CHAPTER THREE: EMMA GOLDMAN AND MIDDLE-CLASS INSURGENCIES
Goldman sometimes despaired of the workers, but her anarchist vision, unlike the Marxisms of the IWW and the SP, was a universal philosophy that appealed to all humanity. Marxism was an avowedly working-class philosophy which taught that the middle class, doomed to extinction in any case, had material interests irreconcilably opposed to those of the proletariat. Goldman, however, asserted that the middle class was holding its own and that anarchism could appeal to individuals of that class on economic, social, and cultural grounds. Capitalist society, she claimed, warped and distorted, and thus victimized, every individual.
Goldman had broadened her focus beyond the working class by 1900, when she said that the foreign-language anarchist groups (overwhelmingly working-class), though "larger and stronger" than the English-language groups, were "of no importance" because only native-born Americans could establish "a free society in the United States." Harping on economic conditions, she insisted, brought few results. People who embraced Anarchism out of economic motives either became prosperous or found that radical activism did not improve their financial prospects; in either case they abandoned the movement. Her lecture, "Modern Aspects of Anarchism," rejected a narrow economic interpretation of anarchism in favor of a wide-ranging cultural "philosophy of life" addressing human relationships and conduct. Her cultural version of anarchism appealed to many people outside the working class. As early as 1899 she declared that "the higher the education of a class, the more anarchists it contains" and urged the many closet anarchists among "doctors, lawyers, professors, and newspaper men" to declare themselves.[i]
Goldman had won increased respectability and a hearing among some well-to-do Americans by 1901, but the assassination of McKinley and Goldman's defense of Czolgosz unleashed a wave of terrorism and repression against all anarchists and drove Goldman virtually into hiding. When this hysteria subsided and the intellectual ferment of the Progressive Era continued, Goldman again attracted diverse interest, especially after 1906. In that year she founded Mother Earth, for over a decade the major English-language anarchist publication in the United States.
The need to support her new publication also caused Goldman to change her lecturing habits. Goldman had always disliked the freak-show atmosphere of soap-box oratory, preferring to lecture in halls where she could present a coherent argument to a stable, interested audience. Yet she had also opposed making a living by spreading the anarchist message, considering it a giving of her whole personality that payment could only debase. She feared that making "a business of lecturing" would undercut her message and reduce her to a mere "wage slave" of the movement.[ii] Her tours were often sponsored by the organizations to which she spoke, and financed by voluntary contributions from those organizations and her audiences. She made her living by other means, including sewing and nursing. In 1906 and after, however, spurred by the necessity of raising money for Mother Earth, Goldman sponsored her own tours, rented halls, and charged admission; the proceeds covered not only her touring expenses, but the publication of Mother Earth, including her living expenses. She left most other paid employment and became a full-time, professional revolutionary agitator.
This innovation generated controversy within the movement. Soon Mother Earth writers were complaining that the anarchists were ignoring the poor and focusing on the well-to-do. "Instead of participating in the trade unions, organizing the unemployed, or indulging in soap-box oratory," Harry Kelly lamented, "we rent comfortable halls and charge ten cents admission.... Anarchism has become a luxury." Berkman scolded Ben Reitman--and by implication Goldman--that although "as a philosophy Anarchism includes the whole of mankind... as a militant movement, we deal with the proletariat that will have to make the revolution." Berkman considered intellectuals as parasites who reduced anarchism to "an intellectual pastime." Despite this, some people complained that Berkman himself appealed mostly to "the so-called educated" classes. Voltairine de Clyre exclaimed that renting halls, charging admission, and appealing to the middle class resulted only in "shallow flattery" for the speaker by people who did not take anarchism seriously as a program for action. De Clyre said that anarchists should work mostly among "the men and women who do the hard and brutalizing work of the world."[iii]
Goldman charged admission because Mother Earth required her subsidy; yet she had deeper reasons for rejecting de Clyre's suggestion. While denying that she appealed specifically to the well-to-do, Goldman insisted that "the men and women who first take up the banner of a new, liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called respectable classes" because they alone have the energy, leisure, and education to entertain new ideas. Limiting anarchist propaganda to the poor "is not only a mistake, but also contrary to the spirit of Anarchism. Unlike other social theories, Anarchism builds not on classes, but on men and women.... Anarchism calls to battle all libertarian elements as against authority." Economic appeals do not work because "a great many radicals lose their ideals the monent they succeed economically.... Spiritual hunger and unrest are often the most lasting incentives" for revolt. Each anarchist, Goldman insisted, remains "free to choose his or her own manner of activity."[iv]
Goldman thought that some members of the middle class would join the revolution because their own economic and social position was deteriorating. "Professionals," she said, "find it harder than even the skilled worker to exist" and are a great danger to society because "they have tasted the good things of life and know what they are missing" when deprived of them. During her lifetime many businessmen and professionals who had regarded themselves as independent became salaried employees of large corporate bureaucracies, while many clerical positions that had been steeping-stones to independent proprietorship became monotonous dead-end jobs. Goldman decried the "insecure and pitiable existence" of white collar workers, professionals, and intellectuals, who she called "mental wage slaves" and "intellectual proletarians." Although they had higher incomes, more possessions, and a higher social status than laborers, Goldman considered them "even more dependent on the masters than those who work with their hands." She claimed that they were less versatile and adaptable than blue-collar workers; they could not, like the laborers, easily uproot themselves and move to the next town because their possessions, love of ease, and social connections have "emasculated them.... They are tied in a thousand ways to the most galling, humiliating conditions....In order to exist, they must cringe and crawl and beg for a position" only to find themselves "slavishly dependent" on their bosses and "upon a stupid and vulgar public opinion" when they find employment.[v]
These proletarians, Goldman asserted, surrendered more of their personalities to their job and to public opinion than other workers. Every professional had to conform to the expectations of his employer and his neighbors as well as maintain moral, economic, and social appearances. "The less creative a man is, the better his chances in every vocation of life.... The most lamentable quality of modern man is his great capacity for adjustment." The corporations require absolute conformity, and this demand infects every institution and all of social life. "Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising person a deadly enemy" Goldman said; they want only to mold "a patient wage slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist." Goldman also appealed to writers, journalists, and artists chaffing under the demands of the market and rebelling against the necessity of pleasing both capitalists and philistines. Capitalism and puritanism, she said, throttled self-expression in personal and professional life. Goldman told insurgent literati that "only when the intellectual forces of Europe had made common cause with the struggling masses, when they came close to the depths of society, did they give to the world a real culture." Finally, Goldman thought that cultural rebels would rally to the workers out of a realization that they could not achieve their goals in isolation from other social forces. They need the "revolutionary workers, who have broken with all the old rubbish" to achieve their own aims. Only by an alliance between "the intellectual proletarians, who try to find expression, and the revolutionary proletarians, who seek to remold life" could progressive Americans "wage a successful war against present society."[vi]
Goldman did not underestimate the difficulties in forging such a coalition. American professionals, white-collar workers, and intellectuals, she realized, considered themselves superior to blue-collar workers and refused to acknowledge their own position as proletarians. In Russia and elsewhere in Europe these groups were recruited partly from poor and declasse students who worked their way through college, but American college students were mostly the pampered rich who wanted a diploma rather than an education. The intellectuals deluded themselves with a sense of their own importance, and convinced themselves that they must educate the masses. Goldman, however, considered their lives false and artificial, and felt that they needed immersion in the reality that only contact with the workers could give. The majority of intellectuals, she claimed, were tied to the bourgeoisie by their values, personal identities, and material interests. She considered the middle class anemic, desiccated, and stifled by conformity and hypocrisy, lacking "red blood, without which active interest in an ideal is impossible." Their hypocritical conformity to conventions they privately detested undermined their capacity for genuine resistance, while their interest in the working class was the "sympathy of aloofness, of experiment" rather than genuine solidarity.[vii]
Goldman also recognized that the desire for self-expression, while related to the ferment in the world of labor, is not identical to it. Although she sometimes implied that personal freedom is itself the revolution, or at least an important contribution towards it, she often emphasized the necessity for active social struggle. She condemned the dilettantes who "out of ennui and lack of stability dabble in all kinds of reform" and confine their rebellion to "the parlor, the so-called salon, or Greenwich village." Yet she also admired serious cultural insurgents, "young artists, living a careless, Bohemian life, with ideas for breakfast, paints and brushes for luncheon, and sunsets for dinner.... living their ideals and caring naught for dollars and cents." She tried to win such idealists for the social revolution. She considered the intellectual proletarian "a new type in America, but an ever-increasing and permanent type... still groping in the dark, unable to find the point of contact with the rest of the social forces." Mother Earth was designed to foster that contact and help forge a revolutionary intelligentsia such as that in Russia. Goldman genuinely admired the New Review group, even as she regarded their rebellion as a one-sided artistic revolt.She resolutely cultivated every genuine spark of rebellion and protest, in culture as in labor, in the hopes that she could broaden, deeper, and radicalize them.[viii]
II
To achieve this purpose, Goldman enlisted modern literature, particularly the drama, in the cause of social revolution. The literary representation of human life and struggle, she thought, "speaks a language of its own, a language embracing the entire gamut of human emotions" and "strikes root where the ordinary word often falls on barren soil." It teaches audiences who could not be reached in any other way otherwise ineffable truths. The modern drama humanizes and personalizes the problems of all classes of society; by making the abstract understandable and concrete, it stirs the heart and enlightens the mind. In particular, it teaches the middle class, who consider themselves detached from the great social struggles around them, that everyone is part of society and intimately involved in its travails. The middle class, Goldman said, must either consciously participate in the struggle for a better life or be left behind. She felt the drama especially necessary in the United States, which lacks the revolutionary tradition which involved many French intellectuals in the labor movement. In Russia the government suppressed all classes equally, and thus inspired the intellectuals to ally themselves with the workers and peasants; in the United States, policemen clubbed, repressed, and brutalized workers but did not molest the respectable classes. Therefore, the American intelligentsia requires the illumination and emotional appeal of the modern drama, which opens "wider horizons of individual expression and social harmony," to involve it in the struggles of the workers.[ix]
In Goldman's view, the modern drama depicts all of human experience and shows the relationships between all aspects of life. It depicts the lowly as possessing personality and dignity; it shows the redeeming qualities in social outcasts; and it reveals how society makes the criminals that it then punishes. Dramatic realism, Goldman felt, was necessarily subversive of society, which would collapse once revealed in its true aspect. Many people already see through the deadening hypocrisies and stifling conventions of society, and conform only because they see no practical escape; but modern dramatists provide role models, such as Ibsen's Nora and Dr. Stockman, who not only show how the middle class is repressed, but also point the way towards freedom. Modern plays articulate the dissatisfaction of which many are only half aware, and show that others share it; they publicize and authenticate the inchoate rebellion of many victims of society and spur them to action, much as labor agitators stir the workers to revolt. The moderns, Goldman asserted, "mirror in their work as much of the spiritual and social revolt as is expressed by the most fiery speech of the propagandist. And more important still, they compel far greater attention.... Any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration that the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator."[x]
The dramatist confronts great social questions "not necessarily because his aim is to proselytize, but because he can best express himself by being true to himself." Because Goldman perceived capitalist society as objectively evil, she considered accurate depiction of that society as itself a revolutionary act. "All roads lead to the great social reconstruction," she said. A good play is as revolutionary as an incendiary speech because "the simple fact that a man is opposed to existing conditions makes a revolutionist of him. How this opposition may manifest itself is of no importance as long as it serves in ever so small a measure to bring about the final downfall of a system, institution, a class or government which is considered undesirable or pernicious." Goldman considered any authentic, free expression of human personality to be ipso facto revolutionary; genuine artistic creation, freed from commercialism, Constockery, and artificial conventions epitomized the creative, spontaneous, and self-expressive life that all would experience in an anarchist society. "Life in all its variety of color, in all its fullness and wealth is art, the highest art. He who does not help to bring about such a life is not an artist, no matter if he can paint sunsets or compose nocturnes. All the true artists of the world have recognized that.... Artists the world over have gone to the life of the people, have become one with their struggles, their hopes and dreams."[xi]
Goldman did not place political demands upon artists, however. She believed that great art was necessarily revolutionary because she identified revolution with authenticity, creativity, and freedom. Precisely because she approved of any spirited expression of individuality, and did not hew to a narrow party line, she favored all art which helped generate thought and unrest, or which expanded our concept of human personality. By being true to both himself and to social reality, the artist generated dissatisfaction and revolt. "Real art has no more to do with good or bad than nature has" she said. "Both are beyond good and evil; their function is life, and the latter is entirely too complex, too limitless, too subtle, to permit of any yardstick of value." Every person and every artist "must insist on untrammeled opportunity to express himself, whether by pen, brush, or speech, or in his personal relations, on the all-absorbing issues of modern times." Far from imposing a rigid political test on authors, Goldman lectured on those dramatists, novelists, and philosophers which she liked, and focused on the messages congenial to her; instead of carping about every deviation from her own political views, Goldman usually overlooked those aspects of her chosen works which she disliked. She could quote Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Nietszche to her purpose. Her method was one of social criticism rather than literary analysis; she used the works she analyzed to propound her own points rather than explicate the whole meaning of the author. Those who have criticized her for simplifying, distorting, and giving political tasks to authors misread her intentions.[xii]
Goldman's views on the politics of literature stemmed inexorably from her larger ethical and social perspective. She believed that the purpose of human life is the development of each individual personality to a complete and harmonious whole, and that this could be achived only in community and only in a just society (or in the pursuit of community and justice). She denied that an individual of intelligence and moral sensibility could experience enduring happiness when people are dying of torture all around her, especially when these deaths are willed and preventable. Whether an individual confronts or evades the realities of life in capitalist society, she truncates and warps her true human potential by anesthetizing either her rational capacity to engage the world around them and confront and analyze reality, or by dulling their capacity for moral sensitivity.
Goldman, of course, tasted what joys she could amidst a barbarous society. Just as Max Eastman ruminated upon his poem "To a Bobolink" above the smouldering ruins of Ludlow, she escaped from the horrors of London's East End into the ecstatic embraces of Hippolyte Havel. After describing scenes of absolute horror, "more terrible than any conceived by Dante," she found that in Havel's arms "the cry of the East End was far away. Only the call of love sounded in our hearts, and we listened and yielded to it." Yet after such transient joys, she confronted renewed horrors. The most sensitive souls, Goldman repeatedly proclaimed, could not endure the sight of such pervasive misery; they must revolt, even to their own destruction. These are the best spirits.
Goldman regarded literature as an exalted part of human life and moral endeavor. It must serve the highest purposes of human life, or at least not thwart them. Because she exulted in individual vision, creativity, and idiosyncrasy, the logic of her position would mandate not that literature have an explicit social message, but only that it contribute to a fuller, richer human life in some fashion. And she did insist that individuals could contribute to a better society in a wide variety of ways. Goldman emphatically felt that there is room even in the life of an agitator for fun, frivolity, laughter, and gaity, and for pondering the more-or-less eternal human dilemmas of life and love that would always exist under any social system. But she would not countenance literature which encoded capitalist, racist, or patriarchal values, which legitimated or condoned inhuman institutions and practices, or implicitly treated such practices as natural, eternal, and inevitable. Such literature would contravene the very purpose of human life and endeavor, the quest for full personhood and moral personality.
Goldman, therefore, condemned literature and art that manifested purely aesthetic strivings, just as some of her comrades lambasted literature that was merely a disguised form of propaganda. Goldman regarded the choice between aesthetic and moral values as no choice at all, much in the manner she insisted that individual self-expression and social welfare were equally necessary and mutually reinforcing. Similarly, she analyzed literature as stemming both from the soul of an individual genius and from a concrete social situation which informed and inspired that genius.
In Goldman's time a symbiosis between literature and revolution seemed likely for two important reasons. Literature was breaking with old conventions and dealing realistically and honestly with the modern social conditions which polite society had largely evaded; and this insurgency ran into opposition from the law and from much of the public. Social realism and individual self-expression were therefore allied; authors had to fight censorship and inhibitions in order to describe their social vision. This created a mileau where Goldman could use dramas and novels whose greatness was acknowledged in avant-garde literary circles to make her own points about social life, to appeal to a wider audience, and to win some respectable supporters. She could enlist high culture to buttress her arguments. In the process she sometimes humiliated the authorities. The New York police broke up one of her lectures on the modern drama because, instead of sticking to her subject, she insisted on interjecting discussion of a subversive-sounding character named Ibsen. Educated, native-born Americans, who had acquiesced in the brutal suppression of her meetings in the past, as well as in systematic terrorism against labor unions, were outraged, and formed a Free Speech Society to fight against police repression. On another occasion Goldman was driven out of San Diego, and Ben Reitman nearly lynched, as vigilantes prevented her from giving this same lecture on Ibsen. This aroused further sympathy for her, and she returned to San Diego until she was allowed to speak there.[xiii]
Goldman's lectures on drama allowed her to drape her intransigent opposition to all social conventions in the forms of high culture--a venerable tactic used to avoid censorship and win a wider hearing in Russia. Goldman could thus imply that she was innocuously talking about literature even while she attacked the foundations of traditional morality and society. When she called modern drama "the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction" she both implicitly distanced herself from that other form of dynamite with which she was often associated, and enlisted the cachet of writers of genius for her own longstanding causes.[xiv]
Goldman's literary studies furthered social revolution. She castigated narrow-minded radicals who indulged in sectarian, esoteric, jargon-ridden propaganda speeches and barren phrase-mongering while remaining oblivious to the wider currents of life swirling around them. She told revolutionaries to acquaint themselves with every point of view and to study all of life, not just their pet theories, and reminded them that "a study of existing conditions is impossible without a knowledge of modern literature and drama." Goldman wanted everyone to experience many lives in one, to criticize and experience and understand all of existence. She herself loved literature and beauty in all its forms, and the example of John Most showed her that this love could be combined with strident advocacy of revolution.[xv]
Lecturing on modern drama not only allowed her to discuss important topics in relative safety from police persecution, and to reach otherwise unapproachable audiences; it also resolved one of her longstanding personal dilemmas. She had long been tormented by the conflict between a desire to sacrifice everything for her ideal and her equally intense desire to experience all of life passionately. She early fought with Berkman over this issue when their mutual friend Fedya gave her some flowers and Berkman protested that "a good anarchist is one who lives for the Cause and gives everything to it.... It is inconsistent for an anarchist to enjoy luxuries while the people live in poverty." Goldman, aghast, replied that "beautiful things are not luxuries, they are necessaries. Life would be unbearable without them." By beautiful things she meant primarily not consumer items, but music, theatre, nature, literature, and flowers, although also velvets and silks. Despite her protestations, "at heart I felt that Berkman was right. Revolutionaries gave up even their lives--why not also beauty?" Berkman's intensity both repelled and attracted her; in his assault on Frick she recognized "something greater than personal ties or even love: an all-embracing devotion that understands all and gives all to the last breath."[xvi] In one of the most famous incidents in her life, a comrade reproached Goldman for her spirited dancing on the grounds that her frivolity "would only hurt the Cause." Goldman responded with a passion evident decades later when she described the incident in Living My Life:
I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prison, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.[xvii]
Yet she remained plagued by doubts "that I must be weak, that I would never reach Sasha's revolutionary, idealistic heights.... To the end of my days I should be torn between the yearning for a personal life and the need of giving all to my ideal." Perhaps she wondered whether C.E.S. Wood was correct in his assertion, in Mother Earth, that "anything that leads toward liberty is of more value than art, valuable as beauty is." Goldman thought than de Clyre, an ascetic and "revolutionary vestal" who bought a piano on the installment plan, failed to reconcile her two all-consuming passions, social revolution and artistic beauty. Goldman's drama lectures allowed her to square this circle by combining her love of literature with revolutionary agitation. Although she lectured widely on literature after 1910, giving entire courses on the modern drama and on great Russian authors, she not only used literature as a springboard for discussing social topics, but often alternated these lectures with more directly revolutionary talks on topics such as syndicalism and militarism. She often lectured once a day on literature, and gave a second lecture on social and economic topics. When Berkman, in the aftermath of the Lexington Avenue explosion, said that social activism was more important than her drama lectures, Goldman acerbically reminded him that her drama lectures supported Mother Earth and his own activities.[xviii]
Goldman deplored the absence of a serious American drama, which was throttled by capitalism and prudery. The United States, she said, was too busy coining the blood of the workers into profits to create great literature. Sectional and other issues distracted attention from the class war; social strife, however, was intensifying, and would, when combined with the yearning of some educated Americans for a more truthful existence, generate a great theatre. (After the publication of The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, which lamented the absense of significant American dramatists, Goldman discovered some Americans worth lecturing on.) Mother Earth intended to promote the "unity of revolutionary thought and artistic expression" and bridge the gap between the intellectuals and the insurgent workers. As Goldman said, even writers of genius required an appreciative audience. It was not enough to write socially conscious dramas; the audience had to be revolutionized if great literature was to be created.[xix]
Mother Earth published translations from and critical commentary on little-known writers such as Nietzsche, but did not foster a renaissance of the arts as it had hoped. Unlike The Masses, it did not discover great new talents. Although Goldman and others often excused themselves on the grounds that the United States was not yet ready for a genuine culture, other factors were responsible. Mother Earth was intended as an open forum for all insurgent tendencies in literature, art, and social commentary--in every sphere of life. Yet important writers shied away from association with the notorious Emma Goldman. Two authors asked for their manuscripts back even before the second issue was published, while the October 1906 issue commemorating Czolgosz scandalized many other potential supporters. Mother Earth, contrary to its intended purpose, became almost exclusively an anarchist publication. Most of the articles were written by a small number of regulars who were not primarily writers but agitators and had much else to occupy their time. While The Masses attracted the best work of great authors and artists by offering them a freedom denied by the mainstream press, Mother Earth published mostly self-educated authors who had no other outlet. Even Goldman and Berkman, despite their fame and felicity of expression, had to publish their books themselves through the Mother Earth Publishing Company (singificantly, Goldman's Social Significance of the Modern Drama was an exception.) As a result, Mother Earth only imperfectly fulfilled either of its intended functions. Berkman fumed that it did not reach the workers or focus on their concerns, conventional radicals condemned its extended treatment of issues such as feminism, birth control, and literature, while many leftists with ties to the mainstream worried about Goldman's pronouncements on assassination and violence. Goldman was at times was implacable in her demands, requiring that revolutionary writers break completely with mainstream, respectable society and give themselves unreservedly to the workers, as the Russian intelligentsia did. She ridiculed society matrons who attended a strike as they would a picnic, only to return to their luxurious life at the day's end; she criticized even Upton Sinclair and Jack London for dilettantism and profiteering from their associations with the labor movement.[xx]
Despite its ingenuity, however, Goldman's philosophy of literature romanticized the working class, exaggerating its receptivity to change. Goldman was convinced that modern literature was relevant to the working class, and that they could perceive its importance. In 1897 she lectured to coal miners during their lunch hour, 400 feet beneath the earth, their black faces lit with their headlamps. "Their eyes, deep-sunken, looked dull at first, but as I continued speaking, they began glowing with understanding of the social significance of Shaw's works." Yet she does not say whether any of the miners obtained any of Shaw's plays as a result of this lecture, whether his were available in their locality, or whether the miners were capable of reading them. Although she asserted that "the poor are more hungry for intellectual food, even than they are for pork chops," this observation was occasioned by lectures at an IWW hall. The Wobblies were not typical workers; like the anarchists, they combined revolutionary zeal with an appreciation for the best in modern philosophy, science, and literature.[xxi]
Goldman's concept of literature exaggerated the progressive sensibilities of the working class. "The inspiration of the true artist has never been the drawing room," she said. "Great art has always gone to the masses, to their hopes and dreams, for the spark that kindled their souls." Yet Goldman knew full well, from her own experiences of workers, how limited most of their dreams were, and how much focused on riches and comfort and how little on liberty and creativity. The "hopes and dreams" of the masses concerned largely their own material welfare, and their determination to remain or become socially superior to some other outcast group. As a nurse and midwife she was sobered by her contacts with those she wanted to liberate. "Their squalid surroundings, their dull and inert submission to their lot, made me realize the colossal work yet to be done to bring about the change our movement was struggling to achieve" she said.[xxii] Moreover, most workers were racist, sexist, patriotic, homophobic, and enslaved by capitalist property morality; no realistic depiction of the American working class could paint an inspiring picture of a struggle for liberty or dignity.
Goldman's views on the relationship of the intelligentsia to the masses contained a major contradiction. On the one hand, she demanded that the intellectuals go to the masses not to teach but to learn, and sternly admonished them that the workers were the real creators of culture. The Russian intellectuals "went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia." Yet after the Russian Revolution Goldman gave real agency to the intellectuals. In the darkest days of Czardom "the blood of the Russian martyrs had nurtured the seed of idealism in the womb of the Russian soil.... The message of the men and women with the white hands--the intellectuals... had borne fruit.... Through a slow and painful process, and at the expense of the best and finest of the Russian generations, this message was carried to the hearts and minds of the people, the peasants, the workers."[xxiii] Goldman's apotheosis of the creative minority, however incompatible with any idealization of the masses, properly recognized the retrograde culture of most workers, their need of ideas and impetus from outside their own narrow experience.
Yet Goldman's attempt to revolutionize the middle class was similarly based on unrealistic expectations. Goldman implicitly assumed that ignorance, not self-interest, underlay elite attitudes towards the workers; she implied that vividly showing the truth to those who profited by exploitation and misery would fundamentally change their actions. This is contrary to her recognition of class conflict and the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. She fully recognized that elite fatuities concerning the workers were not motivated by simple ignorance, but that ignorance and willfulness "are so closely related to each other they must forever stand and fall together."[xxiv] This being true, could the mere realistic depiction of the suffering of the workers evoke genuine commmitment from those who could pay to see plays or her lectures upon them? The problems of the middle class were distinct from those of the workers; there was no reason to suspect that a aficionado of Ibsen would care about the plight of the starving, or that prosperous audiences would transcend preoccupation with their own liberation and evolve an altruistic concern with the workers. Modern dramatists may convince the prosperous classes that their own lives are sterile, hollow, and constrained, but the elites can change their own condition without touching the basic structures of power from which they benefit. Even plays expressly designed to awaken social consciousness have limited effects because literature does not offer clear analysis of problems, much less concrete solutions. It arouses pity more easily than concerted action and is dilettante almost by nature. It can generate dissatisfaction, but seldom proposes remedies except upon an individual basis--the precise kind of action that cannot help the working class or any oppressed group, as opposed to isolated individuals within them. At any rate, as Goldman repeatedly insisted, any exploited group must liberate itself, rather than waiting for sympathy or help from other groups.
Goldman's synthesis of modern literature and revolution also failed because modernism in high culture was rapidly abandoning the social realism and plain language that Goldman favored in favor of absorption in formal technique and esoteric language undeciperable except by a trained elite. James Joyce once said that if he took ten years to write a book, his readers could take that long to read and understand it. In Goldman's day, literature seemed naturally allied to other forms of social ferment both because writers had to struggle to overcome censorship, prudery, and ignorance, and because of the subject matter of many plays and novels. This convergence was fast waning even as Goldman lectured on the social significance of modern drama.
An article in Mother Earth as early as 1910 signaled danger. "Tendencies of Modern Literature," by one William Zuckerman, described the "intense subjectivism" and reaction against realism that characterized recent literature. "Having chosen the soul as its basis, modern literature must necessarily be subjective and individualist, rather than objective and social.... To the modern writer society exists only in so far as it influences and affects the individual." Goldman favored both an individual, psychological analysis and a social, objective depiction, and considered Gorky, whom Zuckerman considered passe, the exemplar of true literature. Goldman could not approve of "this psychological current [which] naturally carries modern literature away to mysticism and symbolism" and, neglecting the social dimensions of life as irrelevant, ends in metaphysics. Nor could she celebrate Zuckerman's contention that "the artist is not a teacher, nor a philosopher.... This is not his work. He has a greater mission." Although Zuckerman optimistically concluded that the impressionistic subjectivism of the most recent authors was of "great service to humanity" and finally compatible with social realism, he nonetheless indicated trends that were increasingly to sunder modernism in art and radicalism in politics. The alliance of writers and labor radicals soon became a project that required conscious effort and never quite succeeded. The increasing gap between Margaret Anderson and her Little Review and Goldman proved symptomatic.[xxv] Goldman had a wide appreciation for variety in literature; she was confident she could appropriate Doestoevsky and Nietzsche for her cause. Yet emerging literary trends would prove less assimilable by radicals of any stripe.
III
Many of the plays Goldman discussed concerned marriage, the family, feminism, and sexuality, topics central to Goldman's own repertoire. Although Goldman stressed the relevance of her ideas to the working class, her cultural radicalism, despite her intentions, addressed the needs of the privileged more than those of the workers.
Goldman's main theme was the total freedom of the individual. Because of this, our contemporary distinction between "equality" and "difference" feminists was largely irrelevant to her. She demanded absolutely equal rights for women in all spheres of life, even while acknowledging that most women possessed a mothering instinct and a broader, richer conception of sex that differentiated them from men. Because she felt that each individual should develop her unique personality, and that all society should be organized to facilitate this, the possible existence of some differences between the sexes did not concern her.
Goldman and the anarchists, opposing the very existence of church and state, and disdaining public opinion and social pressure, consistently opposed all interference in the private lives of individuals. "Sex emotions and love," Goldman asserted, "are among the most intimate, the most intense and sensitive, expressions of our being.... Every love relation should by its very nature remain an absolutely private affair. Neither the State, the Church, morality, or people should meddle in it." No contract or verbal commitment could guarantee happiness, intimacy, or love; legal guarantees could not forestall the inevitable tumults and sorrows which were an important part of love and life. Love "offered out of duty, because of the marriage license, isn't the genuine thing." Love is a union between two persons "of different temperament, feelings, and emotions," each "a small cosmos in himself.... It is glorious and poetic if these two worlds meet in freedom and equality. Even if this lasts but a short time it is already worthwhile. But the moment the two worlds are forced together all the beauty and fragrance ceases and nothing but dead leaves remain." Goldman asserted that love and marriage are antithetical. Marriage, Goldman said, resulted from "the domestication and ownership of women." As early as 1897 she asserted that marriage and private property were twins, and that the abolition of marriage would lead to the end of class society and economic exploitation. Anarchists who claimed that women could be freed only after the abolition of capitalism, or that Anarchism would automatically free women, were wrong. "Many of my sisters could be made free even now, were it not for our marriage institutions which keep them in ignorance, stupidity and prejudice." The emancipation of women must precede rather than follow the social revolution because only economically independent women could raise a new generation capable of establishing an anarchist society. Goldman later quoted Havelock Ellis's dictum that wives were in effect scabbing on prostitutes by providing more and better services at a lower cost. She asserted that a prostitute is freer than a wife, for she can sell herself for a specified time to a man of her choice, "whereas the married woman has no right whatsoever."[xxvi]
Goldman evaluated the realities, rather than the form, of any relationship. She had friends who were married, but criticized exclusive possession in whatever form as limiting and coercive. So-called "free unions," she thought, could be as confining as legal marriage if habits, scruple, or tradition kept people together after the love and passion had gone. She approved multiple sexual partners--what was called "varietism"--although Ben Reitman's philandering sorely tested this belief. "Two people bound by inner harmony and oneness are not afraid to impair their mutual confidence if one or the other has outside attractions," she said. Jealousy "is not the result of love" but of male conceit and arrogance, his proprietary and conquest ethos, and of the economic dependence of women, whose only selling point to men was their sexuality.[xxvii]
Goldman proclaimed the centrality of sex to human personality, as important for women as for men. "Man [by which she meant women as well as men] "is much more a sex creature than a moral creature" she said approvingly. At one point she even claimed that, because sex "is the very basis of the weal or woe of the race," people could endure "political and religious tyranny and be comparatively happy if the freedom of the affections were but guaranteed." She attacked the double standard, but, unlike most feminists, demanded more freedom for women rather than less for men. She charged that the requirement of premarital chastity poisoned the lives of both sexes. She believed, in accordance with the most advanced science of her time, that sexual repression wrecks devastation throughout the whole of human personality. She considered the sexual awakening of youth as a naturally radient time, associated with poetic and intellectual strivings, but complained that it was often poisoned by moralism, repression, and ignorance. Girls and women suffered more than men. Social convention demanded that young men refrain from marrying until they could support a family; in the meantime, they were tacitly allowed a sordid and guilt-ridden, because secret, sexual outlet, often with whores. Because this diversion continued after marriage--Goldman claimed that half of married men frequented prostitutes--many men eventually contracted veneral disease and infected their wives. Their beloveds, meanwhile, were deliberately kept ignorant of sex even while being raised primarily as "a sex commodity"; this ignorance "cripples the entire life and nature of the girl." The young woman avoids sex while waiting for her future husband to earn enough money to marry her; she becomes "a faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and everyone else." Taught that sex is dirty, repulsive, and unwomanly, she cannot enjoy marriage. Her attitude drives her husband to prostitutes. "The marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of women" Goldman said sarcastically.[xxviii]
Goldman could have added another count to her indictment. A woman who waited for her betrothed to earn enough to marry her often lingered in a state of abject dependency and doubt. If one man had promised her marriage she could not readily seek another partner; while she waited, she forfeited other marriage possibilities. Yet her value on the marriage market declined as she aged, even while that of her putative husband rose with his financial prospects. The fate of the young woman, therefore, revolved around her man keeping his promise; yet the dissolution of old social bonds enabled him to betray her with relative impunity. The old institutions of family, church, and village opinion that might have compelled him to marry her in earlier times had lost much of their force; the man had gained mobility while the woman had not. He could escape the consequences of disgraceful behavior by moving to a different area or even to a somewhat different circle of friends and associates.
