When Lum met Voltairine de Cleyre, he was twenty-seven years her elder and had lived a life rich in experience.
Advocates of free love, including early anarcha-feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, as well as Victoria Woodhull, Thomas Low Nichols, and Mary S. Gove Nichols, joined a critique of marital rape to advocacy of women's autonomy and sexual pleasure.