The Club

The Club began in a small Bond Street Hall, and it soon had to move to a bigger space, over Taylor's Saloon at 555 Broadway. Meetings were twice-weekly and people came to "dance, play parlor games, recieve instruction in French, make the acquaintance of other partisans of 'Individual Sovereignty,' and talk about the new social order."

Following the "individual sovereignty" stance of Equitable Commerce, The Club's mission was to promote the "'right of the individual to feel for himself, to follow his attractions.' That right was 'condemned by the moralists as immoral and vicious,'... but those so-called moralists were mistaken.

Free Love
In the public's mind, the idea of Free Love could not be separated from The Club. And indeed, Free Love was a topic frequently discussed there and a great deal of the members were, or became, Free Love advocates. This included both the 'varietists" and the "exclusivists."

For the most part, members of The Club and other advocates saw Free Love as "the opposite of slave love; it meant that women should be liberated from male domination, free to form marriage on the basis of love, dissolve it in the absence of love, and offer or withhold their bodies on their own terms."