While women were not allowed to have sex or children outside of marriage, they were compelled to have them within marriage. Marriage during Goldman's lifetime included institutionalized rape; the husband had a legal claim on his wife's body and could use physical violence to "chastise" or "correct" her. In the twentieth century, laws against rape specifically exempted acts within marriage,[xxix] even as social norms, especially in the native-born middle class, increasingly admitted the wife's right to sexual pleasure and a sexual veto.
Goldman, like many feminists of her day, exalted motherhood as the greatest privilege of womanhood; unlike most feminists, however, she castigated marriage as profaning motherhood by making it compulsory. Motherhood, she complained, was sanctified in marriage, even if the child was conceived in hatred and rape by an overworked, sickly mother; a child born outside of marriage, even if the product of love and true communion, was despised. Goldman's experience as a nurse acquainted her with many a woman, poor and ill, "tied to a man she loathes, whose very sight fills her with horror, yet made to breed." Goldman exclaimed that "were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love." Many women risked mutilation or death from illegal abortions rather than become mothers; Goldman averred that there were 17 known abortions for every 100 pregnancies, and that many thousands of women were killed by illegal abortions every year. In Goldman's time, as many as one-half of urban families lived below the level of decent subsistence, and about one-third lived in destitution. In these poor families the infant mortality rate was 256 per 1000 births, three times that of relatively prosperous families. Between 12% and 20% of the surviving children in America's six largest cities were malnourished on the eve of World War I. Under such circumstances, the anarchists claimed, motherhood within working-class marriage was compulsory partly because capitalist society required low-paid wage slaves, soldiers, jailers, and scabs.[xxx]
Goldman recognized that marriage laws had a built-in class bias. Working-class wives, however battered or neglected, found escape from marriage extremely difficult. Lax divorce laws in Nevada, however, enabled those with the leisure, money, and knowledge to travel to Reno and secure a quick divorce. This privilege was possible only in an increasingly pluralistic, mobile, and affluent society, where marriage had become more of a form than a reality for some members of the elite. Marriage, Goldman charged, was a form of prostitution, where a father sold his daughter to the highest bidder; a rich woman could buy her freedom and sell herself to another man. A piece of paper made serial monogamy respectable; "the sanctity of the home is only for the poor."[xxxi] Middle-class women could also obtain birth control information and devices, denied to the poor, through their private physicians.
Goldman castigated marriage as a form of slavery for woman, an institution that grew out of the ownership of women. "The less soul a woman has, the greater her asset as a wife" she claimed. Goldman noted that women fled marriage, either by not marrying or by securing divorces, as they gained more education and economic independence. This was, in fact, a major reason why traditionalists feared women's emancipation. Working women, Goldman noted, married to avoid the slavery of factory work; but some had to continue working and many more returned to work when their husband fell ill, died, or deserted her. Many prostitutes were married and living at home, and plied their trade to support their families. Even a wife who avoids the factory, Goldman said, "learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him." The home belongs to the man, not the woman; she shrinks to its contours and becomes "a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house," where she cannot follow. "Wonderfully inspiring atmosphere for the bearing of life, is it not?" Marriage made women dependent and parasitic as well as subordinate; it "annihilates her social consciousness [and] paralyzes her imagination" and makes her look to others--her husband and the state--rather than to herself for protection. These conditions also made traditional motherhood "so helpless and dependent, so self-centered and unsocial as to fill me with horror"; Goldman considered mothers the most detrimental influence on their children. Marriage, like capitalism, exploited its victims and rendered them dependent, and then gave them a pittance back as charity.[xxxii] Goldman was only pointing to the grim realities of working-class life when she reminded her readers that neither the state nor men could adequately protect women.
Yet Goldman's strictures attracted more attention among prosperous Americans, imbued with the ideals of companionate marriage, than among ethnic, immigrant workers, for whom marriage remained more of an economic and procreative partnership. Working-class children, laboring in dangerous and squalid factories for a pittance, often contributed necessary family income, and supported their parents in their old age. Many a working-class woman who prosecuted her violent, abusive husband quickly petitioned to get him out of jail, because she and her children desperately needed his economic support.[xxxiii] Many workers had immigrated from conservative, patriarchal cultures which viewed women's position in the United States as positively subversive. Many were Catholics, and others traditional Jews. Immigrants of all sorts regarded the family as a "haven in a heartless world," a mechanism of survival, cultural identity, and upward mobility rather than as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. Working-class women often viewed marriage and the family as their only economic and social support rather than as the prison it increasingly seemed to some educated or economically independent women.
Goldman recognized that middle-class women married to escape their families, not factory work; yet she averred that they found motherhood and the household drudgery of the patriarchal household but another form of slavery. Goldman argued that respectable, middle-class daughters were more repressed than their working-class counterparts, who were freer, more expressive, and less bound by convention. Working-class girls played and danced and cavorted with men "and often follow the call of love and passion regardless of ceremony and tradition." In a passage which partly explains Goldman's infatuation with Ben Reitman, she described one of the tragedies of the modern, emancipated woman. "The higher the mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial mate who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not to lose a single trait of her character.... Equally impossible for her is the man who can see in her nothing more than her mentality and her genius, and who fails to awaken her woman nature."[xxxiv]
Goldman asserted that women--and here she surely referred to relatively privileged women--were restricted by "internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth--ethical and social conventions" than external constraints. "The revolutionary process of changing her external conditions is comparatively easy; what is difficult and necessary is the inner change of thought and desire." The concern for respectability and fear of public opinion, she said, afflicted professionals, many of whom feared involvement with a man in or out of marriage, much more than working-class women. "The dread of love for a man who is not her social equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession--all these together make of the emancipated woman a compulsory vestal" whom life passes by. Just as her work as a nurse and midwife had introduced her to the travails of the working class, so the Vienna scalp and facial massage parlor she briefly owned acquainted her with the loneliness and sterility of middle-class life. The educated, professional women who patronized her parlor claimed they were independent and emancipated because they made their own living. "But they paid for it by the suppression of the mainstream of their natures; fear of public opinion robbed them of love and intimate comradeship. It was pathetic to see how lonely they were, how starved for male affection, and how they craved children."[xxxv] Such women faced a dilemma: either marry, become legally subservient to their husbands, and forfeit their career for motherhood, or forgo love altogether. The opposition and inflexibility of employers and the hostility of potential husbands meant that most professional women had to choose between marriage and a career.
Most of the first generation of college women, therefore, never married, and those who did often did not have children. Yet they would not love a man, much less have children, outside of marriage. "Lacking the courage to tell the world to mind its own business, the emancipation of women was frequently more of a tragedy than traditional marriage would have been.... They had not become independent in spirit or free in their personal lives." Even so-called liberated women were slaves to the church, the state, and public opinion. "Until woman has learned to defy them all, to stand firmly on her own ground and to insist upon her own unrestricted freedom, to listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life's greatest treasure, the love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, to give birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated.... The most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweatheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate." Adding to women's isolation, companionate marriage was offset by social disapproval of the intense emotional bonds that women had formerly formed with each other. The custom of "smashing" became suspect, and close femimine attachments--"Boston marriages"--were becoming stigmatized as lesbian and deviant. Professional women, therefore, were forced to choose between a career (itself offering many fewer rewards than a male career) and any sort of love, affection, close companionship, and sexual expressiveness. Goldman was among the very few Americans to publicly defend homosexuality as natural and ethical.[xxxvi]
Goldman's exaltation of love and motherhood stemmed from her general emphasis on human relationships, joy, and creativity over more conventional material goals. She could not agree that bourgeois economic freedom could liberate women, or that women could become economically free in capitalist society. Goldman did not view any career in a capitalist society as liberating; she rejected any work in a hierarchical bureaucracy, under the direction of other people, and under conditions not of the individual's choice. Many women were among the "intellectual proletarians" whose situation she so perceptively analyzed. "We have seen [woman] exchange the narrow walls and lack of freedom of her home for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the office, department store, or factory" she said.[xxxvii] Money, power, and status, the holy trinity of career men and women, were immaterial to her. She recognized that most working women were herded into horrific, degrading, and dangerous jobs which paid less than a subsistence wage, and that professional women were denied promotions and paid much less than men for comparable work. Women of either class were sexually harassed on the job, and any wife who worked did double duty at home. The economic equality of women, in the sense of equal ability to compete for careers, seemed not only chimerical to Goldman but, even if real, only another form of wage slavery.
Goldman felt that prostitution epitomized women's plight in a capitalist, patriarchal, and puritanical society. Her analysis combined economic, legal, gendered, social, and cultural explanations into a comprehensive whole which resembles our best modern understanding more than the simplistic and moralistic opinions of most of her contemporaries. She blamed capitalism because overworked and underfed women prostituted themselves to feed themselves and their children. Almost 25% of the prostitutes interviewed by William Sanger were married and living with their husbands. Respectable society, Goldman charged, ignored the horrors of tenement life and capitalist exploitation, caring only about sensationalized tales of "white slavery." But "a cause much deeper and by far of greater importance" was the fact that "woman has been reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex." Horrible working conditions and a wretched home life drove many girls to commercial amusements and the company of young men as "the only means of forgetting their daily routine." Society encouraged young men to "follow the call of the wild," yet women were denied the information necessary to protect themselves. One small slip and they are regarded by society--and by themselves--as "depraved and fallen.... Thus society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of." Another cause is "the thoroughly American custom for excessive display of finery and clothes" which necessitated "money that can not be earned in shops or factories." Many respectable women sold their bodies for similar reasons to one man in marriage. "To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much is the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it to many.... The only difference lies in the amount received, and of course in the seal society either gives or withholds." Goldman observed that laws against prostitution only worsened the plight of the prostitutes by driving them out of brothels into the streets where they were preyed on by pimps and policemen. She concluded that the abolition of prostitution required "a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery." Prostitution symbolized women's plight because no class of women had real choice. Society forced every woman to be "a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of hapless children."[xxxviii]
IV
Goldman lived at a time of major shifts in the position of women, the organization of the family, and attitudes towards human sexuality. Her views on these subjects were not idealizations of an imagined past, as many historians claim anarchism was[xxxix]; nor were they an eccentric vision. Rather, Goldman's views were but the logical fulfillment of modern trends and ideas. In these areas of life as in others, Goldman was an unabashed modernist, who intrigued a segment of the elite.
In the early twentieth century, the separate spheres for men and women were eroding as women moved from the home into public spaces. The market economy and government performed many traditional female functions, such as the manufacture of textiles and clothing, the preparation of food, and the education of children, outside the home. Women followed those functions into the public world. Middle-class women benefited from this trend as they attended college, worked at professional careers, volunteered for various social reform movements, and shopped for goods previously manufactured at home. Gender differences, while still vital, were no longer the chief organizer of social life or the main source of personal identity. The emergence of a consumer society for privileged Americans also generated new values, as personal gratification and self-expression uneasily coexisted with the old virtues of frugality, discipline, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.
These epochal changes transformed marriage and the family. The middle class evolved a style of "companionate marriage" which emphasized self-expression, personal satisfaction, and mutuality alongside the old economic partnership focused on reproduction. Companionate marriage, in the words of John D'Emilio and Estelle Freeman, "redefined marriage in more egalitarian terms.... A successful relationship rested on the emotional compatibility of husband and wife, rather than the fulfillment of gender-prescribed duties and roles. Men and women sought happiness and personal satisfaction in their mates; an important component of their happiness was mutual sexual enjoyment." The middle class increasingly detached sex from procreation and acknowledged a female sexuality "as strong as, even if different from, that of the male." As the family ceased being the sole determinate of a woman's identity, sexual purity ceased being her main virtue. Some limited form of sexual expression before marriage (with her future husband) was tolerated. The centrality of sex to human personality was recognized, and the scientific study of human sexual practices begun. Children became more of an economic liability than an asset for the middle class. They were no longer economically productive as on the farm, while their proper socialization to middle-class norms required increasing effort and expense. Birth control halved the average family size between 1800 and 1900, and the decline was even greater in middle-class families.[xl]
Industrialization, urbanization, and consumerism eroded old constraints on personal behavior. Leisure time became commercialized and sexualized as heterosexual mingling occurred at dance halls and amusement parks and on auto excursions. Many consumer goods such as cosmetics and fine clothes appealed to sexual interest, while advertising used sexual themes to sell a myriad of other goods. Working-class forms of commercial amusement and sexual expressiveness percolated upwards towards the middle class. The old mechanisms of social control--village, family, church, and public opinion--dissolved in the impersonality, vastness, and pluralism of the new urban environment. Conservatives outraged over the new mores made sex, previously privatized, into a public, political issue as abortion and prostitution were criminalized and the Comstock law severely limited discussion of birth control and other sexual issues.
Goldman responded to these developments by following their liberating impulses to their logical conclusions. Although companionate marriage was a reform of marriage in the direction of equality and self-fulfillment, an adaptation to the new position of women and the possibilities of an urban society and a consumer economy, Goldman opposed reform in marriage as in economics and politics. She demanded abolition of marriage as well as of capitalism and the state. Her critique of marriage, however, was a logical extension of widespread ideas.
As the old functions of marriage attenuated in the face of social and economic change, marriage became a focus of intimacy, self-expression, companionship, and sexual fulfillment. The old compulsory ties between the sexes weakened as it became possible for men, and even some women, to live alone outside any family context and as sex became potentially detached from procreation. Marriage became laden with new "great expectations" that few actual marriages could fully satisfy.[xli] Yet the ethos of companionate marriage logically implied that any marriage which could not achieve these new purposes should be dissolved. When marriage was considered sanctioned by God for a transcendental purpose, and also as the foundation of an ordered society, it was virtually indissoluble. When the primary purposes of marriage became intimacy, happiness, self-fulfillment, and sexual ecstasy, it seemed logical to dissolve a marriage where one or both partners proved incapable of achieving these goals.
The new expectations of marriage were not only more subjective and lofty than the old purposes; they were also less likely to be achieved over a long period of time for both parties. This was especially true if both spouses had their own interests, friends, and personalities, and valued continual personal growth and the intense experience of life--as Goldman and the anarchists advocated. Couples who married when both parties were relatively young and inexperienced, when they neither fully knew who they were nor had the ability to evaluate others, would obviously experience strain as the partners matured, especially if sexual magnetism, rather than more fundamental compatibilities, was a main source of their attraction. The partners may well pursue different trajectories and change in incompatible ways even if they were well-matched initially. All of this was much more likely in a pluralistic, urban environment where a person's life course was much less predictable, than in a rural society, where a person's source of income, identity, residence, and status was to a much greater extent fixed early in life. The modern, urban world made each individual person far more complex, internally diverse, and changeable at the same time the new ideology of marriage made long-term emotional and intellectual compatibility between mates more important than ever before. The needs that husbands and wives expected each other to satisfy were much less defined and more amorphous and subjective, than previously. Men and women were still socialized for difference, rather than for camaraderie and communication, however; and this created a chasm between them. Goldman realized that raising boys and girls as persons rather than as half-persons would eliminate or lessen brutality and weakness, the extremes of both sexes. In that world, "men and women will be perfect companions, and the most enduring love is founded on comradeship."[xlii]
This blend of new imperatives and old socialization was reflected in a rising divorce rate; by 1915, 8% of all marriages would end in divorce. The nature of marriage was changing, in its expressed purpose, its equalitarianism, and its duration; it was gradually becoming a new institution with the same name as an old one.[xliii] Goldman advocated the total abolition of the institution, and the immediate and complete implementation of the new ideals.
Voltairine de Clyre's philosophy, captured the essence of the new trends and carried Goldman's philosophy to its logical conclusion. De Clyre almost rejected relationships of any duration and cohabitation in or out of marriage. "That love and repect may last," she said, "I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities." Couples should "maintain the distances." Love should not be "vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communion." De Clyre regarded the desire for permanency in any relationship as an illusion. "No matter how perfectly adapted to each other two people may be at any given time, it is not the slightest evidence that they will continue to be so," especially early in life when sexual attraction is so important. "The two are thrown too much and too constantly in contact, and speedily exhaust the delight of each other's presence. Then irritations begin. The familiarities of life in common breed contempt. What was once a rare joy becomes a matter of course, and loses all its delicacy. Very often it becomes a physical torture to one (usually the woman) while it still retains some pleasure for the other, for the reason that bodies, like souls, do most seldom, almost never, parallel each other's development." De Clyre warned that enduring love is impossible. "People will not, and cannot, think and feel the same at the same moments, throughout any considerable period of life; and therefore, their moments of union should be rare and of no binding nature." She rejected the claims of advocates of free love that they have solved the problem, which was not solely one of legal forms but with psychological dependencies, custom, and habit. "The bonds are there, the bonds of life in common, the love of the home built by joint labor, the habit of association and dependence; they are very real chains, binding both, and not to be thrown off lightly." Unlike Goldman, De Clyre viewed motherhood in matter-of-fact terms as one of many possible goals in a woman's life, and a goal which conflicted with most other goals.[xliv]
For all these reasons Goldman demanded a total revolution in the condition of women, a revolution that encompassed every aspect of life. She criticized mainstream feminists for their narrow concept of freedom, their timid demands, and their lack of class consciousness. "Most of them see their slavery as apart from the rest of the human family," she lamented. "The Feminists foolishly believe that having a man's role, or position, makes them free." Goldman similarly criticized the suffragists for believing that the vote would solve women's problems. She rejected all forms of political action as imposing the rule of some people upon others, rewarding corrupt politicians, robbing people of their self-reliance and integrity, and encouraging oppressed and starving people to think of themselves as free. Goldman believed that the self-activity of any oppressed group could win more than the vote, and "in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner."[xlv]
In addition to her strictures against voting in general, Goldman specifically criticized woman suffrage. She laughed at suffragist claims that women would purify politics, asserting that women were no better than men and that politics was corrupt because it was "the reflex of the business and industrial world." Most women, she thought, would vote to strengthen the instruments of their own enslavement--religion, the patriarchal home, and the state. Women also supported Prohibition and other repressive laws; "woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.... Woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power." Goldman asserted that countries and states that enfranchised women were no better governed than other jurisdictions. Women often supported reactionaries, and had not improved the conditions of workers, children, or even themselves by their votes. Women were enslaved "not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions"; in Russia, women achieved liberation "not through the ballot, but by her will to be and to do." In the United States as well "her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body" and "by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer" and "by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free."[xlvi]
V
Goldman's distinctive version of feminism expresses the strengths and weaknesses of her general philosophy, and reveals simultaneously the sources of her appeal and her isolation. She preached self-emancipation to women as to other oppressed groups. And it is a tonic for any victim of oppression to hear that they can, right now, take action to liberate themselves and achieve a full life; that they need not remain the mere passive victim of circumstances, nor await the social revolution or majority or ruling-group consent to their aspirations. Many elite women who had partially overcome the material barriers to equality by securing a career or an education thrilled to her declaration that "true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gains true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.... It is, therefore, far more important for her to begin with her own inner regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs." Goldman was correct in her oft-reiterated view that belief in the determining power of institutions and circumstances breeds passivity, fatalism, and acquiesecence in oppression. "The theory that man is a product of conditions has led only to indifference and to a sluggish acquiescence in those conditions." Yet her critique of marriage and the family, as of American life in general, would benefit from a recognition of the very real constraints that social institutions place on individual behavior, and the role that institutionalized oppression plays in generating conservative cultural beliefs among the oppressed. Generalizing from her own experience, Goldman demanded that all women simply declare their freedom, act upon it, and thus secure it. For most women, this was impossible. Alice Wexler has said that "her own success in establishing her independence led her to judge less successful women rather harshly and to underestimate the obstacles confronting them.... How the individual woman was to overcome institutionalized barriers to freedom and independence--low-paying jobs, lack of education, professional discrimination, absense of contraceptives and child care--remained unclear."[xlvii]
Feminists and suffragists had solid reasons for their cultural conservatism--reasons which went far beyond mere political expediency. Victims of oppression often cling the more firmly to what little space and source of social validation they have. In late Victorian America and beyond, women's limitation to the worst, lowest-paying, least satisfying, least-prestigious, dead-end jobs made the home and their roles as wives and mothers, however oppressive and confining, the source of whatever status, satisfaction, and sense of identity most women could have. Moreover, with the husband often absent and the women conceded superior aptitudes for child-care, the family and the home sometimes offered a modicum of real power to women, or at least more power than was available in those public spaces from which she was either excluded or relegated to the lowest ranks. When radicals attacked the only source of identity and validation that most women possessed before the radicals had transformed the larger social world to make more meaningful sources of identity available, they cut to the heart of everything most women could achieve and cherish. Radicals scoffed at everything that could protect most women or give their lives meaning, or give them some control, however tenuous, over their destinies. When Goldman demanded that liberation begin in the consciousness of individual women, she inverted the proper order of cause and effect. Her anarchist volunteerism, her neglect of structural determinates of identity and ideology, her rejection of any base/superstructure model, even one including race, gender, and other factors in the base, made her philosophy unrealistic and often harshly condemnatory of precisely those victims who most need sympathetic understanding. Marriage and motherhood, however terrible for many women, and confining for all, were perhaps the best options of the bad lot available to most women. Women were not simply cowed, passive participants in their own oppression; their ideology, their exaltation of marriage and the family, stemmed from their very real experience and interests in the world that actually existed. Moreover, such idealization was itself a bid for power within the home as against men; by asserting proper roles for women and men that differed widely from actual practice, they provided justification for women's needs and desires and a limitation on how far men could depart from the idealized norm.
Widespread female endorsement of female chastity and of prohibition had similar origins. In an age where effective birth control was simply not available to most women, and where the law gave the husband legal control of his wife's body up to and including legalized rape, women required some protection against the unbridled lust of their husbands. In an age where very few women could survive without the economic support of a man, women needed some way of securing a man and tying him to the support of a wife and family. In a time lacking effective treatment for venereal disease, indiscriminate sexual activity did endanger women as well as men. For these reasons, the feminist demand for a single standard of sexual purity incumbant upon men, rather than for a single, liberated sexual standard applicable also to women, made eminent sense. Sexual liberation initially liberated men, and liberated women mainly from the ability to reject sexual advances. Moreover, women who acknowledged their eroticism and acted on it often lowered themselves in the eyes of radical men, and probably themselves as well. As Marsh says, ambivilence and perhaps guilt are the inevitable feelings of pioneers who defy society.[xlviii] Such women also had much more difficulty resuming a conventional life than did repenitent men, especially if they had children. Many supposedly "liberated" men neither knew nor cared how to sexually satisfy their partners. Goldman could have all the sex she wanted without fearing pregnancy; and she supported herself in a manner obviously impossible for most women. She was almost immune to public opinion; in fact, she gained by her notoriety. Her contempt for women who feared the opinion of the Board of Education showed insensitivity to the plight of women who eked out a living as public school teachers.
Female attachment to religion also offered women not only false hopes and consolation, and not only injunctions to submissiveness, but also a limited source of cultural power--often the only form available to oppressed groups. Religious ideals, feminized since the early nineteenth century, afforded women a legitimate source not only of identity but of protection from their husbands. It conferred status and recognition on her, and imposed standards on the conduct of her husband above and beyond those imposed by law.
Prohibition is another case in point. Goldman railed against it as an infringement upon individual liberty; but some revolutionaries lauded it as condusive to working-class cohesion and discipline. Alcohol was a real threat to the physical, economic, and psychological survival of most women; feminists and suffragists who supported prohibition did so not from superstititous reasons but out of rational self-interest. Women were physically threatened by alcoholic husbands, who were prone to violence and abuse, and economically threatened by husbands who spent substantial portions of their poverty wages on alcohol, spent excessive time in taverns away from home, and sometimes incapacitiated themselves for work by excessive drinking. Drink was also related to prostitution, another threat to any wife's health and livelihood. Female moralism, far from being either "natural" or superstitious as Goldman thought, stemmed from the very real needs of women; it was a source of power for the largely powerless. Later feminists have confronted this same dilemma, that legal equality between the sexes in a world where women are actually economically unequal generates intensified oppression and inequality.
Goldman similarly neglected the social and cultural meaning of the vote. She was absolutely correct that neither the vote nor even economic opportunity would automatically liberate women; there is an essential cultural and volitional component to all freedom. Women did have significant impact on social policy and legislation before they secured the vote--more influence, in many ways, than they exercised in the decade after enfranchisement. Radicals of all sorts have found that pressure from outside the system often generates change within it; voting is no substitute for solidarity and organization. Whatever the limitations of electoral action as a means of achieving fundamental reform, however, the exclusion of women from the voting booth, from juries, and from political office, was obviously a major ingredient in their oppression not only in law but in economics and the household. Patriarchy, like white supremacy and capitalism, is an interrelated system of economic, political, social, and cultural power that must be confronted along the entire breath of its existence. Goldman and the anarchists properly stressed the cultural dimension of oppression, and called the oppressed of whatever group to immediate action of their own behalf; but they unduly neglected the legal and political aspects of oppression. Or, rather, they postponed confrontation with those constraints until that magic moment when the political state was abolished. They had no immediate program of collective action for women as they did for labor. Kropotkin, despite his anarchist principles, urged Russian anarchists to join the movement for a constitution and the franchise because that movement was the foremost insurgency in Russia; the anarchists belonged on the side of the people, fighting their battles even while seeking to extend them beyond mere political, parchment changes.[xlix] Goldman's harsh criticism of women and of female suffrage isolated her from one of the most vibrant, promising social movements of her time; it therefore limited her impact even while it contributed to the very conservatism of the feminists which she bemoaned.
Goldman's weakness here is exemplified in her attitude, and that of other anarchist women, towards the care of children. Goldman, of course, had no personal worries about children. This helped her ignore the very real problem of what to do about children conceived out of wedlock in the actual world in which she lived. Some of her pronouncements on this subject are simply fatuous. "A child born of love will always prove a joy and a comfort to its parents," she claimed, even while insisting that love is transient. When asked about the care of children outside of marriage, Goldman pointed to the many inadequacies of marriage and the traditional family: "Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing."[l] She pointed to the large numbers of orphans, of women and children abandoned by their husbands and fathers, the large number of children forced to work at an early age, often in virtual death camps, and to the millions of malnourished, ill-educated, and abused and neglected children living in traditional families. All this being said, the mere abolition of marriage and the family was no cure. The anarchists, opposed to all compulsion, simply could not acknowledge that people who have children can legitimately be forced to care for them or that some parents, particularly fathers, might not voluntarily do so. Marriage, the family, and female sexual purity provided some small protection to women and children. Vastly unequal pay and lack of day-care (which as an anarchist Goldman could not demand that the government provide) made single motherhood a true horror. Goldman did believe that an anarchist society would provide free childcare, but had no practical program for the present. Her intransigent opposition to the state undercut any practical proposals. On women's issues, Goldman had few immediate demands of relevance to the vast majority of women, other than the legalization of birth control.
The agitation for birth control, seemingly a cause of obvious benefit to all women, revealed the obstacles to change created by the social system. Class divisions among women, the cultural conservatism of many workers, and the economic necessities of the poor all rendered birth control a difficult fight. As Goldman recognized, middle-class women could obtain contraceptive information and devices from their private physicians, and therefore had no immediate personal reason to join the crusade. Goldman pitched her arguments primarily to the working class, arguing that if the poor had fewer children (or none at all), these children would be healthier. Their mothers, less burdened with a large, half-starved brood, would provide superior care and education for their children. Yet the women in poor, immigrant households were both religious conservatives and more subject to the authority of an overweening male than white, native-born middle-class women. Although many undeniably wanted fewer children, a large family was an economic necessity for poor parents. Children were essential contributors to the family wage economy from an early age, and the only hope of their parents for support in sickness and old age. The horrific death rate made it necessary for poor families to have many children so that some would survive.
Goldman also argued that if the poor had fewer or no children--if working-class women went on a "birth strike"--workers as a class would benefit because the capitalists would have fewer workers to exploit, and therefore pay higher wages. This argument reveals a fatal flaw in Goldman's individualistic ethos. For one, even if all workers drastically limited their family size, this would not necessarily decrease the numbers of workers because the capitalists could tap alternative sources of labor, such as immigrants, women, blacks, and other excluded groups. They could also further mechanize production. Second, even if birth control did affect the labor market and wages if generally practiced, any individual couple who limited their offspring would have negligible effect on wage rates but would impoverish themselves. Their wages would not rise, but their family income and old-age security would plummet. Most people of all classes wanted a family, which they perceived as central to their lives, expectations, and identities; they would not forgo this out of any illusory economic benefits to their class as a whole. Big Bill Haywood evoked the ire of some feminists when we demanded high enough wages for men so that women could have all the babies they wanted; Haywood's elite female backers wanted fewer babies, not more.[li] But Haywood's solution was necessary for the workers, and did not indicate any desire for large families. Experience has demonstrated that smaller families accompany or follow, rather than preceding. a rise in the economic, legal, and political status of women.
Goldman, of course, did not preach abstinence to the poor; she valued contraception precisely because it allowed a full expression of sexuality without harmful consequences. She did not ignore the economic aspects of women's oppression; she proclaimed that as long as women forgo children out of either moral taboos or economic necessity, "the emancipation of women is only a phrase."[lii] In sharp contrast to present-day radicals, however, Goldman did not romanticize the poor and exploited, or absolve them of all responsibility for their plight. Workers, however constrained by economic and social structures over which they had no control, neverthless did have agency and contributed to their own subjugation and degradation. Changes in their personal conduct could help alleviate their distress, even short of social revolution.
Goldman's philosophy is often distorted in contradictory ways. She is at times represented as an all-or-nothing "impossibilist," who disdained all compromise and repudiated all amelioration short of total revolution; at other times she is misrepresented as an idealist who believed that individuals could liberate themselves by a mere act of volition, even within the constraints of a capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society. Goldman avoided both of these errors; she properly saw the necessity of both individual emancipation and social struggle if human liberation was to occur. If many of her followers emphasized one aspect of her philosophy to the exclusion of the other, they did so because the American economic and social structure made combining the two so difficult. Individual and social revolution must occur together for either to be real; but either one seems impossible unless preceded by the other.
Goldman was correct in thinking that social revolution would protect women far more than traditional, patriarchial marriage did; she was also correct in encouraging women's quest for self-liberation in the here-and-now. But her realization of the necessity for total revolution, for complete economic, political, social, and cultural transformation contradicted her erroneous assertion that people, in particular women, could free themselves in the present simply by willing that they be free. Were that true, social revolution would hardly be necessary; individuals could simply demand and take their own freedom now, within the existing capitalistic, patriarchal, and white supremist structures. Cultural revolution, a transformation in the hearts and minds of the oppressed, must accompany economic, political, and social revolution; it cannot replace it. In thinking that it could, in thinking that individuals could by their own isolated action free themselves in the present without any larger social transformation--that, in fact, individual self-liberation would lead to or contribute to social revolution--the anarchists paved the way for the privitazation of cultural revolution, preparing for its detachment from larger socio-economic struggles and its reduction into mere lifestyle preferences expressed within the confines of an unchanged capitalistic, patriarchal, and racist society. Both by their energetic pursuit of individual reforms within existing society, and their insistence that individuals could in and of themselves achieve liberation, the anarchists therefore paved the way for the cooptation and domestication of their own proposals for cultural transformation. In Christopher Lasch's phrase, they confused culture with politics.
