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CHAPTER 1
Women and Revolution
REVOLUTIONARY CHALLENGES
Feminists across several generations have been seduced by Emma Goldman, and it is not hard to see why. Goldman not only centres women's experiences in her call for revolution; she also locates women at the heart of her analysis of capitalism at national and international levels. Refusing to push the harms women suffer to one side, she castigates her comrades for adding to their oppression and for their conservative discomfort with discussions of sexuality and the body. Goldman's important article "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation" was published in the first issue of Mother Earth (Goldman's anarchist journal), and her comment that there are "internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth, such as ethical and social conventions" (1906b, 15) must surely have been meant as much for her anarchist comrades as it was for suffragists. She berated women for their failings, certainly, and aligned herself with those who thought bourgeois femininity a particular bar to revolution, but she also championed women's efforts to remake themselves and supported women's full participation in all spheres of life. Further, and to my mind particularly significant, Goldman inhabited her refusal of convention with unparalleled zeal. From the very beginning of her political career, Goldman occupied the anarchist stage with matchless fervency, horsewhipping Johann Most off the platform when he spoke against Berkman's failed attentat (1931b, 105), supporting prostitutes and homosexuals on the basis of her unwavering critique of morality, albeit in contradictory ways (Cook 1979a, 435–37; Greenway 2009a), and flinging herself into revolutionary struggles right up to the end of her life (Ackelsberg 2001; Porter 1983). Yet while Goldman's life is marked by her insistence on the links between sexual politics and all other forms of oppression, to my mind it is not persuasive to claim her as a feminist foremother without first thinking more fully about several aspects of her ambivalence about women and the nature of their oppression and freedom.
For Goldman, women's social position marks them as dependent, vulnerable, duplicitous subjects. In line with many of her anarchist contemporaries, this means that women are seen as ill equipped for revolutionary activity, and their passivity and misery are framed as preventing men from participating as fully revolutionary subjects too (Gemie 1996). Far from sidelining women's needs, however, Goldman understood their situation as a central rather than peripheral concern for political transformation. She considered women, in their position as reproducers of social and human life, as occupying the boundary between the public and private spheres, and their subordination as essential to the maintenance of labour inequalities, as well as national and military interests (e.g., 1897b, 1913). For Goldman, women are terribly harmed by the institutions and practices they are forced into: marriage, frequent childbearing, prostitution, and economic vulnerability affect women in particularly horrific ways (1898b, 1909e, 1911, between 1927 and 1930). Goldman believed that when women act in accordance with their oppression, they reproduce the worst aspects of capitalism, reinforcing conservatism, nationalism, and class interests across the generations for whom they are largely responsible. At times, as we shall see, Goldman's acerbic critiques of women seem to veer into misogyny, particularly when she does little to disentangle the problem of femininity from those who carry its burden. Goldman's own life and words sit uncomfortably with accounts that seek to domesticate these critiques and revolutionary passions when they claim her as a feminist, however. Such reclamations tend to rely on a reframing of Goldman as less hostile to both feminism and women than she is. And yet, she not only is disparaging towards women (particularly bourgeois women) but also takes great pleasure in this attitude. She refuses to accept suffrage politics as emancipatory for women and develops an epistemology of qualitative value with respect to sexual freedom, arguing more generally against quantitative modes of counting equality. And she not only highlights the double standards regulated by a public/private divide but also seeks to challenge the idea of "the private" more fundamentally. In what follows, I explore Goldman's complex framing of women's oppression and her affectively charged focus on women's transformation. I focus on the ambivalences in her political imaginary with respect to women precisely because these highlight some important sticking points in understanding sexual politics and freedom both in Goldman's lifetime and in ours.
Goldman's refusal to spare women the full force of her rage is both disturbing for feminists and also a sign of her commitment to treating women the same as men: only then might they be able to take up the position of revolutionary subject. Her evaluations of femininity as coldly calculating are extremely consistent too. These enable her to make the links between individual accounting (relying on men's money) and the failure of an equality agenda that adds up gains rather than embracing human value. To want to bring forward Goldman as a feminist is thus perversely to erase the very political theory of sexual freedom that she develops: one dependent on the difference between her views of women and revolution and a feminist one. Her political ambivalence about women's role and person is, I argue, the very site of the development of a fresh and persuasive critique of a public/private divide, and the establishing of women's oppression as tethered to capitalist and militarist exploitation. Rather than claiming Goldman as a missing feminist foremother, then, I instead want to focus on her fundamental contributions to feminist history: contributions that depend precisely on her critiques of feminism. And I want to think with Goldman about the difference that her challenges to sexual and gendered norms make to how we understand the relationship between feminism and feminists in the present. I thus explore the usefulness of disarticulating feminism from a feminist subject not to undermine the former but to refocus on the content and claims that feminism can and should make. Grounding this inquiry first in the subjective archive, I then explore the role of the critical archive in domesticating the very insights that Goldman brings to a history of feminism and finally turn to the theoretical archive to suggest ways in which Goldman's judgement of women might be a helpful starting point for a renewed transformative agenda within feminism.
