Heywood co-founded the New England Labor Reform League in 1869 with individualist anarchist
William Batchelder Greene. The league advocated for the "abolition of class laws and false customs, whereby legitimate enterprise is defrauded by speculative monopoly." and favored "[f]ree contracts, free money, free markets, free transit, and free land". In May 1872, Heywood, a supporter of
women's suffrage and
free love activist
Victoria Woodhull's free speech rights, began editing individualist anarchist magazine
The Word from his home in Princeton, Massachusetts. He was tried in 1878 for mailing "obscene material", his pamphlet ''Cupid's Yokes: or, The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life: An Essay to Consider Some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Government
, which attacked traditional notions of marriageat the instigation of postal inspector Anthony Comstock, who also had Truth Seeker'' editor
D. M. Bennett arrested. Convicted of violating the 1873
Comstock Act, Heywood was sentenced to two years' hard labor at the
Norfolk County Jail. Heywood used his own notation, Y.L. (Year of Love), in replacement
A. D. ==Personal life==