VI
Goldman's weltanschauung and lifestyle intrigued a spectrum of educated urban residents as much for its spirit as for its concrete details. The shift to a market economy, industrialization, urbanization, and massive emigration presented unprecedented opportunities for the flowering of individual human personality. The traditional constraints of family, village, church, and small employer dissolved under the impact of modern urban life. An old guard fashioned a substitute, overt government repression, for these organic controls. In many ways, government intrusion into the private lives of individuals intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Comstock law criminalized discussion of birth control and many sexual issues; abortion, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol were criminalized; marital rape was explicitly legalized; injunctions, police, the national guard, and the army suppressed strikes; blacks and migrant workers were disfranchised, and blacks lynched in record numbers; immigration of politically suspect individuals was prohibited, and anti-anarchist laws criminalized advocacy of the very methods which established the United States. Theodore Roosevelt used obscenity laws to squelch La Question Sociale, an anarchist publication, in 1903, while Mother Earth subscription lists were used as early as 1908 to deport anarchists.[liii] Local, state, and federal authorities created a massive secret police apparatus, which spied on suspected subversives, manufactured evidence, and suborned perjury. First amendment rights scarcely existed. The machinery of government intervented more directly into personal and private affairs as the "island communities" that had composed the United States disintegrated.[liv]
Meanwhile, new class of urban professionals evolved an alternate strategy for preserving and reconstituting order. They forged more subtle instruments of hegemony such as settlement houses, parks, "wholesome" amusements for the working class, welfare capitalism, conservative unionism, and consumerism.[lv] New and old constraints, neither of which had the force, the seeming naturalness, or the inevitablity of the small-town community in its prime, obstructed the new possibilities opened by the modern world.
The anarchists pressed the most liberating strains of the new social forms to their logical conclusions. They opposed all three forms of coercion--the traditional constraints of family, village, church, and small employer; the new repressions of the penal law; and elite manipulation of public institutions. They won some success because the old mechanisms of control were losing their force and the new ones had not yet won universal acceptance. Hegemonic forms of social control must seem inevitable, natural, and invisible--not really forms of control at all. In the early twentieth century, however, many forms of constraint, both new and old, seemed irksome, unnatural, and artificial. Along with new forms of largely hidden constraint came a genuine loosening of bonds. Individuals gained freedom to define their own personalities and lifestyles. The anarchists favored this trend.
The impact of modernization on personal and cultural life has been almost opposite from its effects on politics and economics. The centralized factory regiments workers much more intensely at work, but frees workers from the intrusive scrutiny of their employer off the job which characterized local, handicraft production. The depersonalization and anonymity of modern life generates anomie but also liberates individuals to construct their own lives and personalities without deferring to the opinions of anyone except chosen companions. Bureaucracy structures and regiments life, but its very impersonality, uniformity, and predictability frees the individual to achieve personal goals without suffering defeat from irrational or unpredictable events. Even centralization has genuinely liberating effects because local diversity accompanies national and even global uniformity. Many cultures, "taste publics," and lifestyles coexist within any single locale; individuals are much less defined by their place or birth or any ascribed status and much more by their own individual preferences. Subcultures, voluntary associations, and pluralist lifestyles multiply; internationalism, centralization, and uniformity go hand in hand with individualism, choice, and freedom. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individuals were losing control of the workplace, the political structure, and the chaotic urban life around them, but they--or at least that minority of white males who were full members of the old civil society--were gaining in personal autonomy, control, and freedom in their personal life. The modern world, therefore, is both more and less regimented than premodern society. Modern society can plausibly be viewed both as a soft variety of totalitarianism, insidiously shaping individuals without their knowing it, and as a fragmenting and fractured world where "everything solid melts into air," every bond is temporary and tenuous, and every individual and every group goes its own way, owing no common allegiance to anyone.[lvi]
Goldman lived in the time of this transition and vehemently opposed the coercive aspects of both the new and old orders while exhilerating in every liberating impulse. Her attacks on stifling conformity echoed those of mainstream progressives and reformers who worried about the decay of character and the loss of independence which, they thought, characterized their era. Their strictures vastly exaggerate the real autonomy of the old-fashioned "character-oriented" person, who was narrowly constrained by family, church, and small-town public opinion, to an extent almost unimaginable in today's secular, pluralistic, urban-industrial world. They also exaggerate the regimentation and conformity of the modern "personality."[lvii] The new forms of conformity demand that an individual become different people on different occasions and play contradictory and even incompatible roles at different times and places. This generates stress, uncertainty and confusion; coherence of personality may disintegrate under too great a multiplicity of roles, as one individual strives to meet contrasting expectations of a wide variety of people in a diversity of contexts. Yet multiplicity of roles can also liberate human personality from narrow confines and present greater opportunity for self-definition and choice among possible roles. The old demands for conformity imposed by family, church, and village were far more fixed and unchanging, and were for that very reason more total, more easily internalized and less obvious.
Goldman and the anarchists incessantly denounced the hypocrisy of modern life, the chameleon-like fitting into different roles and contexts. They denounced hypocrisy not in the premodern sense of a secret failure to adhere to recognized and internalized standards, but in the more modern sense of proclaiming allegiance to institutions, values, or beliefs that a person privately ridicules or detests. Old-time hypocrisy consisted of surreptitious and shame-filled depature from generally accepted norms which the individual actually believed on some deep level; new-style hypocrites privately scorn the offical norms even while scrupulously observing them. Modern society's very allowance and even encouragement of a wide variety of personality types, personal values and lifestyles, generates large numbers of individuals who are conscious of and hostile to remaining constraints on their conduct.
Goldman anticipated, and favored, our modern world of fractured "taste publics," in which each individual is a member not of one, solidary, all-embracing community into which she is born, but of many transitory (in duration and membership), partial communities which she freely chooses. Her ideal was not the atomized, isolated, frightened individuals cited by many critics of the modern world, but of free personalities who attain full self-development in and through voluntary communities, each self-chosen, distinct, and composed of different members. The same individual might enjoy Chinese poetry, German music, Mexican food, and African art, and associate with different individuals when pursuing these interests. This avoids the parochialism and fanaticism that too often results from primary identification with a single, all-encompassing community where a unitary culture, based on language, race, religion, or nationality, includes those who are born into it and excludes almost everyone else. Although Voltairine de Clyre once bowed to the widespread idea that each race makes its own distinctive contribution to world civilization, Goldman--and de Clyre too--believed that each individual should freely chose from among the riches created by all human cultures over thousands of years. Goldman, therefore, rejected "multiculturalism" in its contemporary sense in favor of an expansive individualism which encouraged each person to love the best human creations (as individually defined) in every sphere of life. Goldman believed that every individual could repudiate the inherited, provincial identities that bind them to a nation, faith, or tribe.
The problem with the early twentieth century was not, as Goldman and many of her contemporaries insisted, that individuality was threatened, but rather that it was imperfectly liberated. Massive immigration, the anonymity of the large city, and the concomitant growth of various taste publics and subcultures presented each individual with a much wider range of choice than ever before. The conditions for an explosive exuberance of human personality were in place, but new forms of economic exploitation and old forms of cultural taboo obstructed human liberation. Many individuals, sadly, proved incapable of exercising the new liberties afforded them; they lacked the inner, cultural resources to define and create themselves from an infinite variety of possible selves. Such people became confused, disoriented, alienated, and lost; they did not know who they were and lacked the capacity to find out. Such people clung ferociously to inherited cultural identities of race, nationality, gender, and religion--identities which are themselves artificial and socially created, although conceived as natural and eternal. Modernization at its best is disorienting, as old skills, values, and communities dissolve, and old, reliable sources of satisfaction, belonging, self-definition, and prestige evaporate. At its worst, when rapid change is combined with economic downturn, it generates severe counterpressures and yearnings for imagined, and past, forms of life.
Conflicting impulses also clashed in the realm of personal values and behavior. The emergence of a consumer economy for the middle class necessitated a shift in values from the old producer-economy ideals of thrift, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice to self-indulgence, self-expression, and spending. As Warren Sussman has said, "a society moving from scarcity to abundance required a new self... a change in the social order almost demanded a change in the people in it." This was manifested in "an increasing interest in self-development... with somewhat less interest in moral imperatives.... The vision of self-sacrifice began to yield to that of self-realization." Yet the new urban resident was torn between new opportunities for self-expression and new forms of demands for conformity--conformity not to relatively fixed and internalized norms of the village, but to ever-fluctuating, uncertain standards that were artificially imposed by the boss and one's own social class. Advice manuals only increased the individual's perplexity. "In virtually the same breath," Sussman says, "the reader is also urged repeatedly to 'express your individuality' and to 'eliminate the little personal whims, habit, traits that make people dislike you.'... One is to be unique, be distinctive, follow one's own feelings, make oneself stand out from the crowd" and at the same time appeal and conform to that crowd. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Sussman continues. "Every American was to become a performing self." People desired poise, charm, proper consumption, appearences both moral and physical, in general "making oneself pleasing to others."[lviii] In many ways, therefore, the constraints of respectability intensified at the very time that the transcendental, supernatural backing of morals became less plausible, all forms of social control were thrown open to doubt and corrosion, and the social structures that invisibly generated unconscious conformity dissolved. Behavior seemed more obviously directed towards the seemingly arbitrary expectations of others.
In such an atmosphere, Goldman appealed to the middle class in her general attitude towards life even more than with her specific proposals. In many ways her ethos was a consistent and forceful statement of values that were widespread in the middle class of her day. T. Jackson Lears has incomparably described the aspirations, fears, and condition of members of that class during the years that Goldman flourished. They required new meanings in life to replace those lost during the transition to a modern economy and culture. Their faith in a transcendental God was waning. Religion was less a vital presence and no longer informed all of life. It was more a matter of conforming to the conventions of the world, less a matter of intense experience as the terrors of hell and the ecstasies of conversion alike receded. The sense of community and belonging offered by the small town was vanishing, replaced by the anonymity and loneliness of the big city. Any sense of an ordered world based on predictable values seemed to evaporate amidst the chaos of urban life; urbanites' feeling of participation in and control over their community seemed tenuous. They were weathering the transmutation of what they believed to be their old autonomous independence into a not-yet secure berth in a hierarchical, bureaucratic meritocracy. For centuries, Lears reminds us, external constraints on personal conduct--the power of kings, priests, masters--had been on the wane, replaced by internal self-discipline; "oppression was replaced by repression."[lix] Yet In Goldman's day the old values of thrift, discipline, sobriety seemed threatened by the new values appropriate to consumer capitalism--immediate self-gratification, spending, personal indulgence, and good times.
All this led to what Lears, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, calls "weightlessness," a feeling of unreality, formlessness, reminiscent of Marx's phrase, "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." Goldman referred to this as "the uncertainty, the voidness, or all our social life." Moral values crumbled and old institutions such as the family suddenly seemed repressive or irrelevant. A middle-class person assumed many roles, depending on what he was doing and where; he moved from place to place, friends to friends, job to job. This resulted in a fragmented, commodified self, malleable to the demands of others. "Selfhood consisted only of a series of manipulable social masks," Lears says, assembled, dissassembled, recombined, sold, and manipulated for personal gain. "By the end of the nineteenth century the self seemed neither independent, nor unified, nor fully conscious, but rather interdependent, discontinuous, divided, and subject to the play of unconscious or inherited impulses." Moral responsibility, indeed moral personality, seemed to dissolve under such circumstances. Neurasthenia, or lack of nerve force and energy, became the disease of the era. Vaporous lives, frenzied and yet also comfortable and purposeless, resulted from the frantic struggle for existence, from internal repression, and from material and spiritual ease. "Personal identity itself came to seem problematic" Lears says. ".... For many, individual identities began to seem fragmented, diffuse, perhaps even unreal. A weightless culture of material comfort and spiritual blandness was breeding weightless persons who longed for intense experience to give some definition, some distinct outline and substance to their vaporous lives." Elites were aspixiating, "suffocating in their ease, weightless in their lack of significance."[lx]
Yet benefits accompanied these afflictions. The decline of religion and of fixed moral rules liberated some individuals for a freer, more satisfying, more authentic existence, determined by their own needs and interests rather than ancient superstitions and arbitrary rules. The decline of the compulsory village community with its unitary standards allowed individuals to voluntarily form their own communities--professional associations, reform organizations, and private clubs--and to associate with a wide diversity of people for different, self-chosen activities and purposes. Goldman's anarchist emphasis on free associations based on mutuality and common interest appealed to a middle class organizing itself in just such associations.[lxi] The fragmentation of the self was also a broadening of the self, the use of a greater variety of talents, capacities, and qualities; individuals became more complicated, internally diverse, and sophisticated. The growth of interpersonal dependency generated by an ever-widening market allowed the middle class to enjoy unprecedented wealth and an ever-expanding array of new consumer goods. Even the replacement of the economic independence of the autonomous entrepreneur by a career in a hierarchical bureaucracy offered many advantages. The small-town entrepreneur or yeoman farmer was in fact dependent on the good will and help of his neighbors for credit, customers, help in times of need, and companionship. He was also dependent on the weather and the market. He was not truly independent; the autonomous, self-made man was a myth. The new corporate bureaucracies offered somewhat more of a career open to talent, a mileau where following the rules and working one's way up came to offer at least as secure a livelihood as the old dependence on the whim of a patron, master, or solidary community. The middle class of Goldman's day cried out for self-expression partly as a reaction against the foreclosure of the old values of autonomy and independence by the increasingly dominant hierarchical corporate bureaucracies, and partly in response to the very real opportunities for genuine self-expression afforded by urban, industrial society.
But the new choices and freedoms were not only incomplete and stimied by new and old economic and cultural restraints; they also proved threatening and bewildering because they undermined every inherited form of social cohension and personal identity. The newly prevalent opportunities for personal self-definition threatened every inherited hierarchy of class, race, and gender and undermined traditional moral codes. The vast mass of workers and farmers lost not only whatever economic independence and political power they had possessed but their very cultural identities, while even many powerful white men doubted whether they could control the dissolving forces of modern energies. The main beneficiaries of the liberating tendencies were elites with the economic resources and cultural confidence to take advantage of the new possibilities.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries draped themselves in the mantle of traditional values and practices. Throughout history, advocates of radical change have appropriated old symbols and languages for the cause of social transformation. In Goldman's day, workers, farmers, feminists, and middle class radicals claimed to hark back to tried and true verities and to defend venerable ways of life against the onslaught of industrial capitalism, even as they advocated substantial departures from received customs and radical modifications of ancient institutions. Emma Goldman was one of the handful of radicals who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embraced change, in rhetoric as well as action. She often referred to herself as an "avant-garde" and exulted that "the life of the avant-garde [is] the only life worth living." She wholeheartedly embraced the cultural possibilities of the new industrial, urban world. "Those who decry the evils of the city should go to the small towns of America," she said. "They would soon realize that the city, with all its misery, represents life, motion, change, and interest, as against the lethargy, stagnation, and self-sufficiency of the average American town." Goldman and her circle regarded anarchism as "a new world-philosophy" that was heir to all that was best in "the social, scientific, artistic and economic currents of past generations." They read, quoted, and popularized the most recent figures in all disciplines. While they did not echo the Marxist claim of "scientific socialism," they did consider science as their own.[lxii] Goldman felt that one of the worst effects of economic exploitation and overwork was that it deprived the workers of the time, energy, and capacity to immerse themselves in modern literature, art, science, and philosophy. She claimed that anarchists tried to understand human life in all its complexity rather than judge human conduct.
Even Goldman sometimes resorted to such language. She often condemned Americans for desecrating the ideals of their founding fathers, and claimed that Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other [slaveholding] paragons of liberty would be ashamed of their descendants. The religious imagery of Golgotha, of a martyr voluntarily sacrificing themselves for the good of mankind, suffused Goldman's and Berkman's self-images. Other Mother Earth writers had a more realistic understanding of the origins of the United States in genocide and slavery. Yet although Goldman consciously, and to her embarrassment, used hypocritical appeals to alleged national virtues to quiet a mob in England, her legerdermain concerning America's alleged long-lost purity and liberty seem to have been largely unconscious. However, Goldman displayed the limits of her use of traditional rhetoric at her trial for obstructing the draft in 1917, an occasion when she might be expected to stress traditional values and symbols. She told the court that "there has never been any ideal--though it be ever so humane and peaceful--introduced for human betterment which in its place and in its time was considered within the law." Jesus, the writers of the Declaration of Independence, and the authors of the Constitution "were the Anarchists of their time." Yet although she wanted to lay claim to patriotism, it was of a most qualified sort, and not calculated to impress the judge. "The kind of patriotism we represent is the kind of patriotism which loves America with open eyes.... We love America, we love her beauty, we love her riches, we love her mountains and her forests, and above all we love the people who have produced her wealth and her riches, who have created all her beauty, we love her dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty.... But with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the alter of the Golden Calf."[lxiii]
While many thoughtful observors of every political persuasion worried about the disintegrative effects of industrial capitalism, urbanization, immigration, and other massive social changes on old values and institutions, the anarchists most often exulted in the destruction of every form of constraint, every old custom and belief. To those buffeted and confused by change, Goldman offered the joyous tidings that "eternal change, thousandfold variations, continual innovation are the essence of life." The liberated spirit would live, fight, and die for ideals even while knowing that they are "not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself." Goldman repeatedly insisted that life and freedom were processes, not static attainments, that the struggle for liberty more than its attainment "develops all that is strongest, sturdiest, and finest in human character." She threw down the gauntlet: "To the reckless belongs the world." Indeed, so enthusiastic were the anarchists about the turmoil and upheavals that surrounded them that they sometimes sloppily attributed all the epochal changes and dislocations of the day to anarchism. Berkman rejoiced that "in every phase of human activity the Anarchic spirit, the conscious breaking of old fetters and constant striving for greater liberty, is manifesting itself in no uncertain manner. In art and science, in literature and the drama, in education and the rearing of children, in the family and the attitude of woman--everywhere there is going on a progressive breaking of ikons, a bold and determined seeking of new paths.... What are all these but manifestations of the Anarchist spirit, the creation of new human and social values?" Goldman similarly enthused that "almost every time-worn institution and belief is undergoing a revision," though she added, as Berkman usually did, that automatic social processes would not bring liberation to anyone; every advance of liberty "has been gained only after a defiant battle with the forces whose only logic is the club and gun."[lxiv]
Goldman managed to square the circle for moderns caught between the old emphasis on transcendental moral demands and the new stress on self-expression by transmuting self-expression and self-fulfillment into unconditional moral demands. The anarchists, she declared, "have declared war on every institution of today, based on hypocrisy, sham, and the destruction of life and happiness." She resolutely declared her independence from all inherited, prefabricated cultural identities that limited and deformed human individuality, from "the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life." To those who worried that all values were in flux and the standards of success constantly shifting, Goldman offered the reassurance that "the only success of any value has been the failure of men and women who struggled, suffered, and bled for an ideal, rather than give up, or be silenced." She lived her belief that "the ideal alone is worth living and daring for." Mother Earth exhorted its readers, in words reminiscent of older generations of American reformers: "Let us resolve to emancipate, to separate ourselves from statutes and dead rules in every walk of life. Let us make our own conscience the leading principle in our lives."[lxv]
Goldman confronted the existential moral dilemma of modern personality. Morality, she insisted, was not imposed upon people from above by some alien being, as a code essentially foreign to human nature; rather, it was self-chosen, the fulfillment rather than the negation of personality. Her belief that the Moral Life was an essential part of the Good Life--in fact, that the Good Life consisted of the Moral Life, that virtue was its own reward--places her in a long line of ethical theorists from Socrates and the Stoics to John Rawls. Yet in adhering to our moral choice, which defines us, we must risk suffering and even death. That we have created and chosen our ideal, rather than allowing us to forsake it under pressure, obligates us the more to cleave to it as to that which we most cherish.[lxvi]
Goldman addressed a middle class which both doubted the reality of a solid, moral core at the heart of human personality and the efficacy of human will and individual action to affect the course of history. Her attacks on the Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism must have resonated with moderns worried about other determinisms, environmental and herediatarian, that also undercut human will. The Freudian emphasis on the unconscious and on subliminal impulses similarly cast doubt on the individual's ability to rationally and morally determine his or her own conduct, and therefore on free will and moral responsibility. These philosophies were only the intellectual concomitants of the seeming loss of material and social independence which afflicted many Americans. In an era of massive corporations, gigantic machines, and a national market whose fluctuations devastated people who could neither control nor understand them, the ability of any person to determine even the course of her own individual life became increasingly suspect. Goldman's strident proclamations reassured the doubters that they did matter, that their own values, decisions, and personalities could prevail against all the forces of circumstance. In a world increasingly impersonal, Goldman insisted that personality and moral stamina mattered and could triumph over all tendencies towards homogenity, conformity, and powerlessness. This partly motivated her extollings of attentateurs and her rejection of the orthodox Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism.
Goldman did not realize, any more than did any other philosopher or social commentator, precisely how her ethos responded to the urgent needs of the "brain workers" and intelligensia of her day. Yet her strictures against hypocritical conformity to dead usage, to institutions and values repudiated in one's heart, which she aimed primarily at workers and radicals, roused some members of the American elite. Despite her affinity for the exploited working class, she found that "the intellectual class, aye, even the people of the upper class, turn to Anarchism because of its breath of life, its freedom, its humanity, its firm and uncompromising attitude against all sham and hypocrisy."[lxvii]
VI
Although Goldman's ethos and practical proposals resonated within a segment of the middle class, her appeal to the "intellectual proletarians" could not win them for anarchism or social revolution. Long-term structual reasons explain her failure. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many formerly secure, independent native-born white males--small businessmen, professionals, skilled craft workers, landowners--felt threatened and in danger of being crushed between a rising plutocracy above and insurgent workers below. By the time Emma Goldman was deported, however, these dangers had largely passed.
Small businessmen and independent professionals did not disappear as many radicals predicted, but retained a niche within a centralizing economy. Those who did lose their independence as formerly defined found a secure berth in the new corporate economy. The emerging corporate bureaucracies provided relatively secure employment and a real social stability and mobility to those with education and skills. The new economic order was, in fact, more of a genuine meritocracy than the old small-town world of personal farms and businesses; birth and connections remained significant, but credentials and impersonal merit as defined by stated criteria gained more importance. The old elite persisted, augmented by newcomers from the ranks. The widening variety of appliances and other products made consumerism a real benefit to those who could participate in it. Social status and mobility was redefined not as independence, but as a career in a hierarchical, bureaucratic hierarchy garnished with an ever-increasing variety of consumer goods. Meanwhile, the expanding and newly confident middle class achieved greater personal expressiveness as it took advantage of modern, urban society by effecting changes in marriage, child-rearing practices, education, sexuality, and styles of consumption. The limited success of many of the reforms that Goldman advocated enriched the lives of white collar workers, professionals, small businessmen, and other urban elites. Literature, music, and dance broadened and incorporated exciting, exotic, but tamed impulses from blacks and the white working class. The middle class, therefore, benefitted economically, socially, and culturally from the changes of the early twentieth century, especially from many of the specific issues and reforms which Goldman championed.
Any hope for an alliance between a revolutionary workers's movement and insurgent intellectuals and middle-class professionals was dead by 1920. Most radicals who had thought about the subject, including Max Eastman as well as Emma Goldman, realized that the workers could win a significant portion of the middle class only if the workers were themselves organized in militant, powerful economic and political organizations; if workers organised themselves, dissatisfied professionals and "brain workers" might cast their lot with them, seeing in the working class a social formation capable of achieving their own goals. This alliance with an organized working class would itself change the consciousness and goals of the middle class and redefine the parameters of American politics by vastly expanding the range of the possible. The destruction of militant working-class organizations by government terrorism and violence thus crushed any possibility of a trans-class alliance. Members of the middle class saw their economic interests as contrary to those of the workers, but their cultural imperatives also diverged. The IWW, and to a lesser extent the SP, fostered cultural revolution, but government terrorism and violence had crushed them by 1920. The AFL, itself in retreat, was culturally conservative, seeking respectability and acceptance on the basis of old racial, gender, and patriotic stereotypes and moral codes; most unorganized ethnic workers sought refuge in their buffeted ethnic subcultures or in a wider, but intensely conservative, Americanism. Middle-class Americans who favored cultural experimentation and a loosening of old constraints found much of the working class (as well as a large segment of their own group, especially those from small towns and rural areas) opposed to their projects.
Harry Kelly raised another difficulty when he reminded anarchists that mere self-expression was a frail reed upon which to base a social movement. He realized "there is not enough idealism in the desire for self-expression to maintain a strong, healthy movement." Rather than participating in a dangerous and exacting movement, most individuals could achieve greater self-expression for themselves either by working within the system or by ignoring the system entirely and living inconspicuously according to their own values. Goldman argued that appeals to economic self-interest were self-defeating because people who joined the cause in hopes of economic betterment would desert when they became prosperous. Kelly applied this insight to appeals based on personal liberty. The individual who attained personal freedom would rest content, saying that "the revolution is here--for me." For such people, "Anarchism was a personal thing. They were the centre of gravity; they rebelled against conditions because the latter restricted their actions and their liberty." Yet Kelly's solution itself revealed a common confusion in anarchist thought. He simultaneously called for greater idealism, altruism, and self-sacrifice and said that anarchism "must have an economic basis; it must become more a mass movement and much less an individual one.... Anarchism does not concern itself with any special theory of economics, but an economic base there must be, unless it is to become an abstraction." Kelly's conflation of idealism with collective economic interest and his demand that anarchism attain an "economic base" without proposing "any special theory of economics" indicate chasms at the heart of anarchist theory.[lxviii]
Intellectuals and artists, another proposed anarchist constituency, also gained a measure of liberation during this era. Avant-garde literature and art won increasing acceptance but it also diverged from realism and a preoccupation with social themes, which was compatible with mass-based radical politics, into a preoccupation with form and esoteric, symbolic meanings, which was not. Radical literati such as Max Eastman and Emma Goldman who were au current in 1910 seemed relatively dull, conservative, and old-fashioned by 1920.
Goldman's cultural version of anarchism lent itself to cooptation precisely because it was practical, specific, and engaged in the pressing issues of her time, rather than the all-or-nothing irrelevancy that most historians see in anarchism. Goldman began her very first lecture tour by parroting John Most's line that the eight-hour day was a bauble and a distraction from social revolution. An elderly man, however, undermined her thesis. "He said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week" Goldman recounted. It was legitimate for young people to take lightly. But what were men of his age to do? They were not likely to live to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system. Were they also to forgo the release of perhaps two hours a day from the hated work? That was all they could hope to see realized in their lifetime.... Should they never have a little more time for reading or being out in the open?" From that moment on, Goldman engaged in the real struggles of her day even as she fomented total social and cultural revolution. Her experiences as a nurse and midwife among the poor accentuated her practical bent. She saw women dying of childbirth or giving birth to sickly infants in squalid tenements. "After such confinements I would return home sick and distressed, hating the men rsponsible for the frightful condition of their wives and children, hating myself most of all because I did not know how to help them.... Now that I had learned that women and children carried the heaviest burden of our ruthless economic system, I saw that it was a mockery to expect them to wait until the social revolution arrives in order to right injustice. I sought some immediate relief from their purgatory, but I could find nothing of any use."[lxix]
Goldman therefore engaged in specific issues such as birth control, prison reform, free speech, the modern school, and modern literature. She considered that free schools such as "the beehive" in France or the Ferrer Center in the United States could achieve wonders even under capitalism.[lxx] She recognized, however, that free schools only reached a tiny minority of children, and that their graduates would have to make their way in a brutal, competitive, unchanged world. Goldman faced a perennial radical dilemma: radicals must chose between an alienating, irrelevant, and dogmatic "impossibilism" or a concrete, practical reformism. They can link the two and claim that genuine reform is possible only by revolution and that individual evils can be ameliorated but not abolished by tinkering; but they have no guarantee that their audience will agree. The American political system is relatively open to discrete, single-issue, isolated reforms that leave the roots of every problem untouched; it has marginalized, by terrorism and violence or ridicule and ostracism, those who advocate meaningful structural change that would effectively alter the distribution of wealth and power.
William C. Owen, a contributor to Mother Earth and eventual founder of his own ephemeral journal, discerned both the strength and weakness of Goldman's appeal. He criticized intellectuals in the labor movement for distracting and alienating the workers with abstruse theories and neglecting their real needs. "I know reputed Socialist speakers who never fail to remind their audiences that, without a knowledge of half a dozen sciences, it is impossible to understand the social question. They bewilder and dishearten the common man, and they make me tired.... Eliminate premature theories; concentrate on pressing facts. The former will keep you what you are at present--wrangling sects. The latter will give you the magic touch of nature that makes all men kin." He advocated stress on immediate, practical issues, down to and including the dog tax, and extolled Goldman for following this method. He praised Goldman because she emphasized not the theoretically best form of ultimate land tenture, but that Weyhaeuser Corporation owned 32,000,000 acres, and because she attacked religon for its present abuses, not for the errors that Moses made millenia ago. Goldman personified and applied general theories to concrete, practical issues; this is "the proper method because it is at once the scientific and the dramatic method."[lxxi]
The radical challenge is how to prevent individuals interested in the dog tax from pursuing only that, to the neglect of larger social goals, and how to convincingly relate all the various social problems in a fashion that will make their interconnections inescapable. Goldman herself did this; she used her specific lecture topics as entrees into the larger issues of social organization and anarchist philosophy. At the same time that Goldman pursued immediate reforms that would benefit the working class and other people, she maintained that no reform could fundamentally alter anyone's situation. Her criticism of settlement house workers as doing more harm than good, quoted above, illustrates this aspect of her approach.[lxxii] This dilemma, straddling the chasm between a sterile, irrelevant utopianism and a meaningless, fatuous reformism, bedevils radicals of all stripes, regardless of their particular position. The divide between reform and revolution, however, is too great to bridge.
Margaret Anderson said that "Emma Goldman's genius is not so much that she is a great thinker as that she is a great woman; she preaches, but she is a better artist than she is a preacher." Anderson felt that form, not content, was most important in art and in life, and said that she would refute Goldman's position "by applying my theory to her life." Anderson and others exalted Goldman's life as itself a work of art; they admired her courage, her outspokenness, and her creative engagement with the most significant issues of the day. They loved and believed in Goldman, but not in anarchism. Although Goldman often equated herself with anarchism--an identification the authorities were only too willing to foster--her admirers made a crucial distinction. They appropriated many of her ideas for their own purposes, as indeed she would, on some level, have them do. They advocated many of her specific ideas while detaching them from her larger, revolutionary context. They sought to embody the spirit of her life as an unending quest for perfection and freedom while redefining her ultimate objectives. Van Valkenberg, a contributor to Mother Earth, wrote Goldman in exile that "yours was a personal following, and when the gates were closed behind you none were prepared to pick up the work where you had been forced to drop it."[lxxiii] Any movement which heavily depends on charismatic figures, rather than on a mass insurgencies generated by basic structural changes, is vulnerable to government repression.
Goldman's philosophy lent itself to such piecemeal appropriation. She demanded that every individual think for herself, rather than uncritically accept what she or anyone else said. Although she related capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other social diseases, she eschewed any totalizing theory, except perhaps an unconditional demand for full human liberty. She stressed that her Ideal was not a static attainment but an active process, not a fixed state of being but eternal becoming. Like Edward Bernstin, she thought that the end was unattainable or unimportant; process, not stasis, was her ideal and indeed her goal. This is, of course, partly a consolation for defeat, echoed by other defeated radicals; but it also implied that we can live a full life in the present, before the revolution. If freedom consists in the fight for freedom, we can be free even now. Goldman, insistent that individuals make society, not society the individual (even as she blamed society for the warped and stunted people it contained) struggled against her recognition that capitalism, patriarchy, and racism warp us and deform even our fight against them. But if we can live a worthwhile life in the present, if we can attain freedom today, what is the need to reconstruct society? Goldman answered that liberty and meaning were achievable only in the quest for social revolution; that they were not attainable in isolation, as privatized goods. The only decency, civilization, and freedom in a brutal, savage, and slave society consisted in a struggle against that society. But others disagreed, and appropriated Goldman's emphasis on the possibilities for immediate liberation and partial reform for the use of private satisfactions and ameliorative reforms.
Goldman never claimed that any individual could free herself in the present; she emphasized the necessity for cultural and economic reconstruction of society. There was, however, one way in which we could liberate ourselves right now, and that is in fighting for freedom. The fight for freedom, self-development, and social progress is itself the only freedom humanity could ever really experience, Goldman believed. This would be true even within an Anarchist society; the Ideal is elusive and ever-receding. If all Goldman's present dreams were instantly realized, others would take their place, as far from her realized vision as it is from present society. We can liberate ourselves, Goldman asserted, from conventional moral codes, hegemonic discourses, sexual taboos, from racism, sexism, patriotism, and all prefabricated sources of personal identity; we can forge our own personalities according to the dictates of our own choice. Freedom equals the complete and harmonious development of all our human capacities, in communities with others; and we can approximate this now by our own efforts.
