Against the ‘Science’ of Free Love in Yiddish Popular Fiction

• In Event: Gender and Genre: Power and Proscriptivism of Form in Modern Jewish Poetry and Prose

Abstract

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a broad variety of men and women involved in radical and utopian politics engaged in discussions about sex reform and what they called ‘free love.’ Sex radicals, across their political beliefs and strategies, drew upon scientific disciplines and theories, especially the idea of free love as ‘natural’ according to the dictates of eugenics and evolution, to support their arguments. Their scientific understanding of sexual relations was crucial their arguments in favor of making sex ‘free.’


This paper examines the ways that two early twentieth century Yiddish works of popular, ‘lowbrow’ fiction that critique sex radicalism - Miriam Karpilov’s Togbukh fun an elender meydl (Diary of a Lonely Girl) and D. M. Hermalin’s Fraye libe (Free Love) - draw upon, mock, and reject the language of scientific discourse. This paper considers the relationship between popular science and popular literature as well as the gendered heirarchies of scientific and emotional knowledge. It positions these novels as balancing between desire to accept and champion modernity and skepticism for ‘free love’ as a platform for the modern.

Author

• Jessica Anne Kirzane, The University of Chicago