Anyway, I think that if more current-day feminists were actually to sit down and read some of Goldman's writings they'd find them both congenial and inspiring.
I agree. As a starting point, I recommend her autobiography, Living My Life. It connects her feminist and revolutionary politics to the climate of the time and to her real, bodied experience as a woman. Emma Goldman was filled with fiery enthusiasm and possessed by her ideals, and she acted on them, in a "leap before you look" kind of way that often led her into trouble. She threw her whole self into her politics and did what she thought right, even when it meant going to jail and being deported. And we owe her a great debt for her struggles for the eight-hour day and for birth control.
But, as much as I like Emma Goldman, I don't agree with everything she said and did. I think we have much to learn from her mistakes as well.
One incident that speaks to me is the time she tried to prostitute herself for the cause. (Living My Life, Volume I, Chapter 8.) In 1892, during a time of labor unrest, a man named Henry Clay Frick took over management of the Carnegie Steel Company. He performed atrocities, tossing a pregnant woman out on the streets and hiring armed thugs who massacred strikers, including a little boy.
There was great public outcry, and Emma Goldman and her boyfriend Alexander Berkman felt the time had come to act. Moved by the political writings circulating at the time, they decided that Berkman would assassinate Frick.
"A blow aimed at Frick," she writes, "would echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause of the Homestead struggle."
Emma's role would be to raise money for a weapon. But how does a poor woman raise money in a hurry? She chose prostitution. She writes:
My main concern now was whether I could make myself attractive enough to men who seek out girls on the street. I stepped over to the mirror to inspect my body. I looked tired, but my complexion was good. I should need no make-up. My curly blond hair showed off well with my blue eyes. Too large in the hips for my age, I thought; I was just twenty-three. Well, I came from Jewish stock. Besides I would wear a corset and I should look taller in high heels. (I had never worn either before).
After donning the proper attire, she joined a long line of sex workers walking the streets to attract clients. So there went the famous revolutionary, stumbling along in a stiff corset and high heels. A well-to-do gentleman spotted her fear and lack of expertise, and he offered to buy her a drink. So she led him to a dark, crowded saloon. Sitting at a table with a big glass of beer, dressed in fetish wear, she argued politics, telling him about the thousands of women who are driven to prostitution by economic necessity. But he wasn't interested in politics. He gave her ten dollars and told her to get out of the business.
She wired the money to Berkman, who went ahead with his assassination attempt. It failed, and Berkman was arrested. Public opinion, which had been against Frick, now turned against Berkman and the other anarchists. Goldman writes:
Meanwhile, the daily press carried on a ferocious campaign against the anarchists. They called for the police to act, to round up 'the instigators, Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and their ilk.' My name had rarely before been mentioned in the papers, but now it appeared every day in the most sensational stories. The police got busy; a hunt for Emma Goldman began.
So, while she had thought an attempt would rally the working class, it did the opposite. It gave her enemies fuel against the anarchists. It drew attention away from Frick's atrocities. All in all, it was a public relations disaster.
Whatever you may think of the use of violence for political ends, the assassination attempt was a mistake. First, Goldman and Berkman mistook Frick for the real enemy, power itself. Second, she did not take into account the power of the press. And third, she misunderstood the general public, imagining people would be inspired by the act, when instead many were scared. My takeaway from this incident is that whatever our political views, we are always human beings, with human bodies, human failings, desires, fears. When we ignore them, our actions fail.
Fortunately, Emma Goldman didn't give up. She stuck to her ideals and passions, and grounded her politics in our common humanity. She loved, wrote, spoke, and acted with her whole heart, soul, and body. In so doing, she won victories we still benefit from today.
At the end of her autobiography, she writes:
My life - I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived my life.
What is it that has alienated anarchism and feminism, when there are so many commonalities? The anarchist Emma Goldman springs to mind - we have her to thank for the availability of birth control, which has been central to our ability to do critical work, but I don't think most feminists know about her. And then there's Lucy Parsons, an anarchist and woman of color who is even less well known.