Most people, however, missed Goldman's meaning. Even sympathetic critics like Max Eastman misconstrued her as merely seeking the bourgeois ideal of freedom as the absense of external constraint; less sophisticated observors misunderstood her entirely. Members of the elite construed it as a call to personal fulfillment detached from all social consciousness or struggle; literati harked to its demands for creative freedom; excluded groups sought freedom in an important yet instrumental sense as the ability to vote or earn a decent wage. As Henry May has remarked, people must be within a culture in order to find that culture constraining, or to break out from it.[lxxiv] Blacks, women, immigrants, and workers, in fighting for admission to the American dream, unconsciously validated that dream as in itself essentially worthwhile, rather than a nightmare. For their variety of contradictory motives, therefore, almost all of Goldman's audience took away from her lectures and books their own message, which was only a part of Goldman's world-view. Too often this single aspect of Goldman's philosophy, rather than being a partial fulfillment of the whole, was in fact a repudiation of her intent.
Goldman fostered cultural changes with the greatest appeal to segments of the middle class who were socially secure but culturally dissatisfied and experimental, who tasted some liberation but wanted more. The changes she advocated were usually logical extensions of those already winning acceptance. In education, sexuality, literature, work, feminism, birth control, and in her entire ethos of individual self-expression and individualism, she attacked conformism and the stifling aspects of the new world that conflicted with the liberating aspects she wanted to encourage. Most of her crusades were extensions of relatively elite forms of cultural adaptation and protest. Indeed, one of her strengths, as Floyd Dell noted, was her combination of a middle-class sensibility and agenda with working-class experiences and roots. Similarly, she bridged the gap between the immigrant anarchist enclaves and the American reform tradition.[lxxv] In many ways she was a transitional figure. But her cultural agenda had a greater chance than labor issues of winning some success because they secured some elite backing, did not interfere with profits, and in fact furthered the "culture of consumption" required by the newly emerging form of capitalism. Individuals could experiment with many of the changes she advocated, integrating them into their lives without embracing radical change or engaging in public agitation of any sort. Goldman and Berkman felt themselves in tune with the trends of modern history because many of the old beliefs, constraints, and institutions they attacked were dissolving; but new new forms of regimentation and social control, and more subtle forms of hegemony, were coming into being. In opposing them, the anarchists were less successful.
Many people besides the anarchists believed that life was a process and that deep, rich, intense experience was the hallmark of a good life. They reconceptualized virtue not as a static attainment of certain goals or qualities but as "conduct consistent with the demands of a growing personality." They valued intense, exuberant, authentic experience even more than happiness. Middle-class forms of self-exploration included depth psychology, mysticism and "new thought," a fascination with more "primitive" cultures and with outcasts from modern society, and the cult of the medieval warrior. The new psychology rejected the old focus on static faculties, stressing instead "the psche as a dynamic organism interacting in constant process with its environment." Bergson's philosophical vitalism and Dewey's progressive educational philosophy were similar manifestations of the same spirit. Even some varieties of Protestantism adapted to these new expectations; modernist ministers stressed that Christianity meant self-fulfillment rather than the self-abnegation and repression it had for centuries.[lxxvi]
VII
Goldman's problem in keeping self-expression related to, and yet distinct from, social revolution, is epitomized by her fight for free speech. Some anarchists, conflating the subjective need of an individual for self expression with the social need for revolution, defended violence on the grounds that the free speech of workers was routinely throttled; denied the peaceful expression of their views, they turned to violence as a last resort. Referring to one of the victims of the Lexington explosion, Leonard Abbott claimed that "If Caron and his comrades had been allowed the normal avenues of expression, they would still be living men." Even Charles Robert Plunkett, who concluded that "there is but one answer--dynamite," apparently felt that explosives were the appropriate answer to repression of speech, rather than to deprivation of bread. "When free speech is suppressed, when men are jailed for asking for food, clubbed for assembling to discuss their grievances, and stoned for expresssing their opinions, there is but one recourse--violence."[lxxvii] Advocates of change, according to this theory, should work through established channels as long as they remain open, and legally and peaceably persuade others as long as they are allowed. This, however, legitimizes the hegemonic discourse about American freedom and democracy; it implies that workers should peacefully submit to slow torture and murder if they are allowed to protest about it.
Goldman herself usually recognized that established channels were part of the problem rather than a solution. She viewed the entire paraphanalia of elections and politics as a master-class charade which, by diverting workers from self-activity and bogging them down in intermediable wrangling and compromise, frustrated change rather than allowing it. The American political system, like that of Bismarck's Germany, afforded the illusion of participation without the reality. Goldman recognized that, in a capitalist society, free speech must remain an illusion and a bulwark of economic oppression. By allowing the workers to let off steam, it deflects revolt from inhumane living and working conditions. For these reasons, Goldman ridiculed the conceit of British and American workers, whose boasted and illusory freedom only masked and compensated for real exploitation. Goldman claimed that the more free speech the workers had, the worse their material conditions were, and the more tamely they acquiesced in those conditions.[lxxviii] Nevertheless, Goldman and other anarchists were sometimes enticed into almost forgetting the evils that had occasioned their protest, and lulled into considering the mere winning of the right to speak as a substantive victory. This indicates that the social structure most efficient at containing dissent is not that which is most overtly repressive, but that which combines illusory channels for change with terrorism and violence when required. Bismarck consciously established such a system in Germany. In the United States, there was always a chance that a strike would succeed; opposition parties were harassed and defrauded but allowed to function. Government terrorism and violence, while endemic and pervasive, was not universal; radicals could nurture the illusion of change within the system.
Goldman herself was gulled by this seeming openness, and often conflated a victory for her right to speak with a victory for anarchism itself. For example, although she had long recognized the need for birth control among the poor, she largely ignored this topic until Margaret Sanger was arrested. Her justification for her neglect--that she was unwilling to risk her freedom for only a part of the great social struggle--is unconvincing, because any of the causes she championed was only a part of the revolution she championed. Goldman was moved by the suppression and persecution of Sanger to take up the cause, and was herself arrested; she then devoted an issue of Mother Earth largely to that cause. But her reasons were indicative. Birth control was important "first because it is tabooed and the people who advocate it are persecuted. Secondly it represents the immediate question of life and death to masses of people." These priorities were not mere sloppiness or bad editing, but central to her entire ethos. Reb Raney replied that giving out the information was more important than fighting for one's right to do so. Ida Rauh agreed, and told a meeting in Union Square that "I am here not to speak, but to do.... More important than the right of people to such information is the actual getting of the information."[lxxix] Free speech and personal self-expression are supreme goods, necessary for any meaningful and creative life as well as indispensable for a free society and a necessary prerequisite for any constructive social change. Yet self-expression is not social revolution, nor is securing a hearing equivilent to winning substantive changes or securing justice. Goldman agreed with this, and courageously discussed actual methods in public. Yet she considered the birth control struggle a fight for free speech as much as for birth control itself.
Goldman often implicitly threatened violence, through her familiar device of predicting it, if the police clubbed protestors or throttled free speech. She argued against repression on grounds that should have led her to endorse it--that it will inevitably lead to violent resistance. Repression, she said, "stops free speech and thereby forces the people to secrecy and violence. There are nother methods than open public discussion, and if the police drive the people to despair they will have to use those other methods." She never demanded that any individual or group acquiesce nonviolently in oppression as long as peaceful avenues of redress remained open; on the contrary, she validated revolt of all kinds and insisted that only insurrection could topple capitalism. Yet her whole career evinces an astounding faith in the power of the written and spoken word to change society. She repeatedly proclaimed that the free competition of ideas would ensure that truth and justice will prevail.[lxxx] This, however, ignores the realities of a society divided by class, race, and gender.
Free speech is impossible in a capitalist society partly because the capitalists own virtually all the avenues of expression, the means of disseminating and creating the news, and the police and the political system. Free speech is illusory because the possibilities for apprehending and communicating ideas are limited by poverty, the lack of education and leisure, and the necessity of begging and cringing for sustenance. Goldman often observed that poverty, deadening work, and the necessity of pleasing their masters made workers unreceptive to challenging ideas. More fundamentally, any social system generates the beliefs necessary and appropriate for its own survival in both the beneficiaries and victims of the system. No social system is neutral between competing beliefs; there is no free marketplace of ideas any more than of any other commodity. Capitalism, racism, and patriarchy structure and warp perceptions and debate. As but one example, a white supremist society generates, seemingly naturally and effortlessly, a belief in the inferiority of blacks. People of all colors look around them and see very few educated blacks or blacks in responsible positions; blacks are mostly poor and ill-educated, and disproportionately criminals. Blacks seem inferior to most people because socially they are inferior in the qualities and achievements by which society evaluates human worth. The same point applies to women in a patriarchal society, and to workers oppressed by capitalism. In such societies, merely allowing the victims to protest their condition does not afford them "free speech" in a meaningful sense, because the entire social structure invisibly, incessantly and omnipresently argues against what they have to say, without appearing to argue at all. Even those who resist oppression usually receive their agenda, language, and sense of what is possible and appropriate from their oppressors. Genuine free speech requires that all ideas receive a hearing proportionate to their true worth, by individuals who have the education, leisure, and economic freedom to evaluate them. Oppressive societies, however, privilege untrue and vicious ideas for the same reason, and in the same manner, that they privilege iniquitious individuals and groups. A just society, therefore, is an epistemological necessity.
This is why Max Baginski said that a cooperative, communistic society is necessary for both truth and beauty. The insight of an anonymous Mother Earth Bulletin writer, that "true history will be written only when the struggle of the classes shall have been abolished, and no social group will be vitally interested in distorting the truth and misleading the people"[lxxxi] is equally applicable to philosophy, sociology, and even science. Free speech that is genuinely capable of changing society, therefore, must be distinguished from "free speech" that is only a pleasant diversion, a solitary or group pastime with scant social significance. The same point applies to other forms of self-expression, such as experimental lifestyles. Goldman, of course, genuinely valued free speech and self-expression as a vehicle not only for personal fulfillment, but also as a mechanism for social change. She believed that individual fulfillment and social justice were complementary and symbiotic. This belief was so central to her life and endeavor that she never fully allowed herself to recognize how greatly she, and all other members of American society, lacked genuine free speech. In the end, Goldman, as much as the Marxists, believed that the universe was on her side, that the structure of reality is predisposed to truth, justice, and beauty, which will inevitably triumph over all obstacles, artificiality, and repression. She did not fully recognize the implications of her insight that "the mace and the club are not only the symbol, but the very essence, of our 'law and order.'" Goldman's free speech fights were courageous and inspiring to many people. They were absolutely necessary if she was to propigate her ideals at all, much less embody them in her life as they demanded that she do. Her free speech fights allied her with the IWW and also contributed, as Candace Falk says, to "the new recognition she received from the middle class."[lxxxii] Yet these fights, and the rhetoric that accompanied, were not freely chosen, but forced upon her by her oppressors. The recognition she derived from them usually fell far short of agreement on substantive issues other than free speech.
VIII
In a sense, As Candace Falk has remarked, Goldman wrote her own epitaph when, during her heydey in the United States, she compared herself to Chantecler, the rooster in Edmond Rostand's play. Chantecler learned that he did not cause the sun to rise, and then suffered the death of his friend the nightingale. Chantecler consolded himself with "this sorrowful and reassuring fact, that no one, Cock of the morning or evening nightingale, has quite the song of his dreams." Goldman calls this "a wonderful message" which teaches "that though we cannot wake the dawn, we must prepare people to greet the rising sun."[lxxxiii] Goldman finally succumbed to the structural forces she fought against all her life. She could ride the crest of the wave of history, but could not direct it in accordance with her will. She could announce and glory in the most exciting and liberating tendencies in the new economic and social order, but she could not overturn, or even affect, the larger structures of dominion and power. These structures, and not the aspirations of the radicals, would ultimately define, and thereby limit, deflect, and deform, the liberating potentials and impulses of the modern world.
Goldman herself, however, did not propound an ill-assorted hodge-podge of unrelated reforms, as Leslie Fishbein claims. Nor did she often mistake culture for politics, as Lasch's intellectuals did, although, because of the intrinsic nature of her project, she lent herself to this misinterpretation.[lxxxiv] Goldman elaborated a consistent, wide-ranging philosophy that addressed and related all areas of life without creating a dogmatic, totalizing system. If many who thrilled to her words contented themselves with piecemeal reform despite her insistent warnings, this was not Goldman's fault, but that of a system susceptible to certain specific changes but inhospitable to fundamental structural transformations. As Margaret Marsh has said, Goldman "misunderstood the nature of her appeal to young middle-class rebels [and] believed that she had at last begun to convert the American intelligensia to anarchism when what she had succeeded in doing was exciting their admiration for her courageous anticonventionality. Those whom she brought into the movement tended to be interested in anarchy as self-expression to the exclusion of its larger economic and social aims."[lxxxv]
Notes:
[i] Language groups, EG, "The Propaganda and the Congress,"(Free Society, April 8, 1900); harping, EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December, 1910); philosophy, EG, "Report from Chicago," (Free Society, June 9, 1901); education, -------, (The Detroit Evening News, March 14, 1899).
[ii] EG, "Some More Observations," (Free Society, April 29, 1900.)
[iii] Harry Kelly, "Anarchism, a Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908); Berkman, in Falk, 187; so-called educated, "Alexander Berkman in L.A.", (ME, May 1915); Voltairine de Clyre, "Tour Impressions," (ME, December 1910).
[iv] EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December 1910).
[v] Professionals, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, August 1912); missing, Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Really Hatched by Schoolboys," (New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 29, 1914); other quotes, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914).
[vi] Less creative, EG, "La Ruche," (ME, November 1906); institution, EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906); other quotes, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914). See also Max Baginski, "Without Government," (ME March 1906).
[vii] RED BLOOD, WITHOUT WHICH ACTIVE.... ; sympathy, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914).
[viii] ennui, EG, "A Tribute," (ME, December 1909); parlor, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914); new type, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, May 1912).
[ix] Language, root, and involved, EG, SSMD, 1,3; WIDER HORIZONS OF INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION; involved, France, Russia, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, August 1913) and "EG, The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought," AOE, 242-3.
[x] EG, SSMD, 1-2.
[xi] Proselytize, EG, SSMD, 1; roads, EG, "The Drama," AEO, 271; fact, EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in the Modern Drama," (April 5, 1908, EGP-GW); highest art, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, March 1911).
[xii] EG, "Our Moral Censors," (ME, November 1913); Drinnon, 157-58.
[xiii] Ibsen lecture, Drinnon 128-29 and LML 451-54; San Diego, LML 494-501. Charles Thompson, "An Interview with Emma Goldman," (The New York Times, May 30, 1909) begins with a droll account of the police suppression of EG's drama lecture.
[xiv] EG, SSMD, 3.
[xv] EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama," EGP-GW, April 5, 1908. This quote may not be exact because the agent who reported on her lecture said she spoke "substantially as follows." Most, LML 35, 40.
[xvi] LML, 31-2, 109.
[xvii] LML, 56.
[xviii] Doubts, LML, 76; personal, LML, 153; C.E.S. Wood, "The Rebel Press," (ME, March 1915); EG, "Voltairine de Clyre," (Oriole Press, 1926) 19, 29-30; drama lectures, LML, 540. Much later, in 1937, Goldman, echoing the Russian critic Pisarev, wrote a friend that "I consider the workers who work in sewers [as] infinitely more important to the health of the community than the novelist, the dramatist, or the poet." (Vision on Fire, 298). This statement is almost unique in her comments on art and literature.
[xix] Blood, EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama," EGP-GW, April 5, 1908; sectional, SSMD, 1; unity, "Mother Earth Tenth Anniversary," (ME, March 1915); audience, EG, "The Easiest Way, An Appreciation," (ME, May 1909). EG did not feel there were enough good American plays to form a section in her book. As late as 1918 she was complaining that "Plays are not produced in the United States to shed light, but to amuse; to rest the nerves of the tired business man, and to enable to wife of the business man to display her clothes before the wife of the other business man." EG, "Maxim Gorky," January 18, 1918, EGP-GW.
[xx] Manuscripts, Harry Kelly, "Mother Earth, 1906-1915," (ME, March 1915). Kelly said that "the original intention was to make a magazine similar to L'Humanite Nouvelle", but this proved impossible due to the lack of intellectual development in the United States and the unwillingness of the intelligensia to associate with EG. EG (LML, 395), speaks of "the failure of some of the New York literati to live up to their promises to write for it.... They were enthusiastic at first, until they realized that Mother Earth pleaded for freedom and abundance in life as the basis of art. To most of them art meant an escape from reality; how, then, could they be expected to support anything that boldly courted life?" Czolgosz issue, EG, "The Situation in America, concluded," (ME, November 1906; implacable, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914); Jack London, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, March 1910) and "Maxim Gorky," (January 8, 1918, EP-GW). Police harassment, EG, "To My Readers," (ME, December 1906). Upton Sinclair, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," RES, 182.
[xxi] Coal miners, LML, 493; pork chops, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, September 1913).
[xxii] LML, 464, 185.
[xxiii] Russian intellectuals, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February, 1914); agency, EG, "The Russian Revolution," (MEB, December 1917), 1. In her lecture on Maxim Gorky, January 18, 1918, Goldman referred to unappreciated "saviors" of the workers. This, however, is a police transcript, and may not be exact.
[xxiv] EG, "Nation Seethes in Social Unrest," (The Denver Post, April 26, 1912).
[xxv] William Zuckerman, "Tendencies in Modern Literature," (ME, October 1910).
[xxvi] EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 169, 174, 175, 173. See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 227. 1897 quotes from EG, "Marriage," The Firebrand (July 18, 1897). Wife as scab, EG, "The Traffic in Women," RES, 151.
[xxvii] EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 169, 174, 175, 173, 172. See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AEO, 227. Goldman added, "They may not be able, nor ought they be expected, to receive the choice of the loved one into the intimacy of their lives, but that does not give either one the right to deny the necessity of the attraction." RES, 173.
[xxviii] Sex creature, EG, "The Social Importance of the Modern School," RES, 124; weal or woe, EG, "Farewell," (Free Society, August 13, 1899); sex commodity, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); safety valve, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 237. Prostitutes, EG, "The Traffic in Women," AOE, 188.
[xxix] Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence (Oxford, 1987), 94. "Most nineteenth century rape laws did not specify whether a husband could be charged with raping his wife. It was not until the twentieth century that statutes exempted husbands from prosecution for marital rape. Nonetheless, no husband in nineteenth century America was ever prosecuted on this charge." Aggravated wives could sue for divorce.
[xxx] Loathes, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); 23; crimes, EG, "Love and Marriage," AEO, 236; abortions, EG, "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," AEO, 172. According to C.E.S. Wood, New York physicians reported 8,000 deaths from abortion in the state in 1914. EGP, Chronology, August 14, 1915. Statistics are from Commission on Industrial Relations: Final Report (Washington, 1916), 22-33; scabs, EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," (ME, March 1916).
[xxxi] EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (May 1910).
[xxxii] Soul, and solid bars, and nag, and annihilates, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 230, 233, 234, 235; helpless, Wexler, 218; ownership, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES 171. Curiously, although Goldman had long emphasized women's issues, she implied to a reporter in 1908 that she was focusing on this issue because the International Anarchist Congress of 1907 "determined that work for the freedom of women should go hand in hand with efforts towards the abolition of government." "EG Clashes with Police on Meeting," (The Chicago Interocean) AFTER MARCH 6, 1908
[xxxiii] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, 261, 273. "Women had few resources other than their husbands in the task of supporting children.... Many women prosecuted and then withdrew their complaints or petitioned for pardons for their husbands."
[xxxiv] Call, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); higher, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," (ME, March 1906).
[xxxv] Internal tyrants, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AOE, 221; revolutionary process, Wexler, 195; dread, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AEO, 217; Vienna, LML, 371.
[xxxvi] Lacking the Courage, LML 371, defy them all, EG, "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," AEO, 222, 224. Goldman's lecture, "The Intermediate Sex," explained and defended homosexuality. SOURCES FOR HOMOSEXUAL LECTURES, ETC.
[xxxvii] Marguerite Martin, "Mean Absolute Equality," (St. Loius Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908).
[xxxviii] Sex Commodity, amount received, and transvaluation, EG, "The White Slave Traffic," (ME, January 1910); daily routine, finery, EG, "The Traffic in Women," AEO, 186, 189; depraved, celibate, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913).
[xxxix] See note 1.
[xl] Intimate Matters, John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, 209, 265-66, Harper and Row, 1968. The white, middle-class nature of this is explained on 270-273. D'Emilio and Freedman date companionate marriage from the 1920s, but these changes were well underway in the 1910's.
[xli] Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America, Chicago, 1980. Also, Intimate Matters.
[xlii] Marguerite Martin, "Mean Absolute Equality," (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908). See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AEO, 229. See also EG, "Marriage," (The Firebrand, July 18, 1897).
[xliii] EG, "Love and Marriage," AOE, 228. William Marion Reedy, an old friend of Goldman's, said that marriage was already being modified in the direction of free love. Reedy, "Anarchy--Limited," (ME, March 1915).
[xliv] Voltairine de Clyre, "Those Who Marry Do Ill," (ME, January 1908).
[xlv] Slavery, and role, Wexler, 197; EG's comments on the vote, EG, "Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-85 and EG, "Woman Suffrage," AOE, 195-211, quote is from 209.
[xlvi] EG, "Woman Suffrage," AEO 195-211. Goldman remarked "I shall probably be put down as an opponent of woman." (209) Goldman was ambivilent about the role of women in the social revolution. At times she felt that women, though taking longer than men to break with social conventions, broke more thoroughly; she also said that "in America women, and not men, will prove the most ardent workers for social reconstruction." EG, "The End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910). She complained that women giggled during her birth control lectures, and also said that "there is no element in all of society so hopelessly stagnant as the idle, parasitic, sheltered females of the middle class." EG, "Despite Jehovah and the Police," (ME, January 1917): 733. GOLDMAN OFTEN USED SEXIST LANGUAGE
[xlvii] True Emancipation, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AOE, 224; sluggish, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 174; Wexler, 196-97.
[xlviii] Marsh, AMBIVILANCE AND PERHAPS GUILT. Ellen Kay Trimberger has provided a trenchant analysis of how "liberated" men could settle down and find a more conventional, caregiving wife after they tired of more egalitarian relationships. Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, (Monthly Review Press, YEAR OF PUBLICATION), 131-152.
[xlix] Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince, 361. Kropotkin said, "Let the liberals do their work; we cannot be against it. Our business is not to fight with them, but to bring into the existing revolutionary ferment our own ideas, to widen the demands which are raised."
[l] Wedlock, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 237.
[li] Big Bill Haywood on women having all the babies they want
[lii] EG, emancipation of women only a phrase GET SOURCE
[liii] "Observations and Comments," (ME, April 1908): 64. For a brief discussion of the La Questione Sociale incident, see my chapter on the IWW. Subscription list, Drinnon, 196.
[liv] The phrase is from Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order.
[lv] WORKS ON PROGRESSIVE ERA M-C HEGEMONIC INSTITUTIONS. Amusing the Millions; settlement work, etc, City People....
[lvi] WORKS ON MODERNIZATION AS LIBERATING AND CONSTRAINING. Taste Publics, Herbert Gans, High Culture and Low Culture. CHECK TITLE, PUB DATE, ETC. By this Gans means a group of individuals, who may or may not share common socio-economic characteristics, who enjoy a similar music, authors, films, etc. An individual could be a member of many "taste publics," as someone who likes country music, Japanese cinema, and Mexican food, for example.
Goldman and her circle reacted ambivilently to modern trends. They usually claimed that society was growing more regimented, but also claimed (although not as confidently as the socialists) that their ideal was consisent with modern trends. Bolton Hall (ME, March 1915) said that government intruded less into private lives than previously.
[lvii] Warren Sussman, BOOK, ESSAY
[lviii] SUSSMAN
[lix] Lears, T. Jackson, Oppression, AND GENERAL
[lx] Lears, No Place of Grace, weightlessness, 41-2; manipulable, 35; self neither unified nor independent -------; fragmented, diffuse, NPG, 32; suffocating in their ease, ------. EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, August 1912).
[lxi] EG, "Authority versus Liberty," (Free Society, March 5, 1899). Goldman rhapsodized that "hundreds of societies spring up for self-improvement and the benefit of mankind." Note that she stressed both individual self-cultivation and social service. Goldman constantly stressed that there was no conflict between the individual and society, if the latter was based on voluntary activity. She herself, however, refused to submit to group control of any kind. BOOKS ON M-C ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE
[lxii] Life, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, February 1910); decry evils, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1911); New world philosophy, EG, "Among Barbarians," (ME, February 1907), also "Are You Interested in Anarchism," (ME, December 1908); science, Voltairine de Clyre, "November Eleventh, Twenty Years Ago," (ME, November 1907); Jay Fox, "Trade Unionism and Anarchism," (ME, November 1906); A.Z., "Evolution of Anarchist Tendencies," (ME, October 1909); a review of Peter Kropotkin's "Modern Science and Anarchism," (ME, November 1913).
[lxiii] EG used this rhetorical device very early, even when speaking to primarily immigrant audiences. EG SCOLDS US FOR DESECRATING FOUNDING FATHERS, CITE SOME EARLY MIDDLE AND LATE; OTHER ME WRITERS HAVE MORE REALISTIC UNDERSTANDING. Quiet a mob, LML, 254-57. EG said, in a statement referring to prison letters but more broadly relevant, "censorships had taught me to express proscribed ideas in guileless disguise," LML 688. The quotes from EG's speech to the court are from EG, "Emma Goldman's Speech," (ME, July 1917):150-61, and EG, "Address to the Jury," the pamphlet version of her speech, RES, 310-327. These versions differ in some details
[lxiv] Thousandfold, EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, March 1906); not fixed and eternal, EG, "The Philosophy of Atheism," (ME, February 1916); sturdiest, EG, "What I Believe," RES, 35; see also, EG, "Our Sixth Birthday," (ME, March 1911): 4; Reckless, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, April 1910). EG, in "A Woman Without a Country, (ME, May 1909) said, referring to the revocation of her ex-husband's (and thus EG's) citizenship, "You have Emma Goldman's citizenship. But she has the world, and her heritage is the kinship of brave spirits--not a bad bargain." Berkman, "Anniversary Musings," (ME, March 1915); time-worn institution, EG, "Adventures in the Desert of American Liberty," (ME, September 1909). Adeline Champney (ME, March 1915: 419) voiced a similar thought. "I doubt if the actual number of avowed Anarchists has very greatly increased.... but the increase of Anarchistic thought which does not bear the title is enormous."
[lxv] Declared war, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, February 1909); arrogance, EG, "A New Declaration of Independence," (ME, July 1909); success, EG, "Our Sixth Birthday," (ME, March 1911); Ideal, EG, "Agitation En Voyage," (ME, August 1915); consciences, "Observations and Comments," (ME, January 1916). cf EG, "I do not believe in any laws except those of morality," "Anarchy Her Only Faith," (The New York Times, October 7, 1893); "I bow to nothing except my idea of right," Interview, "Emma Goldman's Own Story," (Chicago Daily Tribune), September 11, 1901. On the other hand, the editorial statement for Mother Earth (ME, March 1906), presumably a considered document, denounced that "priest-born monster, conscience." Goldman, like IWW theorists, sometimes failed to distinguish between morality, in which they deeply believed, and conventional morality, which they ridiculed and despised. They sometimes denounced morality and conscience when they meant to criticize conventional understandings.
[lxvi] This view of ethics as freely chosen does present a dilemma which Goldman, and others, have not fully confronted. John Rawls says that justice consists of the principles which we would all agree upon from behind a "veil of ignorance," when we do not know anything about our position in society. Ethic is thus a contract we agree upon. Yet if we would in fact unanimously agree on fundamental principles, these principles cannot be our free creation; they must be "out there" somewhere (or within ourselves) awaiting discovery. Goldman never quite resolved a similar paradox in her own thinking: she insisted that morality was not eternal, but changed over time in response to conditions; yet she intransigently insisted that they were, for all practical purposes, absolute in the here-and-now.
Goldman and the anarchists opposed consequentialism and pragmatism; but these too are absolute moralities. Consequentialism demands that a person act at all times and places for the greatest good of the greatest number. This suffuses all of life with ethical gravity, and is to antithesis of any relativistic view.
[lxvii] EG, "A Review of our New York Activities," (ME, April 1914).
[lxviii] Harry Kelly, "Anarchism, a Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908).
[lxix] LML, 51-53, 186-87.
[lxx] LML, 409. EG said that through proper education alone "can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community." EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906).
[lxxi] W.C. Owen, "Proper Methods of Propaganda," (ME, August 1908).
[lxxii] EG's critique of settlement houses is quoted above. Compare this to her stance on the eight-hour day and on libertarian education. EG supported ameliorative reforms won through worker self-activity, but disdained those offered from above as charity.
[lxxiii] Margaret Anderson, "An Inspiration," (ME, March 1915); Van Valkenberg quote, Wexler, 280.
[lxxiv] Henry May, The End of American Innocence.
[lxxv] CUT THIS NOTE; UNNECESSARY
[lxxvi] Lears, No Place of Grace, passim.
[lxxvii] Leonard Abbott, speech to the Union Square demonstrators, and Plunkett, "Dynamite," (ME, July 1914).
[lxxviii] LML, 165-6, 169. After describing unparalleled "misery and squalor" in England, Goldman said that she "understood the reason for so much political freedom. It was a safety-valve against the fearful destitution. The British Government no doubt felt that as long as it permitted its subjects to let off steam in unhampered talk, there was no danger of rebellion." She quoted Kropotkin as saying that "The British bourgeoisie has good reason to fear the spread of discontent, and political liberties are the best security against it.... The average Britisher loves to think he is free; it helps him to forget his misery." Goldman repeatedly made the same point about elections, saying they were a bauble to distract the workers from economic oppression and foster the illusion of freedom. This is why she refused to make a distinction between autocracies and so-called democracies, and why she applauded any act which, by evoking repression, forced the authorities to reveal their true nature.
[lxxix] EG, "An Urgent Appeal to My Friends," (ME, April 1916); Reb Raney, "The Crowbar v Words" (ME, April 1916); Ida Rauh, "Birth Control Demonstration in Union Square," (ME, June 1916).
[lxxx] She claimed this, it must be noted, in order to win free speech; she argued that if her arguments were wrong, they would not persuade many people, and would therefore by harmless. See her lecture of June 14, 1917 (EGP-GW) for one example of this. Of course, if Goldman were correct in her analysis, and the workers believed her, those who owned and controlled the country would lose most of what they owned.
[lxxxi] "History to Be," MEB (January, 1918). INTERESTING DISPUTE ABOUT OBJECTIVITY OF SCIENCE, PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM, MISMEASURE OF MAN, ETC.
[lxxxii] EG, "Police Brutality," (ME, November, 1906); Falk, 105.
[lxxxiii] Falk, 523.
[lxxxiv] CUT THIS NOTE
[lxxxv] Marsh, 105. The Denver Post (April 17, 1912) said that "Emma Goldman is slowly being absorbed by respectability. She is becoming de rigeur and other things, as far as ennuied society is concerned." Thrill-seekers went to delapidated halls to hear her. In this case Goldman shares some of the blame for lecturing against Socialism to an elite audience--although she could not control who attended her lectures.
Goldman had broadened her focus beyond the working class by 1900, when she said that the foreign-language anarchist groups (overwhelmingly working-class), though "larger and stronger" than the English-language groups, were "of no importance" because only native-born Americans could establish "a free society in the United States." Harping on economic conditions, she insisted, brought few results. People who embraced Anarchism out of economic motives either became prosperous or found that radical activism did not improve their financial prospects; in either case they abandoned the movement. Her lecture, "Modern Aspects of Anarchism," rejected a narrow economic interpretation of anarchism in favor of a wide-ranging cultural "philosophy of life" addressing human relationships and conduct. Her cultural version of anarchism appealed to many people outside the working class. As early as 1899 she declared that "the higher the education of a class, the more anarchists it contains" and urged the many closet anarchists among "doctors, lawyers, professors, and newspaper men" to declare themselves.[i]
Goldman had won increased respectability and a hearing among some well-to-do Americans by 1901, but the assassination of McKinley and Goldman's defense of Czolgosz unleashed a wave of terrorism and repression against all anarchists and drove Goldman virtually into hiding. When this hysteria subsided and the intellectual ferment of the Progressive Era continued, Goldman again attracted diverse interest, especially after 1906. In that year she founded Mother Earth, for over a decade the major English-language anarchist publication in the United States.