Before turning to the Goldman archive, let me put Goldman's work on women and transformation in some context. At the height of her notoriety in America — when she was dubbed the "High Priestess of Anarchy" (Chicago Inter Ocean 1908, 284) — Goldman participated in a scene of revolutionary fervour, in spaces saturated with reflections on the relationship between what we now call sexual politics and social change. Questions of gender and sexuality were rarely absent from the anarchist, socialist, and bohemian circles of turn-of-the-century America, and while never settled, these issues lay at the heart of political interrogation in ways that challenge our own contemporary sense that the Left was only later fragmented by the tangential concerns of feminist, sexual, and racial politics (Frost 2009, 74). Christine Stansell insists that the question of feminism itself was pivotal and not peripheral to the social, cultural, and political fermentation that characterised the modern age, noting in her preface to the 2009 edition of American Moderns that the bohemians "so often gave feminism pride of place in their longed- for democratic revival ... [and] heralded the newest of New Women as heroines of a desirable modernity" (xi). As Kathy Ferguson has documented, Goldman's profound awareness of women's place in cementing and challenging social norms locates her as "very much of her time: her time and place were saturated with the bodies, voices, and ideas of many hundreds of radical women" (2011b, 251). For Stansell, the dramatic changes in relationships between individuals and the social fabric that marked the era also produced considerable rage, such that "fear of immigrants, the black masses, and the labor movement blended with dislike of the New Woman" (2000, 31) to produce a reassertion of a conservative as well as radical masculinity.
Such retrenchment was not the preserve of the establishment alone. As such scholars also chart, the anxiety concerning women's changing position in the home or as part of revolutionary transformation produced a predictable backlash from within those very movements that prided themselves on openness and utopian commitment. While anarchists the world over greeted the new century with searing "critiques of male domination ... [and] emphasized the oppressive and unnatural strictures of the institution of marriage, and the desirability of its prescribed remedy, free love" (Hutchison 2001, 532), real acceptance of women's changing role was rare. In part, this is because the fathers of anarchism either were silent on the matter or else positioned women's oppression as an unfortunate but secondary concern (Gemie 1996, 2001). Thus theorists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Landauer, and Octave Mirbeau considered women to be more immoral than men because of their learned roles of vulnerability and sexual dependency in the family (J. Cohn 2010; Gemie 2001), while others — such as Mikhail Bakunin or Peter Kropotkin — remained disconcertingly silent on the question of women's particular oppression. Proudhon certainly understands women's inferiority as bound to their subordination, but as Alex Prichard (2010) has explored, he depends on rather than challenges the public/private divide upon which that oppression relies in other aspects of his argument. For Proudhon, the domestic sphere needs to be retained so that men can be given the space to come home from their conditions of exploited labour to experience leisure or — more important — create the space for radical participation. In her witty "Anarchist Guide to ... Feminism: The Emma Goldman Angle" (2014), Ruth Kinna imagines Goldman in a postdeath utopia considering the limits of Proudhon's understandings of democracy: "What niggled? Poor dear Proudhon was too much of a home man. ... He failed to see that property worked in complex ways and that for women there was a double enslavement. ... Proudhon's blindness made her shudder" (2014, 22).
While men's absence of radicalism is consistently framed as a product of working conditions, then, women's absence of the same is much more easily bound to her person and understood as enduring. Woman's duplicity and cowardliness are naturalised such that her capacities as a potential as well as current autonomous subject are foreclosed. Not all anarchist writers agree with this assessment of femininity's flaws of course: Magno Espinosa insists on free love as a challenge to the marriage contract that binds women to their subordination, privileges bourgeois morality, and prevents female emancipation (Gemie 1996, 532), and he frames women's "character" as resulting from the current sexual division of labour in a vein more consistent with his broader critique of authority (531). And as David Porter argues, in many cases "emancipation of women was seen as a crucial part of overall social transformation" for anarchists, even if this was not viewed as an immediate priority (1983, 251). But for the most part, as Porter himself acknowledges in an otherwise positive gloss, anarchists rarely advocated a full-scale transformation of the domestic sphere, and "most frequently male anarchists retreated to cultural orthodoxy in their personal relationships with women" (251). In the meantime, women are directly blamed for their subservience and castigated for their bourgeois morality. As Jesse Cohn pertinently notes, within this complex "a newly 'unrestrained' female sexuality is made to bear the guilt for the demise of community" (2010, 418) and a bar to generational revolutionary capacity.
