This speech defends Woodhull's advocacy of free love or social freedom, which served to create divisions within the women's rights movement and led eventually to her ostracism by some women's rights associations.

At the time this was published Victoria Woodhull was perhaps the most well-known promoter of free love (sex outside marriage) in the U.S. This is the speech in which she abandoned her previous reticence to state her own position on free love and took the radical position, telling her audience that she had a right to, "love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please." In library collections this book is variously titled, including "A Speech on The Principles of Social Freedom," "The Principles of Social Freedom," and "And the Truth Shall Make You Free," due to ambiguities on the title page.

This speech and others on the same topic were republished in facsimile in a 2005 book, Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull. ISBN: 978-1-58742-050-4 (pb) and 978-1-58742-051-1 (hb). The book also includes a series of letters she wrote to the NY Times in 1871, along with: The Scarecrows of Sexual Slavery ((1873); The Elixir of Life (1873); Tried as by Fire (1873–74).