The need to support her new publication also caused Goldman to change her lecturing habits. Goldman had always disliked the freak-show atmosphere of soap-box oratory, preferring to lecture in halls where she could present a coherent argument to a stable, interested audience. Yet she had also opposed making a living by spreading the anarchist message, considering it a giving of her whole personality that payment could only debase. She feared that making "a business of lecturing" would undercut her message and reduce her to a mere "wage slave" of the movement.[ii] Her tours were often sponsored by the organizations to which she spoke, and financed by voluntary contributions from those organizations and her audiences. She made her living by other means, including sewing and nursing. In 1906 and after, however, spurred by the necessity of raising money for Mother Earth, Goldman sponsored her own tours, rented halls, and charged admission; the proceeds covered not only her touring expenses, but the publication of Mother Earth, including her living expenses. She left most other paid employment and became a full-time, professional revolutionary agitator.
This innovation generated controversy within the movement. Soon Mother Earth writers were complaining that the anarchists were ignoring the poor and focusing on the well-to-do. "Instead of participating in the trade unions, organizing the unemployed, or indulging in soap-box oratory," Harry Kelly lamented, "we rent comfortable halls and charge ten cents admission.... Anarchism has become a luxury." Berkman scolded Ben Reitman--and by implication Goldman--that although "as a philosophy Anarchism includes the whole of mankind... as a militant movement, we deal with the proletariat that will have to make the revolution." Berkman considered intellectuals as parasites who reduced anarchism to "an intellectual pastime." Despite this, some people complained that Berkman himself appealed mostly to "the so-called educated" classes. Voltairine de Clyre exclaimed that renting halls, charging admission, and appealing to the middle class resulted only in "shallow flattery" for the speaker by people who did not take anarchism seriously as a program for action. De Clyre said that anarchists should work mostly among "the men and women who do the hard and brutalizing work of the world."[iii]
Goldman charged admission because Mother Earth required her subsidy; yet she had deeper reasons for rejecting de Clyre's suggestion. While denying that she appealed specifically to the well-to-do, Goldman insisted that "the men and women who first take up the banner of a new, liberating idea generally emanate from the so-called respectable classes" because they alone have the energy, leisure, and education to entertain new ideas. Limiting anarchist propaganda to the poor "is not only a mistake, but also contrary to the spirit of Anarchism. Unlike other social theories, Anarchism builds not on classes, but on men and women.... Anarchism calls to battle all libertarian elements as against authority." Economic appeals do not work because "a great many radicals lose their ideals the monent they succeed economically.... Spiritual hunger and unrest are often the most lasting incentives" for revolt. Each anarchist, Goldman insisted, remains "free to choose his or her own manner of activity."[iv]
Goldman thought that some members of the middle class would join the revolution because their own economic and social position was deteriorating. "Professionals," she said, "find it harder than even the skilled worker to exist" and are a great danger to society because "they have tasted the good things of life and know what they are missing" when deprived of them. During her lifetime many businessmen and professionals who had regarded themselves as independent became salaried employees of large corporate bureaucracies, while many clerical positions that had been steeping-stones to independent proprietorship became monotonous dead-end jobs. Goldman decried the "insecure and pitiable existence" of white collar workers, professionals, and intellectuals, who she called "mental wage slaves" and "intellectual proletarians." Although they had higher incomes, more possessions, and a higher social status than laborers, Goldman considered them "even more dependent on the masters than those who work with their hands." She claimed that they were less versatile and adaptable than blue-collar workers; they could not, like the laborers, easily uproot themselves and move to the next town because their possessions, love of ease, and social connections have "emasculated them.... They are tied in a thousand ways to the most galling, humiliating conditions....In order to exist, they must cringe and crawl and beg for a position" only to find themselves "slavishly dependent" on their bosses and "upon a stupid and vulgar public opinion" when they find employment.[v]
These proletarians, Goldman asserted, surrendered more of their personalities to their job and to public opinion than other workers. Every professional had to conform to the expectations of his employer and his neighbors as well as maintain moral, economic, and social appearances. "The less creative a man is, the better his chances in every vocation of life.... The most lamentable quality of modern man is his great capacity for adjustment." The corporations require absolute conformity, and this demand infects every institution and all of social life. "Every institution of our day, the family, the State, our moral codes, sees in every strong, beautiful, uncompromising person a deadly enemy" Goldman said; they want only to mold "a patient wage slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist." Goldman also appealed to writers, journalists, and artists chaffing under the demands of the market and rebelling against the necessity of pleasing both capitalists and philistines. Capitalism and puritanism, she said, throttled self-expression in personal and professional life. Goldman told insurgent literati that "only when the intellectual forces of Europe had made common cause with the struggling masses, when they came close to the depths of society, did they give to the world a real culture." Finally, Goldman thought that cultural rebels would rally to the workers out of a realization that they could not achieve their goals in isolation from other social forces. They need the "revolutionary workers, who have broken with all the old rubbish" to achieve their own aims. Only by an alliance between "the intellectual proletarians, who try to find expression, and the revolutionary proletarians, who seek to remold life" could progressive Americans "wage a successful war against present society."[vi]
Goldman did not underestimate the difficulties in forging such a coalition. American professionals, white-collar workers, and intellectuals, she realized, considered themselves superior to blue-collar workers and refused to acknowledge their own position as proletarians. In Russia and elsewhere in Europe these groups were recruited partly from poor and declasse students who worked their way through college, but American college students were mostly the pampered rich who wanted a diploma rather than an education. The intellectuals deluded themselves with a sense of their own importance, and convinced themselves that they must educate the masses. Goldman, however, considered their lives false and artificial, and felt that they needed immersion in the reality that only contact with the workers could give. The majority of intellectuals, she claimed, were tied to the bourgeoisie by their values, personal identities, and material interests. She considered the middle class anemic, desiccated, and stifled by conformity and hypocrisy, lacking "red blood, without which active interest in an ideal is impossible." Their hypocritical conformity to conventions they privately detested undermined their capacity for genuine resistance, while their interest in the working class was the "sympathy of aloofness, of experiment" rather than genuine solidarity.[vii]
Goldman also recognized that the desire for self-expression, while related to the ferment in the world of labor, is not identical to it. Although she sometimes implied that personal freedom is itself the revolution, or at least an important contribution towards it, she often emphasized the necessity for active social struggle. She condemned the dilettantes who "out of ennui and lack of stability dabble in all kinds of reform" and confine their rebellion to "the parlor, the so-called salon, or Greenwich village." Yet she also admired serious cultural insurgents, "young artists, living a careless, Bohemian life, with ideas for breakfast, paints and brushes for luncheon, and sunsets for dinner.... living their ideals and caring naught for dollars and cents." She tried to win such idealists for the social revolution. She considered the intellectual proletarian "a new type in America, but an ever-increasing and permanent type... still groping in the dark, unable to find the point of contact with the rest of the social forces." Mother Earth was designed to foster that contact and help forge a revolutionary intelligentsia such as that in Russia. Goldman genuinely admired the New Review group, even as she regarded their rebellion as a one-sided artistic revolt.She resolutely cultivated every genuine spark of rebellion and protest, in culture as in labor, in the hopes that she could broaden, deeper, and radicalize them.[viii]
II
To achieve this purpose, Goldman enlisted modern literature, particularly the drama, in the cause of social revolution. The literary representation of human life and struggle, she thought, "speaks a language of its own, a language embracing the entire gamut of human emotions" and "strikes root where the ordinary word often falls on barren soil." It teaches audiences who could not be reached in any other way otherwise ineffable truths. The modern drama humanizes and personalizes the problems of all classes of society; by making the abstract understandable and concrete, it stirs the heart and enlightens the mind. In particular, it teaches the middle class, who consider themselves detached from the great social struggles around them, that everyone is part of society and intimately involved in its travails. The middle class, Goldman said, must either consciously participate in the struggle for a better life or be left behind. She felt the drama especially necessary in the United States, which lacks the revolutionary tradition which involved many French intellectuals in the labor movement. In Russia the government suppressed all classes equally, and thus inspired the intellectuals to ally themselves with the workers and peasants; in the United States, policemen clubbed, repressed, and brutalized workers but did not molest the respectable classes. Therefore, the American intelligentsia requires the illumination and emotional appeal of the modern drama, which opens "wider horizons of individual expression and social harmony," to involve it in the struggles of the workers.[ix]
In Goldman's view, the modern drama depicts all of human experience and shows the relationships between all aspects of life. It depicts the lowly as possessing personality and dignity; it shows the redeeming qualities in social outcasts; and it reveals how society makes the criminals that it then punishes. Dramatic realism, Goldman felt, was necessarily subversive of society, which would collapse once revealed in its true aspect. Many people already see through the deadening hypocrisies and stifling conventions of society, and conform only because they see no practical escape; but modern dramatists provide role models, such as Ibsen's Nora and Dr. Stockman, who not only show how the middle class is repressed, but also point the way towards freedom. Modern plays articulate the dissatisfaction of which many are only half aware, and show that others share it; they publicize and authenticate the inchoate rebellion of many victims of society and spur them to action, much as labor agitators stir the workers to revolt. The moderns, Goldman asserted, "mirror in their work as much of the spiritual and social revolt as is expressed by the most fiery speech of the propagandist. And more important still, they compel far greater attention.... Any mode of creative work, which with true perception portrays social wrongs earnestly and boldly, may be a greater menace to our social fabric and a more powerful inspiration that the wildest harangue of the soapbox orator."[x]
The dramatist confronts great social questions "not necessarily because his aim is to proselytize, but because he can best express himself by being true to himself." Because Goldman perceived capitalist society as objectively evil, she considered accurate depiction of that society as itself a revolutionary act. "All roads lead to the great social reconstruction," she said. A good play is as revolutionary as an incendiary speech because "the simple fact that a man is opposed to existing conditions makes a revolutionist of him. How this opposition may manifest itself is of no importance as long as it serves in ever so small a measure to bring about the final downfall of a system, institution, a class or government which is considered undesirable or pernicious." Goldman considered any authentic, free expression of human personality to be ipso facto revolutionary; genuine artistic creation, freed from commercialism, Constockery, and artificial conventions epitomized the creative, spontaneous, and self-expressive life that all would experience in an anarchist society. "Life in all its variety of color, in all its fullness and wealth is art, the highest art. He who does not help to bring about such a life is not an artist, no matter if he can paint sunsets or compose nocturnes. All the true artists of the world have recognized that.... Artists the world over have gone to the life of the people, have become one with their struggles, their hopes and dreams."[xi]
Goldman did not place political demands upon artists, however. She believed that great art was necessarily revolutionary because she identified revolution with authenticity, creativity, and freedom. Precisely because she approved of any spirited expression of individuality, and did not hew to a narrow party line, she favored all art which helped generate thought and unrest, or which expanded our concept of human personality. By being true to both himself and to social reality, the artist generated dissatisfaction and revolt. "Real art has no more to do with good or bad than nature has" she said. "Both are beyond good and evil; their function is life, and the latter is entirely too complex, too limitless, too subtle, to permit of any yardstick of value." Every person and every artist "must insist on untrammeled opportunity to express himself, whether by pen, brush, or speech, or in his personal relations, on the all-absorbing issues of modern times." Far from imposing a rigid political test on authors, Goldman lectured on those dramatists, novelists, and philosophers which she liked, and focused on the messages congenial to her; instead of carping about every deviation from her own political views, Goldman usually overlooked those aspects of her chosen works which she disliked. She could quote Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Nietszche to her purpose. Her method was one of social criticism rather than literary analysis; she used the works she analyzed to propound her own points rather than explicate the whole meaning of the author. Those who have criticized her for simplifying, distorting, and giving political tasks to authors misread her intentions.[xii]
Goldman's views on the politics of literature stemmed inexorably from her larger ethical and social perspective. She believed that the purpose of human life is the development of each individual personality to a complete and harmonious whole, and that this could be achived only in community and only in a just society (or in the pursuit of community and justice). She denied that an individual of intelligence and moral sensibility could experience enduring happiness when people are dying of torture all around her, especially when these deaths are willed and preventable. Whether an individual confronts or evades the realities of life in capitalist society, she truncates and warps her true human potential by anesthetizing either her rational capacity to engage the world around them and confront and analyze reality, or by dulling their capacity for moral sensitivity.
Goldman, of course, tasted what joys she could amidst a barbarous society. Just as Max Eastman ruminated upon his poem "To a Bobolink" above the smouldering ruins of Ludlow, she escaped from the horrors of London's East End into the ecstatic embraces of Hippolyte Havel. After describing scenes of absolute horror, "more terrible than any conceived by Dante," she found that in Havel's arms "the cry of the East End was far away. Only the call of love sounded in our hearts, and we listened and yielded to it." Yet after such transient joys, she confronted renewed horrors. The most sensitive souls, Goldman repeatedly proclaimed, could not endure the sight of such pervasive misery; they must revolt, even to their own destruction. These are the best spirits.
Goldman regarded literature as an exalted part of human life and moral endeavor. It must serve the highest purposes of human life, or at least not thwart them. Because she exulted in individual vision, creativity, and idiosyncrasy, the logic of her position would mandate not that literature have an explicit social message, but only that it contribute to a fuller, richer human life in some fashion. And she did insist that individuals could contribute to a better society in a wide variety of ways. Goldman emphatically felt that there is room even in the life of an agitator for fun, frivolity, laughter, and gaity, and for pondering the more-or-less eternal human dilemmas of life and love that would always exist under any social system. But she would not countenance literature which encoded capitalist, racist, or patriarchal values, which legitimated or condoned inhuman institutions and practices, or implicitly treated such practices as natural, eternal, and inevitable. Such literature would contravene the very purpose of human life and endeavor, the quest for full personhood and moral personality.
Goldman, therefore, condemned literature and art that manifested purely aesthetic strivings, just as some of her comrades lambasted literature that was merely a disguised form of propaganda. Goldman regarded the choice between aesthetic and moral values as no choice at all, much in the manner she insisted that individual self-expression and social welfare were equally necessary and mutually reinforcing. Similarly, she analyzed literature as stemming both from the soul of an individual genius and from a concrete social situation which informed and inspired that genius.
In Goldman's time a symbiosis between literature and revolution seemed likely for two important reasons. Literature was breaking with old conventions and dealing realistically and honestly with the modern social conditions which polite society had largely evaded; and this insurgency ran into opposition from the law and from much of the public. Social realism and individual self-expression were therefore allied; authors had to fight censorship and inhibitions in order to describe their social vision. This created a mileau where Goldman could use dramas and novels whose greatness was acknowledged in avant-garde literary circles to make her own points about social life, to appeal to a wider audience, and to win some respectable supporters. She could enlist high culture to buttress her arguments. In the process she sometimes humiliated the authorities. The New York police broke up one of her lectures on the modern drama because, instead of sticking to her subject, she insisted on interjecting discussion of a subversive-sounding character named Ibsen. Educated, native-born Americans, who had acquiesced in the brutal suppression of her meetings in the past, as well as in systematic terrorism against labor unions, were outraged, and formed a Free Speech Society to fight against police repression. On another occasion Goldman was driven out of San Diego, and Ben Reitman nearly lynched, as vigilantes prevented her from giving this same lecture on Ibsen. This aroused further sympathy for her, and she returned to San Diego until she was allowed to speak there.[xiii]
Goldman's lectures on drama allowed her to drape her intransigent opposition to all social conventions in the forms of high culture--a venerable tactic used to avoid censorship and win a wider hearing in Russia. Goldman could thus imply that she was innocuously talking about literature even while she attacked the foundations of traditional morality and society. When she called modern drama "the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women for the reconstruction" she both implicitly distanced herself from that other form of dynamite with which she was often associated, and enlisted the cachet of writers of genius for her own longstanding causes.[xiv]
Goldman's literary studies furthered social revolution. She castigated narrow-minded radicals who indulged in sectarian, esoteric, jargon-ridden propaganda speeches and barren phrase-mongering while remaining oblivious to the wider currents of life swirling around them. She told revolutionaries to acquaint themselves with every point of view and to study all of life, not just their pet theories, and reminded them that "a study of existing conditions is impossible without a knowledge of modern literature and drama." Goldman wanted everyone to experience many lives in one, to criticize and experience and understand all of existence. She herself loved literature and beauty in all its forms, and the example of John Most showed her that this love could be combined with strident advocacy of revolution.[xv]
Lecturing on modern drama not only allowed her to discuss important topics in relative safety from police persecution, and to reach otherwise unapproachable audiences; it also resolved one of her longstanding personal dilemmas. She had long been tormented by the conflict between a desire to sacrifice everything for her ideal and her equally intense desire to experience all of life passionately. She early fought with Berkman over this issue when their mutual friend Fedya gave her some flowers and Berkman protested that "a good anarchist is one who lives for the Cause and gives everything to it.... It is inconsistent for an anarchist to enjoy luxuries while the people live in poverty." Goldman, aghast, replied that "beautiful things are not luxuries, they are necessaries. Life would be unbearable without them." By beautiful things she meant primarily not consumer items, but music, theatre, nature, literature, and flowers, although also velvets and silks. Despite her protestations, "at heart I felt that Berkman was right. Revolutionaries gave up even their lives--why not also beauty?" Berkman's intensity both repelled and attracted her; in his assault on Frick she recognized "something greater than personal ties or even love: an all-embracing devotion that understands all and gives all to the last breath."[xvi] In one of the most famous incidents in her life, a comrade reproached Goldman for her spirited dancing on the grounds that her frivolity "would only hurt the Cause." Goldman responded with a passion evident decades later when she described the incident in Living My Life:
I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prison, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.[xvii]
Yet she remained plagued by doubts "that I must be weak, that I would never reach Sasha's revolutionary, idealistic heights.... To the end of my days I should be torn between the yearning for a personal life and the need of giving all to my ideal." Perhaps she wondered whether C.E.S. Wood was correct in his assertion, in Mother Earth, that "anything that leads toward liberty is of more value than art, valuable as beauty is." Goldman thought than de Clyre, an ascetic and "revolutionary vestal" who bought a piano on the installment plan, failed to reconcile her two all-consuming passions, social revolution and artistic beauty. Goldman's drama lectures allowed her to square this circle by combining her love of literature with revolutionary agitation. Although she lectured widely on literature after 1910, giving entire courses on the modern drama and on great Russian authors, she not only used literature as a springboard for discussing social topics, but often alternated these lectures with more directly revolutionary talks on topics such as syndicalism and militarism. She often lectured once a day on literature, and gave a second lecture on social and economic topics. When Berkman, in the aftermath of the Lexington Avenue explosion, said that social activism was more important than her drama lectures, Goldman acerbically reminded him that her drama lectures supported Mother Earth and his own activities.[xviii]
Goldman deplored the absence of a serious American drama, which was throttled by capitalism and prudery. The United States, she said, was too busy coining the blood of the workers into profits to create great literature. Sectional and other issues distracted attention from the class war; social strife, however, was intensifying, and would, when combined with the yearning of some educated Americans for a more truthful existence, generate a great theatre. (After the publication of The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, which lamented the absense of significant American dramatists, Goldman discovered some Americans worth lecturing on.) Mother Earth intended to promote the "unity of revolutionary thought and artistic expression" and bridge the gap between the intellectuals and the insurgent workers. As Goldman said, even writers of genius required an appreciative audience. It was not enough to write socially conscious dramas; the audience had to be revolutionized if great literature was to be created.[xix]
Mother Earth published translations from and critical commentary on little-known writers such as Nietzsche, but did not foster a renaissance of the arts as it had hoped. Unlike The Masses, it did not discover great new talents. Although Goldman and others often excused themselves on the grounds that the United States was not yet ready for a genuine culture, other factors were responsible. Mother Earth was intended as an open forum for all insurgent tendencies in literature, art, and social commentary--in every sphere of life. Yet important writers shied away from association with the notorious Emma Goldman. Two authors asked for their manuscripts back even before the second issue was published, while the October 1906 issue commemorating Czolgosz scandalized many other potential supporters. Mother Earth, contrary to its intended purpose, became almost exclusively an anarchist publication. Most of the articles were written by a small number of regulars who were not primarily writers but agitators and had much else to occupy their time. While The Masses attracted the best work of great authors and artists by offering them a freedom denied by the mainstream press, Mother Earth published mostly self-educated authors who had no other outlet. Even Goldman and Berkman, despite their fame and felicity of expression, had to publish their books themselves through the Mother Earth Publishing Company (singificantly, Goldman's Social Significance of the Modern Drama was an exception.) As a result, Mother Earth only imperfectly fulfilled either of its intended functions. Berkman fumed that it did not reach the workers or focus on their concerns, conventional radicals condemned its extended treatment of issues such as feminism, birth control, and literature, while many leftists with ties to the mainstream worried about Goldman's pronouncements on assassination and violence. Goldman was at times was implacable in her demands, requiring that revolutionary writers break completely with mainstream, respectable society and give themselves unreservedly to the workers, as the Russian intelligentsia did. She ridiculed society matrons who attended a strike as they would a picnic, only to return to their luxurious life at the day's end; she criticized even Upton Sinclair and Jack London for dilettantism and profiteering from their associations with the labor movement.[xx]
Despite its ingenuity, however, Goldman's philosophy of literature romanticized the working class, exaggerating its receptivity to change. Goldman was convinced that modern literature was relevant to the working class, and that they could perceive its importance. In 1897 she lectured to coal miners during their lunch hour, 400 feet beneath the earth, their black faces lit with their headlamps. "Their eyes, deep-sunken, looked dull at first, but as I continued speaking, they began glowing with understanding of the social significance of Shaw's works." Yet she does not say whether any of the miners obtained any of Shaw's plays as a result of this lecture, whether his were available in their locality, or whether the miners were capable of reading them. Although she asserted that "the poor are more hungry for intellectual food, even than they are for pork chops," this observation was occasioned by lectures at an IWW hall. The Wobblies were not typical workers; like the anarchists, they combined revolutionary zeal with an appreciation for the best in modern philosophy, science, and literature.[xxi]
Goldman's concept of literature exaggerated the progressive sensibilities of the working class. "The inspiration of the true artist has never been the drawing room," she said. "Great art has always gone to the masses, to their hopes and dreams, for the spark that kindled their souls." Yet Goldman knew full well, from her own experiences of workers, how limited most of their dreams were, and how much focused on riches and comfort and how little on liberty and creativity. The "hopes and dreams" of the masses concerned largely their own material welfare, and their determination to remain or become socially superior to some other outcast group. As a nurse and midwife she was sobered by her contacts with those she wanted to liberate. "Their squalid surroundings, their dull and inert submission to their lot, made me realize the colossal work yet to be done to bring about the change our movement was struggling to achieve" she said.[xxii] Moreover, most workers were racist, sexist, patriotic, homophobic, and enslaved by capitalist property morality; no realistic depiction of the American working class could paint an inspiring picture of a struggle for liberty or dignity.
Goldman's views on the relationship of the intelligentsia to the masses contained a major contradiction. On the one hand, she demanded that the intellectuals go to the masses not to teach but to learn, and sternly admonished them that the workers were the real creators of culture. The Russian intellectuals "went among the people, not to lift them up but themselves to be lifted up, to be instructed, and in return to give themselves wholly to the people. That accounts for the heroism, the art, the literature of Russia." Yet after the Russian Revolution Goldman gave real agency to the intellectuals. In the darkest days of Czardom "the blood of the Russian martyrs had nurtured the seed of idealism in the womb of the Russian soil.... The message of the men and women with the white hands--the intellectuals... had borne fruit.... Through a slow and painful process, and at the expense of the best and finest of the Russian generations, this message was carried to the hearts and minds of the people, the peasants, the workers."[xxiii] Goldman's apotheosis of the creative minority, however incompatible with any idealization of the masses, properly recognized the retrograde culture of most workers, their need of ideas and impetus from outside their own narrow experience.
Yet Goldman's attempt to revolutionize the middle class was similarly based on unrealistic expectations. Goldman implicitly assumed that ignorance, not self-interest, underlay elite attitudes towards the workers; she implied that vividly showing the truth to those who profited by exploitation and misery would fundamentally change their actions. This is contrary to her recognition of class conflict and the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. She fully recognized that elite fatuities concerning the workers were not motivated by simple ignorance, but that ignorance and willfulness "are so closely related to each other they must forever stand and fall together."[xxiv] This being true, could the mere realistic depiction of the suffering of the workers evoke genuine commmitment from those who could pay to see plays or her lectures upon them? The problems of the middle class were distinct from those of the workers; there was no reason to suspect that a aficionado of Ibsen would care about the plight of the starving, or that prosperous audiences would transcend preoccupation with their own liberation and evolve an altruistic concern with the workers. Modern dramatists may convince the prosperous classes that their own lives are sterile, hollow, and constrained, but the elites can change their own condition without touching the basic structures of power from which they benefit. Even plays expressly designed to awaken social consciousness have limited effects because literature does not offer clear analysis of problems, much less concrete solutions. It arouses pity more easily than concerted action and is dilettante almost by nature. It can generate dissatisfaction, but seldom proposes remedies except upon an individual basis--the precise kind of action that cannot help the working class or any oppressed group, as opposed to isolated individuals within them. At any rate, as Goldman repeatedly insisted, any exploited group must liberate itself, rather than waiting for sympathy or help from other groups.
Goldman's synthesis of modern literature and revolution also failed because modernism in high culture was rapidly abandoning the social realism and plain language that Goldman favored in favor of absorption in formal technique and esoteric language undeciperable except by a trained elite. James Joyce once said that if he took ten years to write a book, his readers could take that long to read and understand it. In Goldman's day, literature seemed naturally allied to other forms of social ferment both because writers had to struggle to overcome censorship, prudery, and ignorance, and because of the subject matter of many plays and novels. This convergence was fast waning even as Goldman lectured on the social significance of modern drama.
An article in Mother Earth as early as 1910 signaled danger. "Tendencies of Modern Literature," by one William Zuckerman, described the "intense subjectivism" and reaction against realism that characterized recent literature. "Having chosen the soul as its basis, modern literature must necessarily be subjective and individualist, rather than objective and social.... To the modern writer society exists only in so far as it influences and affects the individual." Goldman favored both an individual, psychological analysis and a social, objective depiction, and considered Gorky, whom Zuckerman considered passe, the exemplar of true literature. Goldman could not approve of "this psychological current [which] naturally carries modern literature away to mysticism and symbolism" and, neglecting the social dimensions of life as irrelevant, ends in metaphysics. Nor could she celebrate Zuckerman's contention that "the artist is not a teacher, nor a philosopher.... This is not his work. He has a greater mission." Although Zuckerman optimistically concluded that the impressionistic subjectivism of the most recent authors was of "great service to humanity" and finally compatible with social realism, he nonetheless indicated trends that were increasingly to sunder modernism in art and radicalism in politics. The alliance of writers and labor radicals soon became a project that required conscious effort and never quite succeeded. The increasing gap between Margaret Anderson and her Little Review and Goldman proved symptomatic.[xxv] Goldman had a wide appreciation for variety in literature; she was confident she could appropriate Doestoevsky and Nietzsche for her cause. Yet emerging literary trends would prove less assimilable by radicals of any stripe.
III
Many of the plays Goldman discussed concerned marriage, the family, feminism, and sexuality, topics central to Goldman's own repertoire. Although Goldman stressed the relevance of her ideas to the working class, her cultural radicalism, despite her intentions, addressed the needs of the privileged more than those of the workers.
Goldman's main theme was the total freedom of the individual. Because of this, our contemporary distinction between "equality" and "difference" feminists was largely irrelevant to her. She demanded absolutely equal rights for women in all spheres of life, even while acknowledging that most women possessed a mothering instinct and a broader, richer conception of sex that differentiated them from men. Because she felt that each individual should develop her unique personality, and that all society should be organized to facilitate this, the possible existence of some differences between the sexes did not concern her.
Goldman and the anarchists, opposing the very existence of church and state, and disdaining public opinion and social pressure, consistently opposed all interference in the private lives of individuals. "Sex emotions and love," Goldman asserted, "are among the most intimate, the most intense and sensitive, expressions of our being.... Every love relation should by its very nature remain an absolutely private affair. Neither the State, the Church, morality, or people should meddle in it." No contract or verbal commitment could guarantee happiness, intimacy, or love; legal guarantees could not forestall the inevitable tumults and sorrows which were an important part of love and life. Love "offered out of duty, because of the marriage license, isn't the genuine thing." Love is a union between two persons "of different temperament, feelings, and emotions," each "a small cosmos in himself.... It is glorious and poetic if these two worlds meet in freedom and equality. Even if this lasts but a short time it is already worthwhile. But the moment the two worlds are forced together all the beauty and fragrance ceases and nothing but dead leaves remain." Goldman asserted that love and marriage are antithetical. Marriage, Goldman said, resulted from "the domestication and ownership of women." As early as 1897 she asserted that marriage and private property were twins, and that the abolition of marriage would lead to the end of class society and economic exploitation. Anarchists who claimed that women could be freed only after the abolition of capitalism, or that Anarchism would automatically free women, were wrong. "Many of my sisters could be made free even now, were it not for our marriage institutions which keep them in ignorance, stupidity and prejudice." The emancipation of women must precede rather than follow the social revolution because only economically independent women could raise a new generation capable of establishing an anarchist society. Goldman later quoted Havelock Ellis's dictum that wives were in effect scabbing on prostitutes by providing more and better services at a lower cost. She asserted that a prostitute is freer than a wife, for she can sell herself for a specified time to a man of her choice, "whereas the married woman has no right whatsoever."[xxvi]
Goldman evaluated the realities, rather than the form, of any relationship. She had friends who were married, but criticized exclusive possession in whatever form as limiting and coercive. So-called "free unions," she thought, could be as confining as legal marriage if habits, scruple, or tradition kept people together after the love and passion had gone. She approved multiple sexual partners--what was called "varietism"--although Ben Reitman's philandering sorely tested this belief. "Two people bound by inner harmony and oneness are not afraid to impair their mutual confidence if one or the other has outside attractions," she said. Jealousy "is not the result of love" but of male conceit and arrogance, his proprietary and conquest ethos, and of the economic dependence of women, whose only selling point to men was their sexuality.[xxvii]
Goldman proclaimed the centrality of sex to human personality, as important for women as for men. "Man [by which she meant women as well as men] "is much more a sex creature than a moral creature" she said approvingly. At one point she even claimed that, because sex "is the very basis of the weal or woe of the race," people could endure "political and religious tyranny and be comparatively happy if the freedom of the affections were but guaranteed." She attacked the double standard, but, unlike most feminists, demanded more freedom for women rather than less for men. She charged that the requirement of premarital chastity poisoned the lives of both sexes. She believed, in accordance with the most advanced science of her time, that sexual repression wrecks devastation throughout the whole of human personality. She considered the sexual awakening of youth as a naturally radient time, associated with poetic and intellectual strivings, but complained that it was often poisoned by moralism, repression, and ignorance. Girls and women suffered more than men. Social convention demanded that young men refrain from marrying until they could support a family; in the meantime, they were tacitly allowed a sordid and guilt-ridden, because secret, sexual outlet, often with whores. Because this diversion continued after marriage--Goldman claimed that half of married men frequented prostitutes--many men eventually contracted veneral disease and infected their wives. Their beloveds, meanwhile, were deliberately kept ignorant of sex even while being raised primarily as "a sex commodity"; this ignorance "cripples the entire life and nature of the girl." The young woman avoids sex while waiting for her future husband to earn enough money to marry her; she becomes "a faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and everyone else." Taught that sex is dirty, repulsive, and unwomanly, she cannot enjoy marriage. Her attitude drives her husband to prostitutes. "The marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of women" Goldman said sarcastically.[xxviii]
Goldman could have added another count to her indictment. A woman who waited for her betrothed to earn enough to marry her often lingered in a state of abject dependency and doubt. If one man had promised her marriage she could not readily seek another partner; while she waited, she forfeited other marriage possibilities. Yet her value on the marriage market declined as she aged, even while that of her putative husband rose with his financial prospects. The fate of the young woman, therefore, revolved around her man keeping his promise; yet the dissolution of old social bonds enabled him to betray her with relative impunity. The old institutions of family, church, and village opinion that might have compelled him to marry her in earlier times had lost much of their force; the man had gained mobility while the woman had not. He could escape the consequences of disgraceful behavior by moving to a different area or even to a somewhat different circle of friends and associates.