Goldman joined other radical women (and some men) in their scathing critiques of the patriarchal male thinking that caught women in a double bind of oppression and blame, both within and outside of the anarchist movement. With Crystal Eastman and Voltairine de Cleyre, Goldman (1911) portrayed the horrors and exploitations of marriage; with Max Eastman, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Louise Bryant, she promoted free love as a political as well as personal alternative (St.Louis Post-Dispatch 1908); with Margaret Sanger and Margaret Anderson, she analysed the links between the banning of family limitation and the creation of a reserve army of labour (Goldman 1916c); and with Henrik Ibsen, H. G. Wells, and Rebecca West, Goldman linked creativity and freedom of expression with utopianism (Goldman 1914b, 1928?a). For these thinkers and activists, women's emancipation could not wait and was formulated as key to the success of a revolutionary agenda. In articulating the links between lack of birth control and women's dependency, or between prostitution and marriage, the espousers of radical sexual politics challenged presumptions that women's position was natural or inevitable, and importantly also insisted that social transformation necessitated a shift in women's subjectivity now and not later. With increasing sexual and intellectual freedom, women would be able to join their male comrades in forging a new world free of oppression; without it, they would continue to hamper such efforts and remain caught in the horrors of femininity.
Thus, in contrast to sexual conservatives of all political persuasions who sought to retain the current familial structure or endorse women's natural role, radical women and men theorised sex roles in terms of socialisation in the strongest possible terms (Presley 2000). Women's position was understood as highly compromised, certainly: bourgeois women were castigated for investing in the temporary and superficial gains offered by marriage; prostitutes chastised for being seduced by consumerism; and mothers scolded for lack of care in relation to both men and children. But these familiar critiques were complemented by a twofold focus on the bodily consequences of oppression for women, and on their readiness for transformation: the new woman could not and would not wait. Along with others, then, and as Ferguson suggests, Goldman "gave a great deal of thought to the embodied conditions under which women struggle to birth and feed children, to have few children, to sell their labour, to love, to survive" (2011b, 251). In the first volume of her autobiography, Goldman foregrounds women's physical and emotional suffering in undergoing repeat and unwanted pregnancies (1931b, 185–86) and provides a human face to prostitution. In a much-quoted comment, Goldman insists: "Now that I had learned that women and children carried the heaviest burden of our ruthless economic system, I saw that it was mockery to expect them to wait until the social revolution arrives in order to right injustice" (187). One might be tempted to read Goldman's statement in 1908 that she intends to strive "until I die to break the shackles that make [women] the chattels of men" (Chicago Inter Ocean 1908, 286) as hyperbolic, but her promise is borne out by more than five decades of commitment to that freedom.
For those insisting that women's emancipation had to be central to a revolutionary imagination, this was no minor set of changes but involved a fundamental reconsideration of women's relationship to others and to the world. As Maxine Molyneux notes, anarchist women in Latin America not only highlighted how fed up they were with their ongoing domestic drudgery but also laid positive claim to their right to pleasure (1986, 126). Indeed, it was sexual freedom that took centre stage in the political imagination of women's freedom for many (Hustak 2012). For Goldman, emancipation would mean "woman's freedom ... absolute sex equality" (St.Louis Post-Dispatch 1908), and she was heartened by what she saw as the increase of women's sexual independence in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Goldman celebrated the "flapper's" sexual freedom, for example, in the face of its characterisation as decadent or frivolous (The Toronto Star 1926), and she highlighted the importance of women's growing assertiveness after many of them had participated in "masculine" labour during the First World War (1926a). An emphasis on sexual freedom within anarchist circles meant embracing struggles for women's access to birth control (which nicely combined individual freedom and critique of state restriction for anarchists), and Goldman was imprisoned for her reproductive freedom activism (Goldman 1916c). Indeed, during a period of intense public visibility in America, Goldman located birth control as a "most vital question" (1916b, 426), and the birth control movement as representing "the spiritual awakening of women throughout the world" (New York Herald 1916b).
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Excerpted from "Considering Emma Goldman"
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