Wicked Victorian Boston
Ezra Heywood
Free-love Advocate.
Ezra Heywood was a co-founder, with his wife Angela, of the New England Free Love League. They published a magazine called The Word with articles on free love, feminism and sexuality and sold books by mail order, including Ezra Heywood’s, Cupid’s Yoke which argued for the abolition of marriage, calling it a social contract that made a woman a prostitute for life. In 1877, at a convention of the Free Love League at Nassau Hall in the South End, Ezra was arrested by U.S. Postal Inspector and anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock.