While women were not allowed to have sex or children outside of marriage, they were compelled to have them within marriage. Marriage during Goldman's lifetime included institutionalized rape; the husband had a legal claim on his wife's body and could use physical violence to "chastise" or "correct" her. In the twentieth century, laws against rape specifically exempted acts within marriage,[xxix] even as social norms, especially in the native-born middle class, increasingly admitted the wife's right to sexual pleasure and a sexual veto.
Goldman, like many feminists of her day, exalted motherhood as the greatest privilege of womanhood; unlike most feminists, however, she castigated marriage as profaning motherhood by making it compulsory. Motherhood, she complained, was sanctified in marriage, even if the child was conceived in hatred and rape by an overworked, sickly mother; a child born outside of marriage, even if the product of love and true communion, was despised. Goldman's experience as a nurse acquainted her with many a woman, poor and ill, "tied to a man she loathes, whose very sight fills her with horror, yet made to breed." Goldman exclaimed that "were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love." Many women risked mutilation or death from illegal abortions rather than become mothers; Goldman averred that there were 17 known abortions for every 100 pregnancies, and that many thousands of women were killed by illegal abortions every year. In Goldman's time, as many as one-half of urban families lived below the level of decent subsistence, and about one-third lived in destitution. In these poor families the infant mortality rate was 256 per 1000 births, three times that of relatively prosperous families. Between 12% and 20% of the surviving children in America's six largest cities were malnourished on the eve of World War I. Under such circumstances, the anarchists claimed, motherhood within working-class marriage was compulsory partly because capitalist society required low-paid wage slaves, soldiers, jailers, and scabs.[xxx]
Goldman recognized that marriage laws had a built-in class bias. Working-class wives, however battered or neglected, found escape from marriage extremely difficult. Lax divorce laws in Nevada, however, enabled those with the leisure, money, and knowledge to travel to Reno and secure a quick divorce. This privilege was possible only in an increasingly pluralistic, mobile, and affluent society, where marriage had become more of a form than a reality for some members of the elite. Marriage, Goldman charged, was a form of prostitution, where a father sold his daughter to the highest bidder; a rich woman could buy her freedom and sell herself to another man. A piece of paper made serial monogamy respectable; "the sanctity of the home is only for the poor."[xxxi] Middle-class women could also obtain birth control information and devices, denied to the poor, through their private physicians.
Goldman castigated marriage as a form of slavery for woman, an institution that grew out of the ownership of women. "The less soul a woman has, the greater her asset as a wife" she claimed. Goldman noted that women fled marriage, either by not marrying or by securing divorces, as they gained more education and economic independence. This was, in fact, a major reason why traditionalists feared women's emancipation. Working women, Goldman noted, married to avoid the slavery of factory work; but some had to continue working and many more returned to work when their husband fell ill, died, or deserted her. Many prostitutes were married and living at home, and plied their trade to support their families. Even a wife who avoids the factory, Goldman said, "learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him." The home belongs to the man, not the woman; she shrinks to its contours and becomes "a nag, petty, quarrelsome, gossipy, unbearable, thus driving the man from the house," where she cannot follow. "Wonderfully inspiring atmosphere for the bearing of life, is it not?" Marriage made women dependent and parasitic as well as subordinate; it "annihilates her social consciousness [and] paralyzes her imagination" and makes her look to others--her husband and the state--rather than to herself for protection. These conditions also made traditional motherhood "so helpless and dependent, so self-centered and unsocial as to fill me with horror"; Goldman considered mothers the most detrimental influence on their children. Marriage, like capitalism, exploited its victims and rendered them dependent, and then gave them a pittance back as charity.[xxxii] Goldman was only pointing to the grim realities of working-class life when she reminded her readers that neither the state nor men could adequately protect women.
Yet Goldman's strictures attracted more attention among prosperous Americans, imbued with the ideals of companionate marriage, than among ethnic, immigrant workers, for whom marriage remained more of an economic and procreative partnership. Working-class children, laboring in dangerous and squalid factories for a pittance, often contributed necessary family income, and supported their parents in their old age. Many a working-class woman who prosecuted her violent, abusive husband quickly petitioned to get him out of jail, because she and her children desperately needed his economic support.[xxxiii] Many workers had immigrated from conservative, patriarchal cultures which viewed women's position in the United States as positively subversive. Many were Catholics, and others traditional Jews. Immigrants of all sorts regarded the family as a "haven in a heartless world," a mechanism of survival, cultural identity, and upward mobility rather than as an obstacle to personal fulfillment. Working-class women often viewed marriage and the family as their only economic and social support rather than as the prison it increasingly seemed to some educated or economically independent women.
Goldman recognized that middle-class women married to escape their families, not factory work; yet she averred that they found motherhood and the household drudgery of the patriarchal household but another form of slavery. Goldman argued that respectable, middle-class daughters were more repressed than their working-class counterparts, who were freer, more expressive, and less bound by convention. Working-class girls played and danced and cavorted with men "and often follow the call of love and passion regardless of ceremony and tradition." In a passage which partly explains Goldman's infatuation with Ben Reitman, she described one of the tragedies of the modern, emancipated woman. "The higher the mental development of woman, the less possible it is for her to meet a congenial mate who will see in her, not only sex, but also the human being, the friend, the comrade and strong individuality, who cannot and ought not to lose a single trait of her character.... Equally impossible for her is the man who can see in her nothing more than her mentality and her genius, and who fails to awaken her woman nature."[xxxiv]
Goldman asserted that women--and here she surely referred to relatively privileged women--were restricted by "internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth--ethical and social conventions" than external constraints. "The revolutionary process of changing her external conditions is comparatively easy; what is difficult and necessary is the inner change of thought and desire." The concern for respectability and fear of public opinion, she said, afflicted professionals, many of whom feared involvement with a man in or out of marriage, much more than working-class women. "The dread of love for a man who is not her social equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession--all these together make of the emancipated woman a compulsory vestal" whom life passes by. Just as her work as a nurse and midwife had introduced her to the travails of the working class, so the Vienna scalp and facial massage parlor she briefly owned acquainted her with the loneliness and sterility of middle-class life. The educated, professional women who patronized her parlor claimed they were independent and emancipated because they made their own living. "But they paid for it by the suppression of the mainstream of their natures; fear of public opinion robbed them of love and intimate comradeship. It was pathetic to see how lonely they were, how starved for male affection, and how they craved children."[xxxv] Such women faced a dilemma: either marry, become legally subservient to their husbands, and forfeit their career for motherhood, or forgo love altogether. The opposition and inflexibility of employers and the hostility of potential husbands meant that most professional women had to choose between marriage and a career.
Most of the first generation of college women, therefore, never married, and those who did often did not have children. Yet they would not love a man, much less have children, outside of marriage. "Lacking the courage to tell the world to mind its own business, the emancipation of women was frequently more of a tragedy than traditional marriage would have been.... They had not become independent in spirit or free in their personal lives." Even so-called liberated women were slaves to the church, the state, and public opinion. "Until woman has learned to defy them all, to stand firmly on her own ground and to insist upon her own unrestricted freedom, to listen to the voice of her nature, whether it call for life's greatest treasure, the love for a man, or her most glorious privilege, to give birth to a child, she cannot call herself emancipated.... The most vital right is the right to love and be loved. Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweatheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate." Adding to women's isolation, companionate marriage was offset by social disapproval of the intense emotional bonds that women had formerly formed with each other. The custom of "smashing" became suspect, and close femimine attachments--"Boston marriages"--were becoming stigmatized as lesbian and deviant. Professional women, therefore, were forced to choose between a career (itself offering many fewer rewards than a male career) and any sort of love, affection, close companionship, and sexual expressiveness. Goldman was among the very few Americans to publicly defend homosexuality as natural and ethical.[xxxvi]
Goldman's exaltation of love and motherhood stemmed from her general emphasis on human relationships, joy, and creativity over more conventional material goals. She could not agree that bourgeois economic freedom could liberate women, or that women could become economically free in capitalist society. Goldman did not view any career in a capitalist society as liberating; she rejected any work in a hierarchical bureaucracy, under the direction of other people, and under conditions not of the individual's choice. Many women were among the "intellectual proletarians" whose situation she so perceptively analyzed. "We have seen [woman] exchange the narrow walls and lack of freedom of her home for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the office, department store, or factory" she said.[xxxvii] Money, power, and status, the holy trinity of career men and women, were immaterial to her. She recognized that most working women were herded into horrific, degrading, and dangerous jobs which paid less than a subsistence wage, and that professional women were denied promotions and paid much less than men for comparable work. Women of either class were sexually harassed on the job, and any wife who worked did double duty at home. The economic equality of women, in the sense of equal ability to compete for careers, seemed not only chimerical to Goldman but, even if real, only another form of wage slavery.
Goldman felt that prostitution epitomized women's plight in a capitalist, patriarchal, and puritanical society. Her analysis combined economic, legal, gendered, social, and cultural explanations into a comprehensive whole which resembles our best modern understanding more than the simplistic and moralistic opinions of most of her contemporaries. She blamed capitalism because overworked and underfed women prostituted themselves to feed themselves and their children. Almost 25% of the prostitutes interviewed by William Sanger were married and living with their husbands. Respectable society, Goldman charged, ignored the horrors of tenement life and capitalist exploitation, caring only about sensationalized tales of "white slavery." But "a cause much deeper and by far of greater importance" was the fact that "woman has been reared as a sex commodity, and yet she is kept in absolute ignorance of the meaning and importance of sex." Horrible working conditions and a wretched home life drove many girls to commercial amusements and the company of young men as "the only means of forgetting their daily routine." Society encouraged young men to "follow the call of the wild," yet women were denied the information necessary to protect themselves. One small slip and they are regarded by society--and by themselves--as "depraved and fallen.... Thus society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of." Another cause is "the thoroughly American custom for excessive display of finery and clothes" which necessitated "money that can not be earned in shops or factories." Many respectable women sold their bodies for similar reasons to one man in marriage. "To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much is the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it to many.... The only difference lies in the amount received, and of course in the seal society either gives or withholds." Goldman observed that laws against prostitution only worsened the plight of the prostitutes by driving them out of brothels into the streets where they were preyed on by pimps and policemen. She concluded that the abolition of prostitution required "a complete transvaluation of all accepted values--especially the moral ones--coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery." Prostitution symbolized women's plight because no class of women had real choice. Society forced every woman to be "a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of hapless children."[xxxviii]
IV
Goldman lived at a time of major shifts in the position of women, the organization of the family, and attitudes towards human sexuality. Her views on these subjects were not idealizations of an imagined past, as many historians claim anarchism was[xxxix]; nor were they an eccentric vision. Rather, Goldman's views were but the logical fulfillment of modern trends and ideas. In these areas of life as in others, Goldman was an unabashed modernist, who intrigued a segment of the elite.
In the early twentieth century, the separate spheres for men and women were eroding as women moved from the home into public spaces. The market economy and government performed many traditional female functions, such as the manufacture of textiles and clothing, the preparation of food, and the education of children, outside the home. Women followed those functions into the public world. Middle-class women benefited from this trend as they attended college, worked at professional careers, volunteered for various social reform movements, and shopped for goods previously manufactured at home. Gender differences, while still vital, were no longer the chief organizer of social life or the main source of personal identity. The emergence of a consumer society for privileged Americans also generated new values, as personal gratification and self-expression uneasily coexisted with the old virtues of frugality, discipline, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.
These epochal changes transformed marriage and the family. The middle class evolved a style of "companionate marriage" which emphasized self-expression, personal satisfaction, and mutuality alongside the old economic partnership focused on reproduction. Companionate marriage, in the words of John D'Emilio and Estelle Freeman, "redefined marriage in more egalitarian terms.... A successful relationship rested on the emotional compatibility of husband and wife, rather than the fulfillment of gender-prescribed duties and roles. Men and women sought happiness and personal satisfaction in their mates; an important component of their happiness was mutual sexual enjoyment." The middle class increasingly detached sex from procreation and acknowledged a female sexuality "as strong as, even if different from, that of the male." As the family ceased being the sole determinate of a woman's identity, sexual purity ceased being her main virtue. Some limited form of sexual expression before marriage (with her future husband) was tolerated. The centrality of sex to human personality was recognized, and the scientific study of human sexual practices begun. Children became more of an economic liability than an asset for the middle class. They were no longer economically productive as on the farm, while their proper socialization to middle-class norms required increasing effort and expense. Birth control halved the average family size between 1800 and 1900, and the decline was even greater in middle-class families.[xl]
Industrialization, urbanization, and consumerism eroded old constraints on personal behavior. Leisure time became commercialized and sexualized as heterosexual mingling occurred at dance halls and amusement parks and on auto excursions. Many consumer goods such as cosmetics and fine clothes appealed to sexual interest, while advertising used sexual themes to sell a myriad of other goods. Working-class forms of commercial amusement and sexual expressiveness percolated upwards towards the middle class. The old mechanisms of social control--village, family, church, and public opinion--dissolved in the impersonality, vastness, and pluralism of the new urban environment. Conservatives outraged over the new mores made sex, previously privatized, into a public, political issue as abortion and prostitution were criminalized and the Comstock law severely limited discussion of birth control and other sexual issues.
Goldman responded to these developments by following their liberating impulses to their logical conclusions. Although companionate marriage was a reform of marriage in the direction of equality and self-fulfillment, an adaptation to the new position of women and the possibilities of an urban society and a consumer economy, Goldman opposed reform in marriage as in economics and politics. She demanded abolition of marriage as well as of capitalism and the state. Her critique of marriage, however, was a logical extension of widespread ideas.
As the old functions of marriage attenuated in the face of social and economic change, marriage became a focus of intimacy, self-expression, companionship, and sexual fulfillment. The old compulsory ties between the sexes weakened as it became possible for men, and even some women, to live alone outside any family context and as sex became potentially detached from procreation. Marriage became laden with new "great expectations" that few actual marriages could fully satisfy.[xli] Yet the ethos of companionate marriage logically implied that any marriage which could not achieve these new purposes should be dissolved. When marriage was considered sanctioned by God for a transcendental purpose, and also as the foundation of an ordered society, it was virtually indissoluble. When the primary purposes of marriage became intimacy, happiness, self-fulfillment, and sexual ecstasy, it seemed logical to dissolve a marriage where one or both partners proved incapable of achieving these goals.
The new expectations of marriage were not only more subjective and lofty than the old purposes; they were also less likely to be achieved over a long period of time for both parties. This was especially true if both spouses had their own interests, friends, and personalities, and valued continual personal growth and the intense experience of life--as Goldman and the anarchists advocated. Couples who married when both parties were relatively young and inexperienced, when they neither fully knew who they were nor had the ability to evaluate others, would obviously experience strain as the partners matured, especially if sexual magnetism, rather than more fundamental compatibilities, was a main source of their attraction. The partners may well pursue different trajectories and change in incompatible ways even if they were well-matched initially. All of this was much more likely in a pluralistic, urban environment where a person's life course was much less predictable, than in a rural society, where a person's source of income, identity, residence, and status was to a much greater extent fixed early in life. The modern, urban world made each individual person far more complex, internally diverse, and changeable at the same time the new ideology of marriage made long-term emotional and intellectual compatibility between mates more important than ever before. The needs that husbands and wives expected each other to satisfy were much less defined and more amorphous and subjective, than previously. Men and women were still socialized for difference, rather than for camaraderie and communication, however; and this created a chasm between them. Goldman realized that raising boys and girls as persons rather than as half-persons would eliminate or lessen brutality and weakness, the extremes of both sexes. In that world, "men and women will be perfect companions, and the most enduring love is founded on comradeship."[xlii]
This blend of new imperatives and old socialization was reflected in a rising divorce rate; by 1915, 8% of all marriages would end in divorce. The nature of marriage was changing, in its expressed purpose, its equalitarianism, and its duration; it was gradually becoming a new institution with the same name as an old one.[xliii] Goldman advocated the total abolition of the institution, and the immediate and complete implementation of the new ideals.
Voltairine de Clyre's philosophy, captured the essence of the new trends and carried Goldman's philosophy to its logical conclusion. De Clyre almost rejected relationships of any duration and cohabitation in or out of marriage. "That love and repect may last," she said, "I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities." Couples should "maintain the distances." Love should not be "vulgarized by the common indecencies of continuous close communion." De Clyre regarded the desire for permanency in any relationship as an illusion. "No matter how perfectly adapted to each other two people may be at any given time, it is not the slightest evidence that they will continue to be so," especially early in life when sexual attraction is so important. "The two are thrown too much and too constantly in contact, and speedily exhaust the delight of each other's presence. Then irritations begin. The familiarities of life in common breed contempt. What was once a rare joy becomes a matter of course, and loses all its delicacy. Very often it becomes a physical torture to one (usually the woman) while it still retains some pleasure for the other, for the reason that bodies, like souls, do most seldom, almost never, parallel each other's development." De Clyre warned that enduring love is impossible. "People will not, and cannot, think and feel the same at the same moments, throughout any considerable period of life; and therefore, their moments of union should be rare and of no binding nature." She rejected the claims of advocates of free love that they have solved the problem, which was not solely one of legal forms but with psychological dependencies, custom, and habit. "The bonds are there, the bonds of life in common, the love of the home built by joint labor, the habit of association and dependence; they are very real chains, binding both, and not to be thrown off lightly." Unlike Goldman, De Clyre viewed motherhood in matter-of-fact terms as one of many possible goals in a woman's life, and a goal which conflicted with most other goals.[xliv]
For all these reasons Goldman demanded a total revolution in the condition of women, a revolution that encompassed every aspect of life. She criticized mainstream feminists for their narrow concept of freedom, their timid demands, and their lack of class consciousness. "Most of them see their slavery as apart from the rest of the human family," she lamented. "The Feminists foolishly believe that having a man's role, or position, makes them free." Goldman similarly criticized the suffragists for believing that the vote would solve women's problems. She rejected all forms of political action as imposing the rule of some people upon others, rewarding corrupt politicians, robbing people of their self-reliance and integrity, and encouraging oppressed and starving people to think of themselves as free. Goldman believed that the self-activity of any oppressed group could win more than the vote, and "in a more direct, less costly, and more lasting manner."[xlv]
In addition to her strictures against voting in general, Goldman specifically criticized woman suffrage. She laughed at suffragist claims that women would purify politics, asserting that women were no better than men and that politics was corrupt because it was "the reflex of the business and industrial world." Most women, she thought, would vote to strengthen the instruments of their own enslavement--religion, the patriarchal home, and the state. Women also supported Prohibition and other repressive laws; "woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be.... Woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power." Goldman asserted that countries and states that enfranchised women were no better governed than other jurisdictions. Women often supported reactionaries, and had not improved the conditions of workers, children, or even themselves by their votes. Women were enslaved "not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions"; in Russia, women achieved liberation "not through the ballot, but by her will to be and to do." In the United States as well "her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body" and "by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer" and "by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free."[xlvi]
V
Goldman's distinctive version of feminism expresses the strengths and weaknesses of her general philosophy, and reveals simultaneously the sources of her appeal and her isolation. She preached self-emancipation to women as to other oppressed groups. And it is a tonic for any victim of oppression to hear that they can, right now, take action to liberate themselves and achieve a full life; that they need not remain the mere passive victim of circumstances, nor await the social revolution or majority or ruling-group consent to their aspirations. Many elite women who had partially overcome the material barriers to equality by securing a career or an education thrilled to her declaration that "true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul. History tells us that every oppressed class gains true liberation from its masters through its own efforts.... It is, therefore, far more important for her to begin with her own inner regeneration, to cut loose from the weight of prejudices, traditions, and customs." Goldman was correct in her oft-reiterated view that belief in the determining power of institutions and circumstances breeds passivity, fatalism, and acquiesecence in oppression. "The theory that man is a product of conditions has led only to indifference and to a sluggish acquiescence in those conditions." Yet her critique of marriage and the family, as of American life in general, would benefit from a recognition of the very real constraints that social institutions place on individual behavior, and the role that institutionalized oppression plays in generating conservative cultural beliefs among the oppressed. Generalizing from her own experience, Goldman demanded that all women simply declare their freedom, act upon it, and thus secure it. For most women, this was impossible. Alice Wexler has said that "her own success in establishing her independence led her to judge less successful women rather harshly and to underestimate the obstacles confronting them.... How the individual woman was to overcome institutionalized barriers to freedom and independence--low-paying jobs, lack of education, professional discrimination, absense of contraceptives and child care--remained unclear."[xlvii]
Feminists and suffragists had solid reasons for their cultural conservatism--reasons which went far beyond mere political expediency. Victims of oppression often cling the more firmly to what little space and source of social validation they have. In late Victorian America and beyond, women's limitation to the worst, lowest-paying, least satisfying, least-prestigious, dead-end jobs made the home and their roles as wives and mothers, however oppressive and confining, the source of whatever status, satisfaction, and sense of identity most women could have. Moreover, with the husband often absent and the women conceded superior aptitudes for child-care, the family and the home sometimes offered a modicum of real power to women, or at least more power than was available in those public spaces from which she was either excluded or relegated to the lowest ranks. When radicals attacked the only source of identity and validation that most women possessed before the radicals had transformed the larger social world to make more meaningful sources of identity available, they cut to the heart of everything most women could achieve and cherish. Radicals scoffed at everything that could protect most women or give their lives meaning, or give them some control, however tenuous, over their destinies. When Goldman demanded that liberation begin in the consciousness of individual women, she inverted the proper order of cause and effect. Her anarchist volunteerism, her neglect of structural determinates of identity and ideology, her rejection of any base/superstructure model, even one including race, gender, and other factors in the base, made her philosophy unrealistic and often harshly condemnatory of precisely those victims who most need sympathetic understanding. Marriage and motherhood, however terrible for many women, and confining for all, were perhaps the best options of the bad lot available to most women. Women were not simply cowed, passive participants in their own oppression; their ideology, their exaltation of marriage and the family, stemmed from their very real experience and interests in the world that actually existed. Moreover, such idealization was itself a bid for power within the home as against men; by asserting proper roles for women and men that differed widely from actual practice, they provided justification for women's needs and desires and a limitation on how far men could depart from the idealized norm.
Widespread female endorsement of female chastity and of prohibition had similar origins. In an age where effective birth control was simply not available to most women, and where the law gave the husband legal control of his wife's body up to and including legalized rape, women required some protection against the unbridled lust of their husbands. In an age where very few women could survive without the economic support of a man, women needed some way of securing a man and tying him to the support of a wife and family. In a time lacking effective treatment for venereal disease, indiscriminate sexual activity did endanger women as well as men. For these reasons, the feminist demand for a single standard of sexual purity incumbant upon men, rather than for a single, liberated sexual standard applicable also to women, made eminent sense. Sexual liberation initially liberated men, and liberated women mainly from the ability to reject sexual advances. Moreover, women who acknowledged their eroticism and acted on it often lowered themselves in the eyes of radical men, and probably themselves as well. As Marsh says, ambivilence and perhaps guilt are the inevitable feelings of pioneers who defy society.[xlviii] Such women also had much more difficulty resuming a conventional life than did repenitent men, especially if they had children. Many supposedly "liberated" men neither knew nor cared how to sexually satisfy their partners. Goldman could have all the sex she wanted without fearing pregnancy; and she supported herself in a manner obviously impossible for most women. She was almost immune to public opinion; in fact, she gained by her notoriety. Her contempt for women who feared the opinion of the Board of Education showed insensitivity to the plight of women who eked out a living as public school teachers.
Female attachment to religion also offered women not only false hopes and consolation, and not only injunctions to submissiveness, but also a limited source of cultural power--often the only form available to oppressed groups. Religious ideals, feminized since the early nineteenth century, afforded women a legitimate source not only of identity but of protection from their husbands. It conferred status and recognition on her, and imposed standards on the conduct of her husband above and beyond those imposed by law.
Prohibition is another case in point. Goldman railed against it as an infringement upon individual liberty; but some revolutionaries lauded it as condusive to working-class cohesion and discipline. Alcohol was a real threat to the physical, economic, and psychological survival of most women; feminists and suffragists who supported prohibition did so not from superstititous reasons but out of rational self-interest. Women were physically threatened by alcoholic husbands, who were prone to violence and abuse, and economically threatened by husbands who spent substantial portions of their poverty wages on alcohol, spent excessive time in taverns away from home, and sometimes incapacitiated themselves for work by excessive drinking. Drink was also related to prostitution, another threat to any wife's health and livelihood. Female moralism, far from being either "natural" or superstitious as Goldman thought, stemmed from the very real needs of women; it was a source of power for the largely powerless. Later feminists have confronted this same dilemma, that legal equality between the sexes in a world where women are actually economically unequal generates intensified oppression and inequality.
Goldman similarly neglected the social and cultural meaning of the vote. She was absolutely correct that neither the vote nor even economic opportunity would automatically liberate women; there is an essential cultural and volitional component to all freedom. Women did have significant impact on social policy and legislation before they secured the vote--more influence, in many ways, than they exercised in the decade after enfranchisement. Radicals of all sorts have found that pressure from outside the system often generates change within it; voting is no substitute for solidarity and organization. Whatever the limitations of electoral action as a means of achieving fundamental reform, however, the exclusion of women from the voting booth, from juries, and from political office, was obviously a major ingredient in their oppression not only in law but in economics and the household. Patriarchy, like white supremacy and capitalism, is an interrelated system of economic, political, social, and cultural power that must be confronted along the entire breath of its existence. Goldman and the anarchists properly stressed the cultural dimension of oppression, and called the oppressed of whatever group to immediate action of their own behalf; but they unduly neglected the legal and political aspects of oppression. Or, rather, they postponed confrontation with those constraints until that magic moment when the political state was abolished. They had no immediate program of collective action for women as they did for labor. Kropotkin, despite his anarchist principles, urged Russian anarchists to join the movement for a constitution and the franchise because that movement was the foremost insurgency in Russia; the anarchists belonged on the side of the people, fighting their battles even while seeking to extend them beyond mere political, parchment changes.[xlix] Goldman's harsh criticism of women and of female suffrage isolated her from one of the most vibrant, promising social movements of her time; it therefore limited her impact even while it contributed to the very conservatism of the feminists which she bemoaned.
Goldman's weakness here is exemplified in her attitude, and that of other anarchist women, towards the care of children. Goldman, of course, had no personal worries about children. This helped her ignore the very real problem of what to do about children conceived out of wedlock in the actual world in which she lived. Some of her pronouncements on this subject are simply fatuous. "A child born of love will always prove a joy and a comfort to its parents," she claimed, even while insisting that love is transient. When asked about the care of children outside of marriage, Goldman pointed to the many inadequacies of marriage and the traditional family: "Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing."[l] She pointed to the large numbers of orphans, of women and children abandoned by their husbands and fathers, the large number of children forced to work at an early age, often in virtual death camps, and to the millions of malnourished, ill-educated, and abused and neglected children living in traditional families. All this being said, the mere abolition of marriage and the family was no cure. The anarchists, opposed to all compulsion, simply could not acknowledge that people who have children can legitimately be forced to care for them or that some parents, particularly fathers, might not voluntarily do so. Marriage, the family, and female sexual purity provided some small protection to women and children. Vastly unequal pay and lack of day-care (which as an anarchist Goldman could not demand that the government provide) made single motherhood a true horror. Goldman did believe that an anarchist society would provide free childcare, but had no practical program for the present. Her intransigent opposition to the state undercut any practical proposals. On women's issues, Goldman had few immediate demands of relevance to the vast majority of women, other than the legalization of birth control.
The agitation for birth control, seemingly a cause of obvious benefit to all women, revealed the obstacles to change created by the social system. Class divisions among women, the cultural conservatism of many workers, and the economic necessities of the poor all rendered birth control a difficult fight. As Goldman recognized, middle-class women could obtain contraceptive information and devices from their private physicians, and therefore had no immediate personal reason to join the crusade. Goldman pitched her arguments primarily to the working class, arguing that if the poor had fewer children (or none at all), these children would be healthier. Their mothers, less burdened with a large, half-starved brood, would provide superior care and education for their children. Yet the women in poor, immigrant households were both religious conservatives and more subject to the authority of an overweening male than white, native-born middle-class women. Although many undeniably wanted fewer children, a large family was an economic necessity for poor parents. Children were essential contributors to the family wage economy from an early age, and the only hope of their parents for support in sickness and old age. The horrific death rate made it necessary for poor families to have many children so that some would survive.
Goldman also argued that if the poor had fewer or no children--if working-class women went on a "birth strike"--workers as a class would benefit because the capitalists would have fewer workers to exploit, and therefore pay higher wages. This argument reveals a fatal flaw in Goldman's individualistic ethos. For one, even if all workers drastically limited their family size, this would not necessarily decrease the numbers of workers because the capitalists could tap alternative sources of labor, such as immigrants, women, blacks, and other excluded groups. They could also further mechanize production. Second, even if birth control did affect the labor market and wages if generally practiced, any individual couple who limited their offspring would have negligible effect on wage rates but would impoverish themselves. Their wages would not rise, but their family income and old-age security would plummet. Most people of all classes wanted a family, which they perceived as central to their lives, expectations, and identities; they would not forgo this out of any illusory economic benefits to their class as a whole. Big Bill Haywood evoked the ire of some feminists when we demanded high enough wages for men so that women could have all the babies they wanted; Haywood's elite female backers wanted fewer babies, not more.[li] But Haywood's solution was necessary for the workers, and did not indicate any desire for large families. Experience has demonstrated that smaller families accompany or follow, rather than preceding. a rise in the economic, legal, and political status of women.
Goldman, of course, did not preach abstinence to the poor; she valued contraception precisely because it allowed a full expression of sexuality without harmful consequences. She did not ignore the economic aspects of women's oppression; she proclaimed that as long as women forgo children out of either moral taboos or economic necessity, "the emancipation of women is only a phrase."[lii] In sharp contrast to present-day radicals, however, Goldman did not romanticize the poor and exploited, or absolve them of all responsibility for their plight. Workers, however constrained by economic and social structures over which they had no control, neverthless did have agency and contributed to their own subjugation and degradation. Changes in their personal conduct could help alleviate their distress, even short of social revolution.
Goldman's philosophy is often distorted in contradictory ways. She is at times represented as an all-or-nothing "impossibilist," who disdained all compromise and repudiated all amelioration short of total revolution; at other times she is misrepresented as an idealist who believed that individuals could liberate themselves by a mere act of volition, even within the constraints of a capitalist, patriarchal, and racist society. Goldman avoided both of these errors; she properly saw the necessity of both individual emancipation and social struggle if human liberation was to occur. If many of her followers emphasized one aspect of her philosophy to the exclusion of the other, they did so because the American economic and social structure made combining the two so difficult. Individual and social revolution must occur together for either to be real; but either one seems impossible unless preceded by the other.
Goldman was correct in thinking that social revolution would protect women far more than traditional, patriarchial marriage did; she was also correct in encouraging women's quest for self-liberation in the here-and-now. But her realization of the necessity for total revolution, for complete economic, political, social, and cultural transformation contradicted her erroneous assertion that people, in particular women, could free themselves in the present simply by willing that they be free. Were that true, social revolution would hardly be necessary; individuals could simply demand and take their own freedom now, within the existing capitalistic, patriarchal, and white supremist structures. Cultural revolution, a transformation in the hearts and minds of the oppressed, must accompany economic, political, and social revolution; it cannot replace it. In thinking that it could, in thinking that individuals could by their own isolated action free themselves in the present without any larger social transformation--that, in fact, individual self-liberation would lead to or contribute to social revolution--the anarchists paved the way for the privitazation of cultural revolution, preparing for its detachment from larger socio-economic struggles and its reduction into mere lifestyle preferences expressed within the confines of an unchanged capitalistic, patriarchal, and racist society. Both by their energetic pursuit of individual reforms within existing society, and their insistence that individuals could in and of themselves achieve liberation, the anarchists therefore paved the way for the cooptation and domestication of their own proposals for cultural transformation. In Christopher Lasch's phrase, they confused culture with politics.