Ariel, in her comment, replies to Kristin
I am not sure what has alienated feminism and anarchism because I see both as deeply interconnected struggles against hierarchy, patriarchy, and state violence. I've certainly encountered male anarchists who are dismissive of feminism as divisive and a special interest, in the style of the "it's all about class struggle" old left style and until I met some really awesome anarchists of all races and genders, I thought anarchism was a young white boy's club--and it can be at times. Fortunately, though, I feel like those of us dedicated to collective liberation are finding one another and doing organizing together.
I'd like to offer a somewhat roundabout reply to the question. Back in the days of Second Wave US feminism, feminisms were widely classified as coming in three flavors: socialist, liberal, and cultural-- which could probably be roughly translated respectively as radical, conservative (back then, though the politics of 1970s "liberal feminism" would now be characterized as "moderate"), and essentialist). (Of course this left out a lot of differences among feminists that didn't fit comfortably into these classifications: it took white feminists a long time to grok intersectionality.) One of the chief preoccupations of socialist-- also known as "materialist"-- feminists was the "unhappy marriage of feminism and Marxism." The reason for this was that the political left back in the '60s and '70s considered race and gender issues to be mere artifacts of the capitalist system and thus not worthy of special attention. If we'd just subordinate our concerns for these to overthrowing capitalism, was the left's attitude, all these issues would simply melt away. In other words, Second Wave feminists felt burned by the left. (Many Second Wave feminists started out in leftist activism, particular civil rights and anti-war activism and became feminists because they got fed up with their second-class status.) The academic journal Feminist Studies (especially its earliest issues, dating from the '70s), founded by socialist feminists, was exemplary of feminists working hard to analyze and salvage that "marriage."
A few titles on socialist/materialist feminism I can suggest off the top of my head: Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (1981); Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, ed. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (1978); Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zilla R. Eisenstein (1979).
Oh, and Joanna Russ, who in the Second Wave was classified as a socialist feminist, has a chapter on many feminists' hostility to Marxism in What Are We Fighting For?
Needless to say, because I wrote Alanya to Alanya in 1984, when feminist issues were still considered special pleading (like all so-called "identity issues") in many mixed activist groups, some of this friction cropped up in the book (via Martha's relationship with Walt). A friend who read the ms in Dec 1984 (and later become one of the Marq'ssan Cycle's greatest fans) chided me for that depiction as unnecessarily disloyal (airing dirty laundry in public). But you know, I was still coping with those attitudes even as late as 1987 when I and another woman and a man organized an art workers collective for producing a four-day mixed-media event in Seattle focused on El Salvador. There was a huge amount of "shit work" to be performed, and the guys in the group actually attempted to relegate all the many details and tasks to the women in the group-- while reserving for themselves all the big decisions. But we women were old hands at mixed group politics; to the guys' shock, we flatly stated that decisions would be made by consensus of the people who were actually doing the work. A couple of years later I wrote up an analysis of this experience for a special issue of a San Diego activist group's newsletter aimed at raising the consciousness of the men in the group. I think the gender politics of mixed-sex activist groups started changing in the late 80s & that this had to do not only with the long-term effects of Second Wave feminism but also with the character of Latin American solidarity work (but this is my personal take and could be mistaken).
A related issue might be why there has traditionally been hostility between Marxists and anarchists. Staughton Lynd talks about this in Wobblies & Zapatistas, which I bought after our panel, at PM Press's table, and am now reading. Lynd himself advocates the "Haymarket Synthesis":
What is Marxism? It is an effort to understand the structure of the society in which we live so as to make informed predictions and to act with greater effect. What is anarchism? It is the attempt to imagine a better society and insofar as possible to "prefigure," to anticipate that society by beginning to live it out, on the ground, here and now.
Isn't it perfectly obvious that these two orientations are both needed, that they are like having two hands to accomplish the needed task of transformation?
