Heywood, Angela T.

HEYWOOD, ANGELA T. A nineteenth-century editor, publisher, and writer, Angela T. Heywood coedited with her husband Ezra Heywood the free love journal The Word: A Monthly Journal of Reform. To leave her out of an account of the Heywoods, wrote a friend of the couple, would be “like leaving Joan of Arc out of the history of France.” Born Angela Fiducia Tilton in Deerfield, New Hampshire in 1840, she met Ezra through the abolitionist movement. They settled in Princeton, Massachusetts, building a house that they rented out to leftists during the summer. Their children --Vesta, Hermes, Psyche (who was told to give her name as “Psyche Ceres Soul and Body Heywood”) and Angelo-- all worked at the inn.

In May 1872, the Heywoods published the first issue of The Word. Angela contributed dozens of articles, on topics ranging from free speech to children’s sexual education to women and labor. In November 1877 at a free love convention at Boston’s Nassau Hall, she crossed paths with special agent to the US Post Office Anthony Comstock, who had come to arrest Ezra on obscenity charges related to his 1876 treatise Cupid’s Yokes, which Angela likely cowrote. Comstock called Angela “the chieftain’s wife” and described her convention talk as “the foulest address I ever heard.” Ezra was imprisoned in Dedham Jail but pardoned by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, after having served six months.

Resistance to Comstock rose in the spring of 1881 after New York’s Dr. Sara B. Chase, was arrested for selling a douching syringe (which could be used as a contraceptive) to an assistant of Comstock who used a false name. In the July 1881 issue of The Word, the Heywoods advertised a “Comstock syringe”: “If Comstock’s mother had had a syringe and known how to use it, what a world of woe it would have saved us!” A later ad, seemingly written by Angela, declared that it would be renamed “The Vaginal Syringe” so that its “intelligent, humane and worthy mission” not be associated “with the pious scamp who thinks Congress gives him legal right of way to and control over every American Woman’s Womb.”

In 1882, Comstock had Ezra arrested on four counts of sending obscene matter, including two on the Comstock syringe ads. Angela argued in The Word that “a Syringe is in the fight; the will of man to impose vs. The Right of Woman to prevent conception is the issue… This womb-syringe question is to the North what the Negro question was to the South.” She proposed a satirical alternative to the Comstock law: a man would “flow semen” only when a woman said he could, and keep his penis tied up with “continent” twine. If he were found untwined he could be convicted by twelve women. Though Ezra was acquitted of those obscenity charges, twice during the next eight years he was arrested for mailing Word issues that included Angela’s “penis twine” essay. In 1890, he was sentenced to two years’ hard labor in Charlestown State Prison.

About a year after his release in Ezra died of an illness likely contracted in prison, and Angela was unable to keep printing The Word. On election night of 1908, their Princeton home caught fire and burned to the ground—with all of the family’s papers inside. Angela moved to Seattle with her mother, and then to Kellogg, Idaho, where she took a job in the largest lead-silver mine in the world. At age seventy, she worked nine hours a day, including Sundays. “I am very well,” she wrote a friend, “but find self always full of work (which I think is good for me).” She died in Brookline, Massachusetts, at ninety-four, having outlived her husband by more than four decades.

McElroy, Wendy. Individualist Feminism of the Nineteenth Century: Collected Writings and Biographical Profiles. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2001.

Blatt, Martin A. Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Elizabeth M. Foote Denton Correspondence, Denton Family Papers, Wellesley Historical Society, Wellesley, MA.

Denton Family Papers, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.