VI
Goldman's weltanschauung and lifestyle intrigued a spectrum of educated urban residents as much for its spirit as for its concrete details. The shift to a market economy, industrialization, urbanization, and massive emigration presented unprecedented opportunities for the flowering of individual human personality. The traditional constraints of family, village, church, and small employer dissolved under the impact of modern urban life. An old guard fashioned a substitute, overt government repression, for these organic controls. In many ways, government intrusion into the private lives of individuals intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Comstock law criminalized discussion of birth control and many sexual issues; abortion, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol were criminalized; marital rape was explicitly legalized; injunctions, police, the national guard, and the army suppressed strikes; blacks and migrant workers were disfranchised, and blacks lynched in record numbers; immigration of politically suspect individuals was prohibited, and anti-anarchist laws criminalized advocacy of the very methods which established the United States. Theodore Roosevelt used obscenity laws to squelch La Question Sociale, an anarchist publication, in 1903, while Mother Earth subscription lists were used as early as 1908 to deport anarchists.[liii] Local, state, and federal authorities created a massive secret police apparatus, which spied on suspected subversives, manufactured evidence, and suborned perjury. First amendment rights scarcely existed. The machinery of government intervented more directly into personal and private affairs as the "island communities" that had composed the United States disintegrated.[liv]
Meanwhile, new class of urban professionals evolved an alternate strategy for preserving and reconstituting order. They forged more subtle instruments of hegemony such as settlement houses, parks, "wholesome" amusements for the working class, welfare capitalism, conservative unionism, and consumerism.[lv] New and old constraints, neither of which had the force, the seeming naturalness, or the inevitablity of the small-town community in its prime, obstructed the new possibilities opened by the modern world.
The anarchists pressed the most liberating strains of the new social forms to their logical conclusions. They opposed all three forms of coercion--the traditional constraints of family, village, church, and small employer; the new repressions of the penal law; and elite manipulation of public institutions. They won some success because the old mechanisms of control were losing their force and the new ones had not yet won universal acceptance. Hegemonic forms of social control must seem inevitable, natural, and invisible--not really forms of control at all. In the early twentieth century, however, many forms of constraint, both new and old, seemed irksome, unnatural, and artificial. Along with new forms of largely hidden constraint came a genuine loosening of bonds. Individuals gained freedom to define their own personalities and lifestyles. The anarchists favored this trend.
The impact of modernization on personal and cultural life has been almost opposite from its effects on politics and economics. The centralized factory regiments workers much more intensely at work, but frees workers from the intrusive scrutiny of their employer off the job which characterized local, handicraft production. The depersonalization and anonymity of modern life generates anomie but also liberates individuals to construct their own lives and personalities without deferring to the opinions of anyone except chosen companions. Bureaucracy structures and regiments life, but its very impersonality, uniformity, and predictability frees the individual to achieve personal goals without suffering defeat from irrational or unpredictable events. Even centralization has genuinely liberating effects because local diversity accompanies national and even global uniformity. Many cultures, "taste publics," and lifestyles coexist within any single locale; individuals are much less defined by their place or birth or any ascribed status and much more by their own individual preferences. Subcultures, voluntary associations, and pluralist lifestyles multiply; internationalism, centralization, and uniformity go hand in hand with individualism, choice, and freedom. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individuals were losing control of the workplace, the political structure, and the chaotic urban life around them, but they--or at least that minority of white males who were full members of the old civil society--were gaining in personal autonomy, control, and freedom in their personal life. The modern world, therefore, is both more and less regimented than premodern society. Modern society can plausibly be viewed both as a soft variety of totalitarianism, insidiously shaping individuals without their knowing it, and as a fragmenting and fractured world where "everything solid melts into air," every bond is temporary and tenuous, and every individual and every group goes its own way, owing no common allegiance to anyone.[lvi]
Goldman lived in the time of this transition and vehemently opposed the coercive aspects of both the new and old orders while exhilerating in every liberating impulse. Her attacks on stifling conformity echoed those of mainstream progressives and reformers who worried about the decay of character and the loss of independence which, they thought, characterized their era. Their strictures vastly exaggerate the real autonomy of the old-fashioned "character-oriented" person, who was narrowly constrained by family, church, and small-town public opinion, to an extent almost unimaginable in today's secular, pluralistic, urban-industrial world. They also exaggerate the regimentation and conformity of the modern "personality."[lvii] The new forms of conformity demand that an individual become different people on different occasions and play contradictory and even incompatible roles at different times and places. This generates stress, uncertainty and confusion; coherence of personality may disintegrate under too great a multiplicity of roles, as one individual strives to meet contrasting expectations of a wide variety of people in a diversity of contexts. Yet multiplicity of roles can also liberate human personality from narrow confines and present greater opportunity for self-definition and choice among possible roles. The old demands for conformity imposed by family, church, and village were far more fixed and unchanging, and were for that very reason more total, more easily internalized and less obvious.
Goldman and the anarchists incessantly denounced the hypocrisy of modern life, the chameleon-like fitting into different roles and contexts. They denounced hypocrisy not in the premodern sense of a secret failure to adhere to recognized and internalized standards, but in the more modern sense of proclaiming allegiance to institutions, values, or beliefs that a person privately ridicules or detests. Old-time hypocrisy consisted of surreptitious and shame-filled depature from generally accepted norms which the individual actually believed on some deep level; new-style hypocrites privately scorn the offical norms even while scrupulously observing them. Modern society's very allowance and even encouragement of a wide variety of personality types, personal values and lifestyles, generates large numbers of individuals who are conscious of and hostile to remaining constraints on their conduct.
Goldman anticipated, and favored, our modern world of fractured "taste publics," in which each individual is a member not of one, solidary, all-embracing community into which she is born, but of many transitory (in duration and membership), partial communities which she freely chooses. Her ideal was not the atomized, isolated, frightened individuals cited by many critics of the modern world, but of free personalities who attain full self-development in and through voluntary communities, each self-chosen, distinct, and composed of different members. The same individual might enjoy Chinese poetry, German music, Mexican food, and African art, and associate with different individuals when pursuing these interests. This avoids the parochialism and fanaticism that too often results from primary identification with a single, all-encompassing community where a unitary culture, based on language, race, religion, or nationality, includes those who are born into it and excludes almost everyone else. Although Voltairine de Clyre once bowed to the widespread idea that each race makes its own distinctive contribution to world civilization, Goldman--and de Clyre too--believed that each individual should freely chose from among the riches created by all human cultures over thousands of years. Goldman, therefore, rejected "multiculturalism" in its contemporary sense in favor of an expansive individualism which encouraged each person to love the best human creations (as individually defined) in every sphere of life. Goldman believed that every individual could repudiate the inherited, provincial identities that bind them to a nation, faith, or tribe.
The problem with the early twentieth century was not, as Goldman and many of her contemporaries insisted, that individuality was threatened, but rather that it was imperfectly liberated. Massive immigration, the anonymity of the large city, and the concomitant growth of various taste publics and subcultures presented each individual with a much wider range of choice than ever before. The conditions for an explosive exuberance of human personality were in place, but new forms of economic exploitation and old forms of cultural taboo obstructed human liberation. Many individuals, sadly, proved incapable of exercising the new liberties afforded them; they lacked the inner, cultural resources to define and create themselves from an infinite variety of possible selves. Such people became confused, disoriented, alienated, and lost; they did not know who they were and lacked the capacity to find out. Such people clung ferociously to inherited cultural identities of race, nationality, gender, and religion--identities which are themselves artificial and socially created, although conceived as natural and eternal. Modernization at its best is disorienting, as old skills, values, and communities dissolve, and old, reliable sources of satisfaction, belonging, self-definition, and prestige evaporate. At its worst, when rapid change is combined with economic downturn, it generates severe counterpressures and yearnings for imagined, and past, forms of life.
Conflicting impulses also clashed in the realm of personal values and behavior. The emergence of a consumer economy for the middle class necessitated a shift in values from the old producer-economy ideals of thrift, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice to self-indulgence, self-expression, and spending. As Warren Sussman has said, "a society moving from scarcity to abundance required a new self... a change in the social order almost demanded a change in the people in it." This was manifested in "an increasing interest in self-development... with somewhat less interest in moral imperatives.... The vision of self-sacrifice began to yield to that of self-realization." Yet the new urban resident was torn between new opportunities for self-expression and new forms of demands for conformity--conformity not to relatively fixed and internalized norms of the village, but to ever-fluctuating, uncertain standards that were artificially imposed by the boss and one's own social class. Advice manuals only increased the individual's perplexity. "In virtually the same breath," Sussman says, "the reader is also urged repeatedly to 'express your individuality' and to 'eliminate the little personal whims, habit, traits that make people dislike you.'... One is to be unique, be distinctive, follow one's own feelings, make oneself stand out from the crowd" and at the same time appeal and conform to that crowd. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Sussman continues. "Every American was to become a performing self." People desired poise, charm, proper consumption, appearences both moral and physical, in general "making oneself pleasing to others."[lviii] In many ways, therefore, the constraints of respectability intensified at the very time that the transcendental, supernatural backing of morals became less plausible, all forms of social control were thrown open to doubt and corrosion, and the social structures that invisibly generated unconscious conformity dissolved. Behavior seemed more obviously directed towards the seemingly arbitrary expectations of others.
In such an atmosphere, Goldman appealed to the middle class in her general attitude towards life even more than with her specific proposals. In many ways her ethos was a consistent and forceful statement of values that were widespread in the middle class of her day. T. Jackson Lears has incomparably described the aspirations, fears, and condition of members of that class during the years that Goldman flourished. They required new meanings in life to replace those lost during the transition to a modern economy and culture. Their faith in a transcendental God was waning. Religion was less a vital presence and no longer informed all of life. It was more a matter of conforming to the conventions of the world, less a matter of intense experience as the terrors of hell and the ecstasies of conversion alike receded. The sense of community and belonging offered by the small town was vanishing, replaced by the anonymity and loneliness of the big city. Any sense of an ordered world based on predictable values seemed to evaporate amidst the chaos of urban life; urbanites' feeling of participation in and control over their community seemed tenuous. They were weathering the transmutation of what they believed to be their old autonomous independence into a not-yet secure berth in a hierarchical, bureaucratic meritocracy. For centuries, Lears reminds us, external constraints on personal conduct--the power of kings, priests, masters--had been on the wane, replaced by internal self-discipline; "oppression was replaced by repression."[lix] Yet In Goldman's day the old values of thrift, discipline, sobriety seemed threatened by the new values appropriate to consumer capitalism--immediate self-gratification, spending, personal indulgence, and good times.
All this led to what Lears, borrowing a phrase from Nietzsche, calls "weightlessness," a feeling of unreality, formlessness, reminiscent of Marx's phrase, "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned." Goldman referred to this as "the uncertainty, the voidness, or all our social life." Moral values crumbled and old institutions such as the family suddenly seemed repressive or irrelevant. A middle-class person assumed many roles, depending on what he was doing and where; he moved from place to place, friends to friends, job to job. This resulted in a fragmented, commodified self, malleable to the demands of others. "Selfhood consisted only of a series of manipulable social masks," Lears says, assembled, dissassembled, recombined, sold, and manipulated for personal gain. "By the end of the nineteenth century the self seemed neither independent, nor unified, nor fully conscious, but rather interdependent, discontinuous, divided, and subject to the play of unconscious or inherited impulses." Moral responsibility, indeed moral personality, seemed to dissolve under such circumstances. Neurasthenia, or lack of nerve force and energy, became the disease of the era. Vaporous lives, frenzied and yet also comfortable and purposeless, resulted from the frantic struggle for existence, from internal repression, and from material and spiritual ease. "Personal identity itself came to seem problematic" Lears says. ".... For many, individual identities began to seem fragmented, diffuse, perhaps even unreal. A weightless culture of material comfort and spiritual blandness was breeding weightless persons who longed for intense experience to give some definition, some distinct outline and substance to their vaporous lives." Elites were aspixiating, "suffocating in their ease, weightless in their lack of significance."[lx]
Yet benefits accompanied these afflictions. The decline of religion and of fixed moral rules liberated some individuals for a freer, more satisfying, more authentic existence, determined by their own needs and interests rather than ancient superstitions and arbitrary rules. The decline of the compulsory village community with its unitary standards allowed individuals to voluntarily form their own communities--professional associations, reform organizations, and private clubs--and to associate with a wide diversity of people for different, self-chosen activities and purposes. Goldman's anarchist emphasis on free associations based on mutuality and common interest appealed to a middle class organizing itself in just such associations.[lxi] The fragmentation of the self was also a broadening of the self, the use of a greater variety of talents, capacities, and qualities; individuals became more complicated, internally diverse, and sophisticated. The growth of interpersonal dependency generated by an ever-widening market allowed the middle class to enjoy unprecedented wealth and an ever-expanding array of new consumer goods. Even the replacement of the economic independence of the autonomous entrepreneur by a career in a hierarchical bureaucracy offered many advantages. The small-town entrepreneur or yeoman farmer was in fact dependent on the good will and help of his neighbors for credit, customers, help in times of need, and companionship. He was also dependent on the weather and the market. He was not truly independent; the autonomous, self-made man was a myth. The new corporate bureaucracies offered somewhat more of a career open to talent, a mileau where following the rules and working one's way up came to offer at least as secure a livelihood as the old dependence on the whim of a patron, master, or solidary community. The middle class of Goldman's day cried out for self-expression partly as a reaction against the foreclosure of the old values of autonomy and independence by the increasingly dominant hierarchical corporate bureaucracies, and partly in response to the very real opportunities for genuine self-expression afforded by urban, industrial society.
But the new choices and freedoms were not only incomplete and stimied by new and old economic and cultural restraints; they also proved threatening and bewildering because they undermined every inherited form of social cohension and personal identity. The newly prevalent opportunities for personal self-definition threatened every inherited hierarchy of class, race, and gender and undermined traditional moral codes. The vast mass of workers and farmers lost not only whatever economic independence and political power they had possessed but their very cultural identities, while even many powerful white men doubted whether they could control the dissolving forces of modern energies. The main beneficiaries of the liberating tendencies were elites with the economic resources and cultural confidence to take advantage of the new possibilities.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries draped themselves in the mantle of traditional values and practices. Throughout history, advocates of radical change have appropriated old symbols and languages for the cause of social transformation. In Goldman's day, workers, farmers, feminists, and middle class radicals claimed to hark back to tried and true verities and to defend venerable ways of life against the onslaught of industrial capitalism, even as they advocated substantial departures from received customs and radical modifications of ancient institutions. Emma Goldman was one of the handful of radicals who wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embraced change, in rhetoric as well as action. She often referred to herself as an "avant-garde" and exulted that "the life of the avant-garde [is] the only life worth living." She wholeheartedly embraced the cultural possibilities of the new industrial, urban world. "Those who decry the evils of the city should go to the small towns of America," she said. "They would soon realize that the city, with all its misery, represents life, motion, change, and interest, as against the lethargy, stagnation, and self-sufficiency of the average American town." Goldman and her circle regarded anarchism as "a new world-philosophy" that was heir to all that was best in "the social, scientific, artistic and economic currents of past generations." They read, quoted, and popularized the most recent figures in all disciplines. While they did not echo the Marxist claim of "scientific socialism," they did consider science as their own.[lxii] Goldman felt that one of the worst effects of economic exploitation and overwork was that it deprived the workers of the time, energy, and capacity to immerse themselves in modern literature, art, science, and philosophy. She claimed that anarchists tried to understand human life in all its complexity rather than judge human conduct.
Even Goldman sometimes resorted to such language. She often condemned Americans for desecrating the ideals of their founding fathers, and claimed that Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other [slaveholding] paragons of liberty would be ashamed of their descendants. The religious imagery of Golgotha, of a martyr voluntarily sacrificing themselves for the good of mankind, suffused Goldman's and Berkman's self-images. Other Mother Earth writers had a more realistic understanding of the origins of the United States in genocide and slavery. Yet although Goldman consciously, and to her embarrassment, used hypocritical appeals to alleged national virtues to quiet a mob in England, her legerdermain concerning America's alleged long-lost purity and liberty seem to have been largely unconscious. However, Goldman displayed the limits of her use of traditional rhetoric at her trial for obstructing the draft in 1917, an occasion when she might be expected to stress traditional values and symbols. She told the court that "there has never been any ideal--though it be ever so humane and peaceful--introduced for human betterment which in its place and in its time was considered within the law." Jesus, the writers of the Declaration of Independence, and the authors of the Constitution "were the Anarchists of their time." Yet although she wanted to lay claim to patriotism, it was of a most qualified sort, and not calculated to impress the judge. "The kind of patriotism we represent is the kind of patriotism which loves America with open eyes.... We love America, we love her beauty, we love her riches, we love her mountains and her forests, and above all we love the people who have produced her wealth and her riches, who have created all her beauty, we love her dreamers and the philosophers and the thinkers who are giving America liberty.... But with the same passionate emotion we hate her superficiality, her corruption, her mad, unscrupulous worship at the alter of the Golden Calf."[lxiii]
While many thoughtful observors of every political persuasion worried about the disintegrative effects of industrial capitalism, urbanization, immigration, and other massive social changes on old values and institutions, the anarchists most often exulted in the destruction of every form of constraint, every old custom and belief. To those buffeted and confused by change, Goldman offered the joyous tidings that "eternal change, thousandfold variations, continual innovation are the essence of life." The liberated spirit would live, fight, and die for ideals even while knowing that they are "not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself." Goldman repeatedly insisted that life and freedom were processes, not static attainments, that the struggle for liberty more than its attainment "develops all that is strongest, sturdiest, and finest in human character." She threw down the gauntlet: "To the reckless belongs the world." Indeed, so enthusiastic were the anarchists about the turmoil and upheavals that surrounded them that they sometimes sloppily attributed all the epochal changes and dislocations of the day to anarchism. Berkman rejoiced that "in every phase of human activity the Anarchic spirit, the conscious breaking of old fetters and constant striving for greater liberty, is manifesting itself in no uncertain manner. In art and science, in literature and the drama, in education and the rearing of children, in the family and the attitude of woman--everywhere there is going on a progressive breaking of ikons, a bold and determined seeking of new paths.... What are all these but manifestations of the Anarchist spirit, the creation of new human and social values?" Goldman similarly enthused that "almost every time-worn institution and belief is undergoing a revision," though she added, as Berkman usually did, that automatic social processes would not bring liberation to anyone; every advance of liberty "has been gained only after a defiant battle with the forces whose only logic is the club and gun."[lxiv]
Goldman managed to square the circle for moderns caught between the old emphasis on transcendental moral demands and the new stress on self-expression by transmuting self-expression and self-fulfillment into unconditional moral demands. The anarchists, she declared, "have declared war on every institution of today, based on hypocrisy, sham, and the destruction of life and happiness." She resolutely declared her independence from all inherited, prefabricated cultural identities that limited and deformed human individuality, from "the stupid arrogance of national, racial, religious and sex superiority, and from the narrow puritanical conception of human life." To those who worried that all values were in flux and the standards of success constantly shifting, Goldman offered the reassurance that "the only success of any value has been the failure of men and women who struggled, suffered, and bled for an ideal, rather than give up, or be silenced." She lived her belief that "the ideal alone is worth living and daring for." Mother Earth exhorted its readers, in words reminiscent of older generations of American reformers: "Let us resolve to emancipate, to separate ourselves from statutes and dead rules in every walk of life. Let us make our own conscience the leading principle in our lives."[lxv]
Goldman confronted the existential moral dilemma of modern personality. Morality, she insisted, was not imposed upon people from above by some alien being, as a code essentially foreign to human nature; rather, it was self-chosen, the fulfillment rather than the negation of personality. Her belief that the Moral Life was an essential part of the Good Life--in fact, that the Good Life consisted of the Moral Life, that virtue was its own reward--places her in a long line of ethical theorists from Socrates and the Stoics to John Rawls. Yet in adhering to our moral choice, which defines us, we must risk suffering and even death. That we have created and chosen our ideal, rather than allowing us to forsake it under pressure, obligates us the more to cleave to it as to that which we most cherish.[lxvi]
Goldman addressed a middle class which both doubted the reality of a solid, moral core at the heart of human personality and the efficacy of human will and individual action to affect the course of history. Her attacks on the Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism must have resonated with moderns worried about other determinisms, environmental and herediatarian, that also undercut human will. The Freudian emphasis on the unconscious and on subliminal impulses similarly cast doubt on the individual's ability to rationally and morally determine his or her own conduct, and therefore on free will and moral responsibility. These philosophies were only the intellectual concomitants of the seeming loss of material and social independence which afflicted many Americans. In an era of massive corporations, gigantic machines, and a national market whose fluctuations devastated people who could neither control nor understand them, the ability of any person to determine even the course of her own individual life became increasingly suspect. Goldman's strident proclamations reassured the doubters that they did matter, that their own values, decisions, and personalities could prevail against all the forces of circumstance. In a world increasingly impersonal, Goldman insisted that personality and moral stamina mattered and could triumph over all tendencies towards homogenity, conformity, and powerlessness. This partly motivated her extollings of attentateurs and her rejection of the orthodox Marxist doctrines of economic determinism and historical materialism.
Goldman did not realize, any more than did any other philosopher or social commentator, precisely how her ethos responded to the urgent needs of the "brain workers" and intelligensia of her day. Yet her strictures against hypocritical conformity to dead usage, to institutions and values repudiated in one's heart, which she aimed primarily at workers and radicals, roused some members of the American elite. Despite her affinity for the exploited working class, she found that "the intellectual class, aye, even the people of the upper class, turn to Anarchism because of its breath of life, its freedom, its humanity, its firm and uncompromising attitude against all sham and hypocrisy."[lxvii]
VI
Although Goldman's ethos and practical proposals resonated within a segment of the middle class, her appeal to the "intellectual proletarians" could not win them for anarchism or social revolution. Long-term structual reasons explain her failure. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many formerly secure, independent native-born white males--small businessmen, professionals, skilled craft workers, landowners--felt threatened and in danger of being crushed between a rising plutocracy above and insurgent workers below. By the time Emma Goldman was deported, however, these dangers had largely passed.
Small businessmen and independent professionals did not disappear as many radicals predicted, but retained a niche within a centralizing economy. Those who did lose their independence as formerly defined found a secure berth in the new corporate economy. The emerging corporate bureaucracies provided relatively secure employment and a real social stability and mobility to those with education and skills. The new economic order was, in fact, more of a genuine meritocracy than the old small-town world of personal farms and businesses; birth and connections remained significant, but credentials and impersonal merit as defined by stated criteria gained more importance. The old elite persisted, augmented by newcomers from the ranks. The widening variety of appliances and other products made consumerism a real benefit to those who could participate in it. Social status and mobility was redefined not as independence, but as a career in a hierarchical, bureaucratic hierarchy garnished with an ever-increasing variety of consumer goods. Meanwhile, the expanding and newly confident middle class achieved greater personal expressiveness as it took advantage of modern, urban society by effecting changes in marriage, child-rearing practices, education, sexuality, and styles of consumption. The limited success of many of the reforms that Goldman advocated enriched the lives of white collar workers, professionals, small businessmen, and other urban elites. Literature, music, and dance broadened and incorporated exciting, exotic, but tamed impulses from blacks and the white working class. The middle class, therefore, benefitted economically, socially, and culturally from the changes of the early twentieth century, especially from many of the specific issues and reforms which Goldman championed.
Any hope for an alliance between a revolutionary workers's movement and insurgent intellectuals and middle-class professionals was dead by 1920. Most radicals who had thought about the subject, including Max Eastman as well as Emma Goldman, realized that the workers could win a significant portion of the middle class only if the workers were themselves organized in militant, powerful economic and political organizations; if workers organised themselves, dissatisfied professionals and "brain workers" might cast their lot with them, seeing in the working class a social formation capable of achieving their own goals. This alliance with an organized working class would itself change the consciousness and goals of the middle class and redefine the parameters of American politics by vastly expanding the range of the possible. The destruction of militant working-class organizations by government terrorism and violence thus crushed any possibility of a trans-class alliance. Members of the middle class saw their economic interests as contrary to those of the workers, but their cultural imperatives also diverged. The IWW, and to a lesser extent the SP, fostered cultural revolution, but government terrorism and violence had crushed them by 1920. The AFL, itself in retreat, was culturally conservative, seeking respectability and acceptance on the basis of old racial, gender, and patriotic stereotypes and moral codes; most unorganized ethnic workers sought refuge in their buffeted ethnic subcultures or in a wider, but intensely conservative, Americanism. Middle-class Americans who favored cultural experimentation and a loosening of old constraints found much of the working class (as well as a large segment of their own group, especially those from small towns and rural areas) opposed to their projects.
Harry Kelly raised another difficulty when he reminded anarchists that mere self-expression was a frail reed upon which to base a social movement. He realized "there is not enough idealism in the desire for self-expression to maintain a strong, healthy movement." Rather than participating in a dangerous and exacting movement, most individuals could achieve greater self-expression for themselves either by working within the system or by ignoring the system entirely and living inconspicuously according to their own values. Goldman argued that appeals to economic self-interest were self-defeating because people who joined the cause in hopes of economic betterment would desert when they became prosperous. Kelly applied this insight to appeals based on personal liberty. The individual who attained personal freedom would rest content, saying that "the revolution is here--for me." For such people, "Anarchism was a personal thing. They were the centre of gravity; they rebelled against conditions because the latter restricted their actions and their liberty." Yet Kelly's solution itself revealed a common confusion in anarchist thought. He simultaneously called for greater idealism, altruism, and self-sacrifice and said that anarchism "must have an economic basis; it must become more a mass movement and much less an individual one.... Anarchism does not concern itself with any special theory of economics, but an economic base there must be, unless it is to become an abstraction." Kelly's conflation of idealism with collective economic interest and his demand that anarchism attain an "economic base" without proposing "any special theory of economics" indicate chasms at the heart of anarchist theory.[lxviii]
Intellectuals and artists, another proposed anarchist constituency, also gained a measure of liberation during this era. Avant-garde literature and art won increasing acceptance but it also diverged from realism and a preoccupation with social themes, which was compatible with mass-based radical politics, into a preoccupation with form and esoteric, symbolic meanings, which was not. Radical literati such as Max Eastman and Emma Goldman who were au current in 1910 seemed relatively dull, conservative, and old-fashioned by 1920.
Goldman's cultural version of anarchism lent itself to cooptation precisely because it was practical, specific, and engaged in the pressing issues of her time, rather than the all-or-nothing irrelevancy that most historians see in anarchism. Goldman began her very first lecture tour by parroting John Most's line that the eight-hour day was a bauble and a distraction from social revolution. An elderly man, however, undermined her thesis. "He said that he understood my impatience with such small demands as a few hours less a day, or a few dollars more a week" Goldman recounted. It was legitimate for young people to take lightly. But what were men of his age to do? They were not likely to live to see the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system. Were they also to forgo the release of perhaps two hours a day from the hated work? That was all they could hope to see realized in their lifetime.... Should they never have a little more time for reading or being out in the open?" From that moment on, Goldman engaged in the real struggles of her day even as she fomented total social and cultural revolution. Her experiences as a nurse and midwife among the poor accentuated her practical bent. She saw women dying of childbirth or giving birth to sickly infants in squalid tenements. "After such confinements I would return home sick and distressed, hating the men rsponsible for the frightful condition of their wives and children, hating myself most of all because I did not know how to help them.... Now that I had learned that women and children carried the heaviest burden of our ruthless economic system, I saw that it was a mockery to expect them to wait until the social revolution arrives in order to right injustice. I sought some immediate relief from their purgatory, but I could find nothing of any use."[lxix]
Goldman therefore engaged in specific issues such as birth control, prison reform, free speech, the modern school, and modern literature. She considered that free schools such as "the beehive" in France or the Ferrer Center in the United States could achieve wonders even under capitalism.[lxx] She recognized, however, that free schools only reached a tiny minority of children, and that their graduates would have to make their way in a brutal, competitive, unchanged world. Goldman faced a perennial radical dilemma: radicals must chose between an alienating, irrelevant, and dogmatic "impossibilism" or a concrete, practical reformism. They can link the two and claim that genuine reform is possible only by revolution and that individual evils can be ameliorated but not abolished by tinkering; but they have no guarantee that their audience will agree. The American political system is relatively open to discrete, single-issue, isolated reforms that leave the roots of every problem untouched; it has marginalized, by terrorism and violence or ridicule and ostracism, those who advocate meaningful structural change that would effectively alter the distribution of wealth and power.
William C. Owen, a contributor to Mother Earth and eventual founder of his own ephemeral journal, discerned both the strength and weakness of Goldman's appeal. He criticized intellectuals in the labor movement for distracting and alienating the workers with abstruse theories and neglecting their real needs. "I know reputed Socialist speakers who never fail to remind their audiences that, without a knowledge of half a dozen sciences, it is impossible to understand the social question. They bewilder and dishearten the common man, and they make me tired.... Eliminate premature theories; concentrate on pressing facts. The former will keep you what you are at present--wrangling sects. The latter will give you the magic touch of nature that makes all men kin." He advocated stress on immediate, practical issues, down to and including the dog tax, and extolled Goldman for following this method. He praised Goldman because she emphasized not the theoretically best form of ultimate land tenture, but that Weyhaeuser Corporation owned 32,000,000 acres, and because she attacked religon for its present abuses, not for the errors that Moses made millenia ago. Goldman personified and applied general theories to concrete, practical issues; this is "the proper method because it is at once the scientific and the dramatic method."[lxxi]
The radical challenge is how to prevent individuals interested in the dog tax from pursuing only that, to the neglect of larger social goals, and how to convincingly relate all the various social problems in a fashion that will make their interconnections inescapable. Goldman herself did this; she used her specific lecture topics as entrees into the larger issues of social organization and anarchist philosophy. At the same time that Goldman pursued immediate reforms that would benefit the working class and other people, she maintained that no reform could fundamentally alter anyone's situation. Her criticism of settlement house workers as doing more harm than good, quoted above, illustrates this aspect of her approach.[lxxii] This dilemma, straddling the chasm between a sterile, irrelevant utopianism and a meaningless, fatuous reformism, bedevils radicals of all stripes, regardless of their particular position. The divide between reform and revolution, however, is too great to bridge.
Margaret Anderson said that "Emma Goldman's genius is not so much that she is a great thinker as that she is a great woman; she preaches, but she is a better artist than she is a preacher." Anderson felt that form, not content, was most important in art and in life, and said that she would refute Goldman's position "by applying my theory to her life." Anderson and others exalted Goldman's life as itself a work of art; they admired her courage, her outspokenness, and her creative engagement with the most significant issues of the day. They loved and believed in Goldman, but not in anarchism. Although Goldman often equated herself with anarchism--an identification the authorities were only too willing to foster--her admirers made a crucial distinction. They appropriated many of her ideas for their own purposes, as indeed she would, on some level, have them do. They advocated many of her specific ideas while detaching them from her larger, revolutionary context. They sought to embody the spirit of her life as an unending quest for perfection and freedom while redefining her ultimate objectives. Van Valkenberg, a contributor to Mother Earth, wrote Goldman in exile that "yours was a personal following, and when the gates were closed behind you none were prepared to pick up the work where you had been forced to drop it."[lxxiii] Any movement which heavily depends on charismatic figures, rather than on a mass insurgencies generated by basic structural changes, is vulnerable to government repression.
Goldman's philosophy lent itself to such piecemeal appropriation. She demanded that every individual think for herself, rather than uncritically accept what she or anyone else said. Although she related capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other social diseases, she eschewed any totalizing theory, except perhaps an unconditional demand for full human liberty. She stressed that her Ideal was not a static attainment but an active process, not a fixed state of being but eternal becoming. Like Edward Bernstin, she thought that the end was unattainable or unimportant; process, not stasis, was her ideal and indeed her goal. This is, of course, partly a consolation for defeat, echoed by other defeated radicals; but it also implied that we can live a full life in the present, before the revolution. If freedom consists in the fight for freedom, we can be free even now. Goldman, insistent that individuals make society, not society the individual (even as she blamed society for the warped and stunted people it contained) struggled against her recognition that capitalism, patriarchy, and racism warp us and deform even our fight against them. But if we can live a worthwhile life in the present, if we can attain freedom today, what is the need to reconstruct society? Goldman answered that liberty and meaning were achievable only in the quest for social revolution; that they were not attainable in isolation, as privatized goods. The only decency, civilization, and freedom in a brutal, savage, and slave society consisted in a struggle against that society. But others disagreed, and appropriated Goldman's emphasis on the possibilities for immediate liberation and partial reform for the use of private satisfactions and ameliorative reforms.
