The Word: A Monthly Journal of Reform. Vol. 20, no. 1 (July, Y.L. 20 [1892])

Heywood, Ezra

Princeton, MA: Ezra Heywood, 1892. Single issue of the newspaper, four pages, creased from folding, some splitting at the horizontal fold, some tears to the broad margins. Dated, not by the Christian era, but Y.L., "Year of Love," denoting the number of years since the formation of the New England Free Love League in Boston.

The Heywoods were advocates not only of anarchism and sexual liberation, but of spiritualism. Ezra Heywood went to jail for his publication of "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." This issue reports on Heywood's release from two years' imprisonment on a later charge, describing a banquet in his honor and reprinting the speech delivered by Robert C. Adams of Montreal, in which he veers from the tradition of toasting the President of the United States, instead asking that the president "may cease to imprison men because they are wiser and better than himself." The issue opens with an introduction to the paper's position: "The Word, regarding the subjection of Labor, of Woman, and the prevalence of War as unnatural evils induced by false claims to obedience and service, favors the abolition of the State, of property in land and its kindred resources, of speculative income and all other means whereby Intrusion acquires wealth and power at the expense of Useful People."

Cat.No: 260694

Price: $80.00