Polyamory in the 21st Century

Proposition 31, which explored group marriage and its legalization; Thursday My Love, which addressed extramarital sex; and Come Live My Life

Harrad Experiment described an undergraduate program designed to liberate students from sexual repression and monogamous conditioning and teach them to embrace healthy open relating.

Starhawk created her own fictional world featuring polyamorous relationships as a basis for social change movements in her first novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing.8

Zells, who invented the term polyamory in 1990

Consensual multipartner relationships have also figured prominently in the books of literary giants such as Anais Nin, Doris Lessing, and Alice Walker.

Heinlein wrote many other science-fiction novels with polyamorous themes that continue to be widely read today, though none has achieved the popularity of Stranger in a Strange Land.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. This novel, with a Martian-raised human hero who finds the concept of sexual possessiveness very peculiar and starts a religion based on sharing, struck a deep chord with the millions who’ve read it since its publication in 1961

Politically and emotionally, Goldman, the quintessential anarchist who thought that voting was a waste of time, and Woodhull, the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States in 1872, were worlds apart, but both created many effective cocreative partnerships with men that merged their intimate and professional needs. This model for harnessing the power of sexual passion in service of social goals is a theme elaborated on a generation later

I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.

The Oneidan version of free love could be likened to today’s term polyfidelity (which refers to a type of closed group marriage), but Goldman and her fellow anarchists didn’t believe in imposing any kind of structure or rules on the free flow of love.