 Comstock Act, Heywood was sentenced to two years' hard labor[6] at the Norfolk County Jail.[7]
Heywood used his own notation, Y.L. (Year of Love), in replacement A. D.[8]
Personal life
editHeywood met his wife Angela Heywood through her work in the abolitionist movement. They had four children together named Psyche, Angelo, Vesta, and Hermes.[9]
Works
edit- Uncivil Liberty: An Essay to Show the Injustice and Impolicy of Ruling Woman Without Her Consent (1873) by Ezra Heywood – one of the first individualist feminist essays, by Ezra Heywood (with an introduction by James J. Martin)
- Cupid's Yokes: or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life: An Essay to Consider some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage by Ezra Heywood – a free-love essay defending the natural right of "sexual self-government" as opposed to marriage
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: From disunionism to the brink of war, 1850-1860, ISBN 0674526635, pg. 545.
- ^ Who was who in America. Marquis-Who's Who. 1963.
- ^ Blake, Francis Everett (1915). History of the Town of Princeton: In the County of Worcester and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1759-1915. Town.
- ^ D'Amato, David S. (2016-02-17). "William B. Greene, American Mutualist". Libertarianism.org. Archived from the original on 2021-12-08. Retrieved 2022-08-21.
- ^ The Free Love Movement and Radical Individualism Archived 2011-06-14 at the Wayback Machine by Wendy McElroy.
- ^ Passet, Joanne Ellen (2003). Sex radicals and the quest for women's equality. University of Illinois Press. p. 45.
- ^ Parr, James L. (1 October 2009). Dedham: Historic and Heroic Tales from Shiretown. Arcadia Publishing Incorporated. p. 66. ISBN 978-1-62584-277-0. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
- ^ "Heywood, Ezra H." in The New Encyclopedia of UNBELIEF (Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), p. 389.
- ^ Sears, Hal D. (1977). The Sex Radicals. Lawrence, Kansas: The Regents Press of Kansas. p. 176.
Further reading
edit- Martin Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989)
- Martin Blatt, editor, The Collected Works of Ezra Heywood (Weston, MA: M & S Press, 1985)
External links
edit- Chapter V of James J. Martin's Men Against the State contains a large section called Ezra Heywood, Pamphleteer
- Ezra Heywood & Benjamin R. Tucker by Martin Blatt
- A biography of Heywood on the anniversary of a protest at his arrest
- A chronology of Emma Goldman's life and the anarchist movement