Goldman never claimed that any individual could free herself in the present; she emphasized the necessity for cultural and economic reconstruction of society. There was, however, one way in which we could liberate ourselves right now, and that is in fighting for freedom. The fight for freedom, self-development, and social progress is itself the only freedom humanity could ever really experience, Goldman believed. This would be true even within an Anarchist society; the Ideal is elusive and ever-receding. If all Goldman's present dreams were instantly realized, others would take their place, as far from her realized vision as it is from present society. We can liberate ourselves, Goldman asserted, from conventional moral codes, hegemonic discourses, sexual taboos, from racism, sexism, patriotism, and all prefabricated sources of personal identity; we can forge our own personalities according to the dictates of our own choice. Freedom equals the complete and harmonious development of all our human capacities, in communities with others; and we can approximate this now by our own efforts.
Most people, however, missed Goldman's meaning. Even sympathetic critics like Max Eastman misconstrued her as merely seeking the bourgeois ideal of freedom as the absense of external constraint; less sophisticated observors misunderstood her entirely. Members of the elite construed it as a call to personal fulfillment detached from all social consciousness or struggle; literati harked to its demands for creative freedom; excluded groups sought freedom in an important yet instrumental sense as the ability to vote or earn a decent wage. As Henry May has remarked, people must be within a culture in order to find that culture constraining, or to break out from it.[lxxiv] Blacks, women, immigrants, and workers, in fighting for admission to the American dream, unconsciously validated that dream as in itself essentially worthwhile, rather than a nightmare. For their variety of contradictory motives, therefore, almost all of Goldman's audience took away from her lectures and books their own message, which was only a part of Goldman's world-view. Too often this single aspect of Goldman's philosophy, rather than being a partial fulfillment of the whole, was in fact a repudiation of her intent.
Goldman fostered cultural changes with the greatest appeal to segments of the middle class who were socially secure but culturally dissatisfied and experimental, who tasted some liberation but wanted more. The changes she advocated were usually logical extensions of those already winning acceptance. In education, sexuality, literature, work, feminism, birth control, and in her entire ethos of individual self-expression and individualism, she attacked conformism and the stifling aspects of the new world that conflicted with the liberating aspects she wanted to encourage. Most of her crusades were extensions of relatively elite forms of cultural adaptation and protest. Indeed, one of her strengths, as Floyd Dell noted, was her combination of a middle-class sensibility and agenda with working-class experiences and roots. Similarly, she bridged the gap between the immigrant anarchist enclaves and the American reform tradition.[lxxv] In many ways she was a transitional figure. But her cultural agenda had a greater chance than labor issues of winning some success because they secured some elite backing, did not interfere with profits, and in fact furthered the "culture of consumption" required by the newly emerging form of capitalism. Individuals could experiment with many of the changes she advocated, integrating them into their lives without embracing radical change or engaging in public agitation of any sort. Goldman and Berkman felt themselves in tune with the trends of modern history because many of the old beliefs, constraints, and institutions they attacked were dissolving; but new new forms of regimentation and social control, and more subtle forms of hegemony, were coming into being. In opposing them, the anarchists were less successful.
Many people besides the anarchists believed that life was a process and that deep, rich, intense experience was the hallmark of a good life. They reconceptualized virtue not as a static attainment of certain goals or qualities but as "conduct consistent with the demands of a growing personality." They valued intense, exuberant, authentic experience even more than happiness. Middle-class forms of self-exploration included depth psychology, mysticism and "new thought," a fascination with more "primitive" cultures and with outcasts from modern society, and the cult of the medieval warrior. The new psychology rejected the old focus on static faculties, stressing instead "the psche as a dynamic organism interacting in constant process with its environment." Bergson's philosophical vitalism and Dewey's progressive educational philosophy were similar manifestations of the same spirit. Even some varieties of Protestantism adapted to these new expectations; modernist ministers stressed that Christianity meant self-fulfillment rather than the self-abnegation and repression it had for centuries.[lxxvi]
VII
Goldman's problem in keeping self-expression related to, and yet distinct from, social revolution, is epitomized by her fight for free speech. Some anarchists, conflating the subjective need of an individual for self expression with the social need for revolution, defended violence on the grounds that the free speech of workers was routinely throttled; denied the peaceful expression of their views, they turned to violence as a last resort. Referring to one of the victims of the Lexington explosion, Leonard Abbott claimed that "If Caron and his comrades had been allowed the normal avenues of expression, they would still be living men." Even Charles Robert Plunkett, who concluded that "there is but one answer--dynamite," apparently felt that explosives were the appropriate answer to repression of speech, rather than to deprivation of bread. "When free speech is suppressed, when men are jailed for asking for food, clubbed for assembling to discuss their grievances, and stoned for expresssing their opinions, there is but one recourse--violence."[lxxvii] Advocates of change, according to this theory, should work through established channels as long as they remain open, and legally and peaceably persuade others as long as they are allowed. This, however, legitimizes the hegemonic discourse about American freedom and democracy; it implies that workers should peacefully submit to slow torture and murder if they are allowed to protest about it.
Goldman herself usually recognized that established channels were part of the problem rather than a solution. She viewed the entire paraphanalia of elections and politics as a master-class charade which, by diverting workers from self-activity and bogging them down in intermediable wrangling and compromise, frustrated change rather than allowing it. The American political system, like that of Bismarck's Germany, afforded the illusion of participation without the reality. Goldman recognized that, in a capitalist society, free speech must remain an illusion and a bulwark of economic oppression. By allowing the workers to let off steam, it deflects revolt from inhumane living and working conditions. For these reasons, Goldman ridiculed the conceit of British and American workers, whose boasted and illusory freedom only masked and compensated for real exploitation. Goldman claimed that the more free speech the workers had, the worse their material conditions were, and the more tamely they acquiesced in those conditions.[lxxviii] Nevertheless, Goldman and other anarchists were sometimes enticed into almost forgetting the evils that had occasioned their protest, and lulled into considering the mere winning of the right to speak as a substantive victory. This indicates that the social structure most efficient at containing dissent is not that which is most overtly repressive, but that which combines illusory channels for change with terrorism and violence when required. Bismarck consciously established such a system in Germany. In the United States, there was always a chance that a strike would succeed; opposition parties were harassed and defrauded but allowed to function. Government terrorism and violence, while endemic and pervasive, was not universal; radicals could nurture the illusion of change within the system.
Goldman herself was gulled by this seeming openness, and often conflated a victory for her right to speak with a victory for anarchism itself. For example, although she had long recognized the need for birth control among the poor, she largely ignored this topic until Margaret Sanger was arrested. Her justification for her neglect--that she was unwilling to risk her freedom for only a part of the great social struggle--is unconvincing, because any of the causes she championed was only a part of the revolution she championed. Goldman was moved by the suppression and persecution of Sanger to take up the cause, and was herself arrested; she then devoted an issue of Mother Earth largely to that cause. But her reasons were indicative. Birth control was important "first because it is tabooed and the people who advocate it are persecuted. Secondly it represents the immediate question of life and death to masses of people." These priorities were not mere sloppiness or bad editing, but central to her entire ethos. Reb Raney replied that giving out the information was more important than fighting for one's right to do so. Ida Rauh agreed, and told a meeting in Union Square that "I am here not to speak, but to do.... More important than the right of people to such information is the actual getting of the information."[lxxix] Free speech and personal self-expression are supreme goods, necessary for any meaningful and creative life as well as indispensable for a free society and a necessary prerequisite for any constructive social change. Yet self-expression is not social revolution, nor is securing a hearing equivilent to winning substantive changes or securing justice. Goldman agreed with this, and courageously discussed actual methods in public. Yet she considered the birth control struggle a fight for free speech as much as for birth control itself.
Goldman often implicitly threatened violence, through her familiar device of predicting it, if the police clubbed protestors or throttled free speech. She argued against repression on grounds that should have led her to endorse it--that it will inevitably lead to violent resistance. Repression, she said, "stops free speech and thereby forces the people to secrecy and violence. There are nother methods than open public discussion, and if the police drive the people to despair they will have to use those other methods." She never demanded that any individual or group acquiesce nonviolently in oppression as long as peaceful avenues of redress remained open; on the contrary, she validated revolt of all kinds and insisted that only insurrection could topple capitalism. Yet her whole career evinces an astounding faith in the power of the written and spoken word to change society. She repeatedly proclaimed that the free competition of ideas would ensure that truth and justice will prevail.[lxxx] This, however, ignores the realities of a society divided by class, race, and gender.
Free speech is impossible in a capitalist society partly because the capitalists own virtually all the avenues of expression, the means of disseminating and creating the news, and the police and the political system. Free speech is illusory because the possibilities for apprehending and communicating ideas are limited by poverty, the lack of education and leisure, and the necessity of begging and cringing for sustenance. Goldman often observed that poverty, deadening work, and the necessity of pleasing their masters made workers unreceptive to challenging ideas. More fundamentally, any social system generates the beliefs necessary and appropriate for its own survival in both the beneficiaries and victims of the system. No social system is neutral between competing beliefs; there is no free marketplace of ideas any more than of any other commodity. Capitalism, racism, and patriarchy structure and warp perceptions and debate. As but one example, a white supremist society generates, seemingly naturally and effortlessly, a belief in the inferiority of blacks. People of all colors look around them and see very few educated blacks or blacks in responsible positions; blacks are mostly poor and ill-educated, and disproportionately criminals. Blacks seem inferior to most people because socially they are inferior in the qualities and achievements by which society evaluates human worth. The same point applies to women in a patriarchal society, and to workers oppressed by capitalism. In such societies, merely allowing the victims to protest their condition does not afford them "free speech" in a meaningful sense, because the entire social structure invisibly, incessantly and omnipresently argues against what they have to say, without appearing to argue at all. Even those who resist oppression usually receive their agenda, language, and sense of what is possible and appropriate from their oppressors. Genuine free speech requires that all ideas receive a hearing proportionate to their true worth, by individuals who have the education, leisure, and economic freedom to evaluate them. Oppressive societies, however, privilege untrue and vicious ideas for the same reason, and in the same manner, that they privilege iniquitious individuals and groups. A just society, therefore, is an epistemological necessity.
This is why Max Baginski said that a cooperative, communistic society is necessary for both truth and beauty. The insight of an anonymous Mother Earth Bulletin writer, that "true history will be written only when the struggle of the classes shall have been abolished, and no social group will be vitally interested in distorting the truth and misleading the people"[lxxxi] is equally applicable to philosophy, sociology, and even science. Free speech that is genuinely capable of changing society, therefore, must be distinguished from "free speech" that is only a pleasant diversion, a solitary or group pastime with scant social significance. The same point applies to other forms of self-expression, such as experimental lifestyles. Goldman, of course, genuinely valued free speech and self-expression as a vehicle not only for personal fulfillment, but also as a mechanism for social change. She believed that individual fulfillment and social justice were complementary and symbiotic. This belief was so central to her life and endeavor that she never fully allowed herself to recognize how greatly she, and all other members of American society, lacked genuine free speech. In the end, Goldman, as much as the Marxists, believed that the universe was on her side, that the structure of reality is predisposed to truth, justice, and beauty, which will inevitably triumph over all obstacles, artificiality, and repression. She did not fully recognize the implications of her insight that "the mace and the club are not only the symbol, but the very essence, of our 'law and order.'" Goldman's free speech fights were courageous and inspiring to many people. They were absolutely necessary if she was to propigate her ideals at all, much less embody them in her life as they demanded that she do. Her free speech fights allied her with the IWW and also contributed, as Candace Falk says, to "the new recognition she received from the middle class."[lxxxii] Yet these fights, and the rhetoric that accompanied, were not freely chosen, but forced upon her by her oppressors. The recognition she derived from them usually fell far short of agreement on substantive issues other than free speech.
VIII
In a sense, As Candace Falk has remarked, Goldman wrote her own epitaph when, during her heydey in the United States, she compared herself to Chantecler, the rooster in Edmond Rostand's play. Chantecler learned that he did not cause the sun to rise, and then suffered the death of his friend the nightingale. Chantecler consolded himself with "this sorrowful and reassuring fact, that no one, Cock of the morning or evening nightingale, has quite the song of his dreams." Goldman calls this "a wonderful message" which teaches "that though we cannot wake the dawn, we must prepare people to greet the rising sun."[lxxxiii] Goldman finally succumbed to the structural forces she fought against all her life. She could ride the crest of the wave of history, but could not direct it in accordance with her will. She could announce and glory in the most exciting and liberating tendencies in the new economic and social order, but she could not overturn, or even affect, the larger structures of dominion and power. These structures, and not the aspirations of the radicals, would ultimately define, and thereby limit, deflect, and deform, the liberating potentials and impulses of the modern world.
Goldman herself, however, did not propound an ill-assorted hodge-podge of unrelated reforms, as Leslie Fishbein claims. Nor did she often mistake culture for politics, as Lasch's intellectuals did, although, because of the intrinsic nature of her project, she lent herself to this misinterpretation.[lxxxiv] Goldman elaborated a consistent, wide-ranging philosophy that addressed and related all areas of life without creating a dogmatic, totalizing system. If many who thrilled to her words contented themselves with piecemeal reform despite her insistent warnings, this was not Goldman's fault, but that of a system susceptible to certain specific changes but inhospitable to fundamental structural transformations. As Margaret Marsh has said, Goldman "misunderstood the nature of her appeal to young middle-class rebels [and] believed that she had at last begun to convert the American intelligensia to anarchism when what she had succeeded in doing was exciting their admiration for her courageous anticonventionality. Those whom she brought into the movement tended to be interested in anarchy as self-expression to the exclusion of its larger economic and social aims."[lxxxv]
Notes:
[i] Language groups, EG, "The Propaganda and the Congress,"(Free Society, April 8, 1900); harping, EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December, 1910); philosophy, EG, "Report from Chicago," (Free Society, June 9, 1901); education, -------, (The Detroit Evening News, March 14, 1899).
[ii] EG, "Some More Observations," (Free Society, April 29, 1900.)
[iii] Harry Kelly, "Anarchism, a Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908); Berkman, in Falk, 187; so-called educated, "Alexander Berkman in L.A.", (ME, May 1915); Voltairine de Clyre, "Tour Impressions," (ME, December 1910).
[iv] EG, "A Rejoinder," (ME, December 1910).
[v] Professionals, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, August 1912); missing, Charles Thompson, "So-Called IWW Raids Really Hatched by Schoolboys," (New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 29, 1914); other quotes, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914).
[vi] Less creative, EG, "La Ruche," (ME, November 1906); institution, EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906); other quotes, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914). See also Max Baginski, "Without Government," (ME March 1906).
[vii] RED BLOOD, WITHOUT WHICH ACTIVE.... ; sympathy, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914).
[viii] ennui, EG, "A Tribute," (ME, December 1909); parlor, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914); new type, EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, May 1912).
[ix] Language, root, and involved, EG, SSMD, 1,3; WIDER HORIZONS OF INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION; involved, France, Russia, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, August 1913) and "EG, The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought," AOE, 242-3.
[x] EG, SSMD, 1-2.
[xi] Proselytize, EG, SSMD, 1; roads, EG, "The Drama," AEO, 271; fact, EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in the Modern Drama," (April 5, 1908, EGP-GW); highest art, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, March 1911).
[xii] EG, "Our Moral Censors," (ME, November 1913); Drinnon, 157-58.
[xiii] Ibsen lecture, Drinnon 128-29 and LML 451-54; San Diego, LML 494-501. Charles Thompson, "An Interview with Emma Goldman," (The New York Times, May 30, 1909) begins with a droll account of the police suppression of EG's drama lecture.
[xiv] EG, SSMD, 3.
[xv] EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama," EGP-GW, April 5, 1908. This quote may not be exact because the agent who reported on her lecture said she spoke "substantially as follows." Most, LML 35, 40.
[xvi] LML, 31-2, 109.
[xvii] LML, 56.
[xviii] Doubts, LML, 76; personal, LML, 153; C.E.S. Wood, "The Rebel Press," (ME, March 1915); EG, "Voltairine de Clyre," (Oriole Press, 1926) 19, 29-30; drama lectures, LML, 540. Much later, in 1937, Goldman, echoing the Russian critic Pisarev, wrote a friend that "I consider the workers who work in sewers [as] infinitely more important to the health of the community than the novelist, the dramatist, or the poet." (Vision on Fire, 298). This statement is almost unique in her comments on art and literature.
[xix] Blood, EG, "The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Drama," EGP-GW, April 5, 1908; sectional, SSMD, 1; unity, "Mother Earth Tenth Anniversary," (ME, March 1915); audience, EG, "The Easiest Way, An Appreciation," (ME, May 1909). EG did not feel there were enough good American plays to form a section in her book. As late as 1918 she was complaining that "Plays are not produced in the United States to shed light, but to amuse; to rest the nerves of the tired business man, and to enable to wife of the business man to display her clothes before the wife of the other business man." EG, "Maxim Gorky," January 18, 1918, EGP-GW.
[xx] Manuscripts, Harry Kelly, "Mother Earth, 1906-1915," (ME, March 1915). Kelly said that "the original intention was to make a magazine similar to L'Humanite Nouvelle", but this proved impossible due to the lack of intellectual development in the United States and the unwillingness of the intelligensia to associate with EG. EG (LML, 395), speaks of "the failure of some of the New York literati to live up to their promises to write for it.... They were enthusiastic at first, until they realized that Mother Earth pleaded for freedom and abundance in life as the basis of art. To most of them art meant an escape from reality; how, then, could they be expected to support anything that boldly courted life?" Czolgosz issue, EG, "The Situation in America, concluded," (ME, November 1906; implacable, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February 1914); Jack London, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, March 1910) and "Maxim Gorky," (January 8, 1918, EP-GW). Police harassment, EG, "To My Readers," (ME, December 1906). Upton Sinclair, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," RES, 182.
[xxi] Coal miners, LML, 493; pork chops, EG, "The Ups and Downs of an Anarchist Propagandist," (ME, September 1913).
[xxii] LML, 464, 185.
[xxiii] Russian intellectuals, EG, "Intellectual Proletarians," (ME, February, 1914); agency, EG, "The Russian Revolution," (MEB, December 1917), 1. In her lecture on Maxim Gorky, January 18, 1918, Goldman referred to unappreciated "saviors" of the workers. This, however, is a police transcript, and may not be exact.
[xxiv] EG, "Nation Seethes in Social Unrest," (The Denver Post, April 26, 1912).
[xxv] William Zuckerman, "Tendencies in Modern Literature," (ME, October 1910).
[xxvi] EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 169, 174, 175, 173. See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 227. 1897 quotes from EG, "Marriage," The Firebrand (July 18, 1897). Wife as scab, EG, "The Traffic in Women," RES, 151.
[xxvii] EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 169, 174, 175, 173, 172. See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AEO, 227. Goldman added, "They may not be able, nor ought they be expected, to receive the choice of the loved one into the intimacy of their lives, but that does not give either one the right to deny the necessity of the attraction." RES, 173.
[xxviii] Sex creature, EG, "The Social Importance of the Modern School," RES, 124; weal or woe, EG, "Farewell," (Free Society, August 13, 1899); sex commodity, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); safety valve, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 237. Prostitutes, EG, "The Traffic in Women," AOE, 188.
[xxix] Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence (Oxford, 1987), 94. "Most nineteenth century rape laws did not specify whether a husband could be charged with raping his wife. It was not until the twentieth century that statutes exempted husbands from prosecution for marital rape. Nonetheless, no husband in nineteenth century America was ever prosecuted on this charge." Aggravated wives could sue for divorce.
[xxx] Loathes, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); 23; crimes, EG, "Love and Marriage," AEO, 236; abortions, EG, "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," AEO, 172. According to C.E.S. Wood, New York physicians reported 8,000 deaths from abortion in the state in 1914. EGP, Chronology, August 14, 1915. Statistics are from Commission on Industrial Relations: Final Report (Washington, 1916), 22-33; scabs, EG, "The Social Aspects of Birth Control," (ME, March 1916).
[xxxi] EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (May 1910).
[xxxii] Soul, and solid bars, and nag, and annihilates, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 230, 233, 234, 235; helpless, Wexler, 218; ownership, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES 171. Curiously, although Goldman had long emphasized women's issues, she implied to a reporter in 1908 that she was focusing on this issue because the International Anarchist Congress of 1907 "determined that work for the freedom of women should go hand in hand with efforts towards the abolition of government." "EG Clashes with Police on Meeting," (The Chicago Interocean) AFTER MARCH 6, 1908
[xxxiii] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, 261, 273. "Women had few resources other than their husbands in the task of supporting children.... Many women prosecuted and then withdrew their complaints or petitioned for pardons for their husbands."
[xxxiv] Call, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913); higher, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," (ME, March 1906).
[xxxv] Internal tyrants, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AOE, 221; revolutionary process, Wexler, 195; dread, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AEO, 217; Vienna, LML, 371.
[xxxvi] Lacking the Courage, LML 371, defy them all, EG, "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," AEO, 222, 224. Goldman's lecture, "The Intermediate Sex," explained and defended homosexuality. SOURCES FOR HOMOSEXUAL LECTURES, ETC.
[xxxvii] Marguerite Martin, "Mean Absolute Equality," (St. Loius Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908).
[xxxviii] Sex Commodity, amount received, and transvaluation, EG, "The White Slave Traffic," (ME, January 1910); daily routine, finery, EG, "The Traffic in Women," AEO, 186, 189; depraved, celibate, EG, "Victims of Morality," (ME, March 1913).
[xxxix] See note 1.
[xl] Intimate Matters, John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, 209, 265-66, Harper and Row, 1968. The white, middle-class nature of this is explained on 270-273. D'Emilio and Freedman date companionate marriage from the 1920s, but these changes were well underway in the 1910's.
[xli] Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America, Chicago, 1980. Also, Intimate Matters.
[xlii] Marguerite Martin, "Mean Absolute Equality," (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 1, 1908). See also, EG, "Marriage and Love," AEO, 229. See also EG, "Marriage," (The Firebrand, July 18, 1897).
[xliii] EG, "Love and Marriage," AOE, 228. William Marion Reedy, an old friend of Goldman's, said that marriage was already being modified in the direction of free love. Reedy, "Anarchy--Limited," (ME, March 1915).
[xliv] Voltairine de Clyre, "Those Who Marry Do Ill," (ME, January 1908).
[xlv] Slavery, and role, Wexler, 197; EG's comments on the vote, EG, "Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap," RES, 78-85 and EG, "Woman Suffrage," AOE, 195-211, quote is from 209.
[xlvi] EG, "Woman Suffrage," AEO 195-211. Goldman remarked "I shall probably be put down as an opponent of woman." (209) Goldman was ambivilent about the role of women in the social revolution. At times she felt that women, though taking longer than men to break with social conventions, broke more thoroughly; she also said that "in America women, and not men, will prove the most ardent workers for social reconstruction." EG, "The End of the Odyssey," (ME, July 1910). She complained that women giggled during her birth control lectures, and also said that "there is no element in all of society so hopelessly stagnant as the idle, parasitic, sheltered females of the middle class." EG, "Despite Jehovah and the Police," (ME, January 1917): 733. GOLDMAN OFTEN USED SEXIST LANGUAGE
[xlvii] True Emancipation, EG, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation," AOE, 224; sluggish, EG, "Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure," RES, 174; Wexler, 196-97.
[xlviii] Marsh, AMBIVILANCE AND PERHAPS GUILT. Ellen Kay Trimberger has provided a trenchant analysis of how "liberated" men could settle down and find a more conventional, caregiving wife after they tired of more egalitarian relationships. Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, (Monthly Review Press, YEAR OF PUBLICATION), 131-152.
[xlix] Woodcock and Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince, 361. Kropotkin said, "Let the liberals do their work; we cannot be against it. Our business is not to fight with them, but to bring into the existing revolutionary ferment our own ideas, to widen the demands which are raised."
[l] Wedlock, EG, "Marriage and Love," AOE, 237.
[li] Big Bill Haywood on women having all the babies they want
[lii] EG, emancipation of women only a phrase GET SOURCE
[liii] "Observations and Comments," (ME, April 1908): 64. For a brief discussion of the La Questione Sociale incident, see my chapter on the IWW. Subscription list, Drinnon, 196.
[liv] The phrase is from Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order.
[lv] WORKS ON PROGRESSIVE ERA M-C HEGEMONIC INSTITUTIONS. Amusing the Millions; settlement work, etc, City People....
[lvi] WORKS ON MODERNIZATION AS LIBERATING AND CONSTRAINING. Taste Publics, Herbert Gans, High Culture and Low Culture. CHECK TITLE, PUB DATE, ETC. By this Gans means a group of individuals, who may or may not share common socio-economic characteristics, who enjoy a similar music, authors, films, etc. An individual could be a member of many "taste publics," as someone who likes country music, Japanese cinema, and Mexican food, for example.
Goldman and her circle reacted ambivilently to modern trends. They usually claimed that society was growing more regimented, but also claimed (although not as confidently as the socialists) that their ideal was consisent with modern trends. Bolton Hall (ME, March 1915) said that government intruded less into private lives than previously.
[lvii] Warren Sussman, BOOK, ESSAY
[lviii] SUSSMAN
[lix] Lears, T. Jackson, Oppression, AND GENERAL
[lx] Lears, No Place of Grace, weightlessness, 41-2; manipulable, 35; self neither unified nor independent -------; fragmented, diffuse, NPG, 32; suffocating in their ease, ------. EG, "The Power of the Ideal," (ME, August 1912).
[lxi] EG, "Authority versus Liberty," (Free Society, March 5, 1899). Goldman rhapsodized that "hundreds of societies spring up for self-improvement and the benefit of mankind." Note that she stressed both individual self-cultivation and social service. Goldman constantly stressed that there was no conflict between the individual and society, if the latter was based on voluntary activity. She herself, however, refused to submit to group control of any kind. BOOKS ON M-C ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE
[lxii] Life, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, February 1910); decry evils, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, July 1911); New world philosophy, EG, "Among Barbarians," (ME, February 1907), also "Are You Interested in Anarchism," (ME, December 1908); science, Voltairine de Clyre, "November Eleventh, Twenty Years Ago," (ME, November 1907); Jay Fox, "Trade Unionism and Anarchism," (ME, November 1906); A.Z., "Evolution of Anarchist Tendencies," (ME, October 1909); a review of Peter Kropotkin's "Modern Science and Anarchism," (ME, November 1913).
[lxiii] EG used this rhetorical device very early, even when speaking to primarily immigrant audiences. EG SCOLDS US FOR DESECRATING FOUNDING FATHERS, CITE SOME EARLY MIDDLE AND LATE; OTHER ME WRITERS HAVE MORE REALISTIC UNDERSTANDING. Quiet a mob, LML, 254-57. EG said, in a statement referring to prison letters but more broadly relevant, "censorships had taught me to express proscribed ideas in guileless disguise," LML 688. The quotes from EG's speech to the court are from EG, "Emma Goldman's Speech," (ME, July 1917):150-61, and EG, "Address to the Jury," the pamphlet version of her speech, RES, 310-327. These versions differ in some details
[lxiv] Thousandfold, EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, March 1906); not fixed and eternal, EG, "The Philosophy of Atheism," (ME, February 1916); sturdiest, EG, "What I Believe," RES, 35; see also, EG, "Our Sixth Birthday," (ME, March 1911): 4; Reckless, EG, "Light and Shadows in the Life of an Avant-Garde," (ME, April 1910). EG, in "A Woman Without a Country, (ME, May 1909) said, referring to the revocation of her ex-husband's (and thus EG's) citizenship, "You have Emma Goldman's citizenship. But she has the world, and her heritage is the kinship of brave spirits--not a bad bargain." Berkman, "Anniversary Musings," (ME, March 1915); time-worn institution, EG, "Adventures in the Desert of American Liberty," (ME, September 1909). Adeline Champney (ME, March 1915: 419) voiced a similar thought. "I doubt if the actual number of avowed Anarchists has very greatly increased.... but the increase of Anarchistic thought which does not bear the title is enormous."
[lxv] Declared war, EG, "On the Trail," (ME, February 1909); arrogance, EG, "A New Declaration of Independence," (ME, July 1909); success, EG, "Our Sixth Birthday," (ME, March 1911); Ideal, EG, "Agitation En Voyage," (ME, August 1915); consciences, "Observations and Comments," (ME, January 1916). cf EG, "I do not believe in any laws except those of morality," "Anarchy Her Only Faith," (The New York Times, October 7, 1893); "I bow to nothing except my idea of right," Interview, "Emma Goldman's Own Story," (Chicago Daily Tribune), September 11, 1901. On the other hand, the editorial statement for Mother Earth (ME, March 1906), presumably a considered document, denounced that "priest-born monster, conscience." Goldman, like IWW theorists, sometimes failed to distinguish between morality, in which they deeply believed, and conventional morality, which they ridiculed and despised. They sometimes denounced morality and conscience when they meant to criticize conventional understandings.
[lxvi] This view of ethics as freely chosen does present a dilemma which Goldman, and others, have not fully confronted. John Rawls says that justice consists of the principles which we would all agree upon from behind a "veil of ignorance," when we do not know anything about our position in society. Ethic is thus a contract we agree upon. Yet if we would in fact unanimously agree on fundamental principles, these principles cannot be our free creation; they must be "out there" somewhere (or within ourselves) awaiting discovery. Goldman never quite resolved a similar paradox in her own thinking: she insisted that morality was not eternal, but changed over time in response to conditions; yet she intransigently insisted that they were, for all practical purposes, absolute in the here-and-now.
Goldman and the anarchists opposed consequentialism and pragmatism; but these too are absolute moralities. Consequentialism demands that a person act at all times and places for the greatest good of the greatest number. This suffuses all of life with ethical gravity, and is to antithesis of any relativistic view.
[lxvii] EG, "A Review of our New York Activities," (ME, April 1914).
[lxviii] Harry Kelly, "Anarchism, a Plea for the Impersonal," (ME, February 1908).
[lxix] LML, 51-53, 186-87.
[lxx] LML, 409. EG said that through proper education alone "can we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community." EG, "The Child and Its Enemies," (ME, April 1906).
[lxxi] W.C. Owen, "Proper Methods of Propaganda," (ME, August 1908).
[lxxii] EG's critique of settlement houses is quoted above. Compare this to her stance on the eight-hour day and on libertarian education. EG supported ameliorative reforms won through worker self-activity, but disdained those offered from above as charity.
[lxxiii] Margaret Anderson, "An Inspiration," (ME, March 1915); Van Valkenberg quote, Wexler, 280.
[lxxiv] Henry May, The End of American Innocence.
[lxxv] CUT THIS NOTE; UNNECESSARY
[lxxvi] Lears, No Place of Grace, passim.
[lxxvii] Leonard Abbott, speech to the Union Square demonstrators, and Plunkett, "Dynamite," (ME, July 1914).
[lxxviii] LML, 165-6, 169. After describing unparalleled "misery and squalor" in England, Goldman said that she "understood the reason for so much political freedom. It was a safety-valve against the fearful destitution. The British Government no doubt felt that as long as it permitted its subjects to let off steam in unhampered talk, there was no danger of rebellion." She quoted Kropotkin as saying that "The British bourgeoisie has good reason to fear the spread of discontent, and political liberties are the best security against it.... The average Britisher loves to think he is free; it helps him to forget his misery." Goldman repeatedly made the same point about elections, saying they were a bauble to distract the workers from economic oppression and foster the illusion of freedom. This is why she refused to make a distinction between autocracies and so-called democracies, and why she applauded any act which, by evoking repression, forced the authorities to reveal their true nature.
[lxxix] EG, "An Urgent Appeal to My Friends," (ME, April 1916); Reb Raney, "The Crowbar v Words" (ME, April 1916); Ida Rauh, "Birth Control Demonstration in Union Square," (ME, June 1916).
[lxxx] She claimed this, it must be noted, in order to win free speech; she argued that if her arguments were wrong, they would not persuade many people, and would therefore by harmless. See her lecture of June 14, 1917 (EGP-GW) for one example of this. Of course, if Goldman were correct in her analysis, and the workers believed her, those who owned and controlled the country would lose most of what they owned.
[lxxxi] "History to Be," MEB (January, 1918). INTERESTING DISPUTE ABOUT OBJECTIVITY OF SCIENCE, PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM, MISMEASURE OF MAN, ETC.
[lxxxii] EG, "Police Brutality," (ME, November, 1906); Falk, 105.
[lxxxiii] Falk, 523.
[lxxxiv] CUT THIS NOTE
[lxxxv] Marsh, 105. The Denver Post (April 17, 1912) said that "Emma Goldman is slowly being absorbed by respectability. She is becoming de rigeur and other things, as far as ennuied society is concerned." Thrill-seekers went to delapidated halls to hear her. In this case Goldman shares some of the blame for lecturing against Socialism to an elite audience--although she could not control who attended her lectures.