7 Famous Polyamorists From History

1. Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, 1757-1806

Georgiana “Gee” Cavendish was an English duchess, gifted author, and women’s rights activist. She was well known for her unusual marital arrangement with William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, and her many love affairs with men and women.

In the 18th century among fashionable women, “romantic friendships” between women were accepted. Gee would write such passionate letters to women that one told her “some part of your letter frightened me”!

In 1782, she met Lady Elizabeth “Bess” Foster, with whom she developed such an intimate connection that Bess eventually moved in to live with Gee and William, as Bess was also financially struggling at the time. Eventually, Bess formed a relationship with William as well. This polyamorous open triad lasted for 25 years, during which Bess and William had two illegitimate children. All three of them also took other lovers. Gee once wrote fervently in a letter, “Oh Bess, every sensation I feel but heightens my adoration of you.”

After Gee’s death, Bess wrote that Gee “was the constant charm of my life. She doubled every joy, lessened every grief. Her society had an attraction I never met with in any other being. Her love for me was really ‘passing the love of woman’.”

2. William Marston, 1893-1947

William M. Marston was an American psychologist, a major contributor to the invention of the modern lie detector, and most famously, the creator of DC’s Wonder Woman. The inspiration for Wonder Woman came from his two life partners: his wife Elizabeth, and Olive Byrne.

The three were in a polyamorous triad and raised four children together (two from each woman); Elizabeth and Olive named their children after each other. They also had a BDSM relationship, which is reflected in the not-so-subtle kinky imagery in the original comics. Wonder Woman’s ‘Bracelets of Submission’ were likely based on the wide bracelets Olive wore when she “married” William, and the ‘Lasso of Truth’ on Marston’s lie detector.

Even though historians frequently dispute it, there is overwhelming evidence that Elizabeth and Olive deeply loved each other as well as Marston. Additionally, Marston wrote a lot about lesbianism, calling it “perfect”, and once described a scene of two women making love in front of him (no prizes for guessing who). After his death, Elizabeth and Olive continued to live together for the rest of their lives.

3. Emma Goldman, 1869-1940

Emma Goldman, known as “the matron saint of non-monogamy”, was an activist, anarchist and writer who risked arrest and deportation to tour America and Europe in the 1900s giving lectures about the benefits of non-monogamy (or “free love” as it was called at the time), birth control, and pacifism. At one point, in a hilarious attempt to disparage her, the press called her “the high priestess of anarchy”. Goldman was vehemently anti-marriage and saw it as completely at odds with love, calling it a “Church-begotten weed” and an “insurance pact” in comparison to love, which she called the “defier of all laws”. Considering the treatment of women at the time, this is pretty unsurprising.

However, despite her many lectures and writings touting the virtues of free love, Emma Goldman had a fairly turbulent love life. She was infatuated for several years with a man named Ben Reitman (who called her his “blue-eyed Mommy” - kinky!) who frequently sent her into jealous fits, to the point where she later condemned her own lecture, “Marriage and Love”, saying it was “hateful to me”. Many of her friends believed that Reitman was a bad influence - he wasn’t always upfront about his affairs, meaning Goldman would sometimes find out through other people. He led her to question her life’s work to the point where she wrote, “I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love.”

There’s something humanising and deeply relatable about the fact that someone who did so much for the non-monogamy movement was also prone to frequent jealousy attacks - though, granted, this might have been more to do with her choice in partner than anything else.

4. Alfred Kinsey, 1894-1956

Alfred Kinsey was an openly bisexual and polyamorous American sexologist who pioneered research on modern sexuality and homosexuality, compiled in two books known as the Kinsey Reports. He and his colleagues interviewed over 18,000 men and women about their sex lives, exploring topics like BDSM, infidelity, masturbation, and homosexuality. He was the inventor of the Kinsey scale, was the first person in his field to defend homosexuality, and famously said that the only universal in human sexuality is variability itself. He founded the Institute for Sex Research, now known as the Kinsey Institute, at Indiana University.

He and his wife, Clara McMillen, who also significantly contributed to his work, were at one point in a triad with one of Kinsey’s graduate students, Clyde Martin. They were known to have orgies where Clara would serve persimmon pies during breaks.

While some of Kinsey’s work is undoubtedly controversial, he contributed greatly to social and cultural values in America as well as internationally, and definitely deserves credit for that.

5. Colette, 1873-1954

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, most popularly known as just Colette, was a bisexual French author and actor who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 for her feminist novels. She married three times over the course of her life, and none of those marriages were monogamous - indeed, she mentions her non-monogamous arrangements in her book, ‘Claudine Married’. “A lover whom I love or simply desire...that’s just obeying the law of nature.”

While married to her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars, both of them had other lovers - at one point, they and their partners went on vacation together as a foursome. Colette’s most well-known extramarital entanglement was with the niece of Napoleon III, the Marquise de Belbeouf, known as “Missy”. They starred in a pantomime that premiered at the Moulin Rouge in 1907, where they caused a riot and a police raid due to sharing a kiss on stage. The play was nearly shut down for this daring display, and after this, she wrote a letter to a newspaper editor complaining about the handling of this story. She said that she, Missy, her husband, and his lover, were two couples who were living “in the most natural way”.

Funnily enough, Colette has an indirect connection to William Marston (see above). Her mother studied under a man named Charles Fournier, a philosopher who supposedly coined the word “feminism” and frequently wrote about queer sexuality and non-monogamy. Marston was also a student of Fournier’s!

6. Simone de Beauvoir, 1908-1985, and Jean Paul Sartre, 1905-1980

Simone de Beauvoir was a prominent bisexual French feminist philosopher, who is most famous for writing ‘The Second Sex’. Jean-Paul Sartre was a famous existentialist playwright and activist. They were never legally married, and throughout their 51-year lifelong open relationship, they both pursued other sexual and romantic partners, calling their connection “Authentic Love”.

Sartre, who proposed the open relationship, wrote to de Beauvoir, “What we have is an essential love, but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.”

In response, de Beauvoir said their relationship “could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people”, and felt the “urge to embrace all experience”. Their only condition was total transparency - they vowed to never lie to each other like married couples did.

It is disputed whether this open relationship was entirely happy (though, to be fair, it was 51 years long!) - indeed, there is evidence that Simone was prone to jealousy, and engaged in far fewer outside liaisons than Jean-Paul. However, the one defining piece of evidence of Simone’s willingness and enthusiasm is her description of their open relationship as “the one undoubted success in my life”.

7. Marlene Dietrich, 1901-1992

Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress who was famous for her work in silent films and her androgynous, “femme fatale” aesthetic. Throughout her marriage to film producer Rudolf Sieber, she took many famous men and women as lovers, most notably Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Greta Garbo. She was open about these relationships with her husband, and they would often all spend time together - Sieber’s own lover was an old friend of Marlene’s. Marlene would also annotate the love letters she received from other people with sarcastic comments for his entertainment.

Dietrich loved her husband deeply, nursing him when he had a heart attack and fell ill from pneumonia. When rumours began to circulate about their divorce, she was extremely angry, saying, “I consider Mr. Sieber the perfect husband and father.”

Sieber only gave one interview in his life, and when asked about his open marriage, he said, “She is a glamorous woman, and a glamorous woman is supposed to be surrounded by romance at all times.”