At any rate it is clear that during the past century and a half neither Marxism or anarchism has been able to carry out the transformative task alone. Marxism has produced a series of fearsome dictatorships. Anarchism has offered a number of glorious anticipations, all of them short-lived and many of them drowned in blood.
Before turning to North America [from Europe], with its quite different experience, I wish to note that in their best moments Marxists have acknowledged their comradeship with anarchists. Marx spent a great deal of energy denouncing efforts to imagine the future, but when his anarchist opponents in Paris created the Paris Commune he defended them and even declared that they had discovered the form of the future Communist state. Lenin, hiding out in Finland on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, described in State and Revolution a state that "every cook" would be capable of governing, anticipated in the Russian soviets.
The term "Haymarket Synthesis" pays tribute to the Chicago socialists of the 1870s (among whom numbered Lucy Parsons, whom Kristin mentioned in her comment), who were militant socialists who began calling themselves anarchists.
In the section immediately before his discussion of "the Haymarket Synthesis," Lynd talks about how the Zapatistas started out as traditional Marxist guerrillas advocating violent revolution-- only to embrace the political philosophy of the Indians of Chiapas (which is both anarchist and feminist).
As far as feminists and Emma Goldman goes, some of that may have to do with Goldman's essay "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," which, as Alice Wexler notes,
criticized the American feminist movement for focusing too narrowly on the "external tyrants" while neglecting the power of the "internal tyrannies" which "seem to get along as beautifully in the hands and hearts of the most active exponents of women's emancipation, as in the heads and hearts of our grandmothers." Goldman wrote that the narrowness of the modern ideal of emancipation induced women "to make a dignified, proper appearance, while the inner life is growing empty and dead." It had made of her "a compulsory vestal," fearful of love and sexual intimacy. "The tragedy of the self-supporting or economically free woman does not lie in too many, but in too few experiences." Only by "emancipating herself from emancipation," that is, by beginning with her 'inner regeneration," and cutting loose "from the weight of prejudices, traditions and customs" that stifled her sexual and emotional life, would she really liberate herself from the chains of the past.
This quote comes from Wexler's afterword to the text of Goldman's "On Mary Wollstonecraft." ("Emma Goldman on Mary Wollstonecraft," Feminist Studies 7,1 Spring 1981.) Goldman took Wollstonecraft as one of her personal heroes (much as I've taken Goldman as one of mine); Wexler characterizes Goldman's view of Wollstonecraft as romantic, which I think is fair. My sense is that Goldman had trouble with the feminists of her day for the same reason that First Wave feminists had trouble with Wollstonecraft: both Goldman and Wollstonecraft refused middle-class notions of morality, both engaged in "free love" (though Wollstonecraft changed her attitudes about this not long before her untimely death). Both were passionate, even charismatic personalities.As Wexler says,
If Goldman had romanticized Wollstonecraft, she nevertheless grasped the radicalism of Wollstonecraft's project, both in life and in thought....Reacting against the conservatism of the middle-class American suffrage movement in the years before World War I, Goldman saw Wollstonecraft as a great historical heroine whose vision was far more radical than that of the suffragists....Goldman's feminism was one aspect of a total ideology of anarchist revolution. The liberation of women involved the transformation of all aspects of society.
Interestingly, this sort of turns the Old Left's view of feminism on its head.
It was only in the '70s that (at least some feminists) rediscovered Emma Goldman as one of their own. (Surely her most famous bon mot these days must be "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution." Though I'm not sure that knowledge of Goldman goes much farther than that.) Anyway, I think that if more current-day feminists were actually to sit down and read some of Goldman's writings they'd find them both congenial and inspiring.
I agree. As a starting point, I recommend her autobiography, Living My Life. It connects her feminist and revolutionary politics to the climate of the time and to her real, bodied experience as a woman. Emma Goldman was filled with fiery enthusiasm and possessed by her ideals, and she acted on them, in a "leap before you look" kind of way that often led her into trouble. She threw her whole self into her politics and did what she thought right, even when it meant going to jail and being deported. And we owe her a great debt for her struggles for the eight-hour day and for birth control.
