In this paper I will look at public and private discussions of free love versus marriage amongst anarchists in England during the 1880's and 90's. During this period love, sex, marriage, and the relationship, if any, between them were topics of widespread public interest and debate. A number of notorious women anarchists from the USA visited England and spoke publicly in favour of sex revolution. Many anarchist women saw free unions as an explicitly feminist choice, both a critique of capitalism and patriarchy and a prefiguration of utopian sexual and gender relations. They conceptualised the practice of free love as a kind of demonstrative politics - a rehearsal or experimentation with new ways to live.

In some ways these women were not just rehearsing, but performing the future; as Charlotte Wilson, the editor of Freedom put it, the 'New Society ... [struggles] into being within the old... without very much theorising'. The paper will compare the language, and the principles invoked, with other contemporaneous feminist discourses on marriage, and will discuss changing meanings of 'free love' in relation to changing ideas about marriage and the role of the State. The telling and retelling of cautionary and inspirational stories of alternative ways of life was, for anarchist women, part of that 'education of desire' which is so central a part of utopianism.

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