Critical Summary and Analysis

A feminist search for love Emma Goldman on the politics of marriage, love, sexuality and the feminine

Abstract This article explores the life and work of Emma Goldman to formulate a radical critique of intimacy. Goldman’s theory of sexual freedom and revolutionary love offers a feminist vision that challenges contemporary debates concerning uses of the language of feminine desire. Goldman appealed to ideals of feminine instinct and feminine desire in order to challenge the conventional meanings attached to femininity in her day. Her views on marriage, love, sexuality and the feminine are analysed alongside her writings on her own personal experience, in order to illuminate the continuing paradoxes feminists face in regard to definitions and experiences of femininity.

keywords anarchism, desire, Goldman, marriage, sexuality

Emma Goldman is far better known for her dramatic life and for her anar- chism than for any contribution to political and feminist theory. An anarchist activist who constantly challenged the political and social status quo, Goldman was a rousing orator and a prolific pamphleteer, as well as founder and editor of the anarchist journal Mother Earth. She was jailed many times (once for two years) for her political activity, which included support for the labour movement and striking workers, opposition to the World War I draft, advocating free speech and free love, work on the birth control campaign and opposition to state and government power. In late 1919, Goldman was deported from the USA to the Soviet Union along with several hundred other immigrant radicals including her long-time colleague, friend and early lover, Alexander Berkman.1 Hoping to find some of their ideals enacted in the Soviet Revolution,2 Goldman and Berkman were severely disappointed by the concentration of state power and the suppression of dissidents in their country of birth.3

Goldman famously chronicled her anarchist activities in her two-volume autobiography, Living My Life (1970a, 1970b). Her presentation is fascinat- ing for its historical context as well as for details of the sacrifices and commitments such an intense political life required. I will argue here, however, that it is not solely Goldman’s political life that makes her import- ant for us to study today. Rather, it is in the intersection of her life with her thought, specifically her intimate and sexual life as studied in conjunction

305

TF

Lori Jo Marso Union College, NY, USA

Feminist Theory Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA

and New Delhi) vol. 4(3): 305–320.

[1464-7001 (200312) 4:3;

305–320; 037059] www.sagepublications.com

with her essays on marriage, sex, love, women’s emancipation and femi- ninity, where a study of Goldman contributes important insights to contem- porary feminist debates. Most importantly, she helps us to think about the connections and tensions between sexuality, love and feminist politics. Chronicled in Goldman’s many public speeches and political writings, we witness her philosophical commitment to an anarchist feminism that rejects marriage and the conventional nuclear family. In conjunction with this philosophy, Goldman lived a life of free and open sexual expression, engaging in direct action on behalf of campaigns for birth control, free speech and the complete acceptance of unconventional sexual practices. At the same time, she neither rejects nor condemns romantic love; she places intimate connections with others as central to her life and her politics; and she suggests that the basis for women’s emancipation should spring from the full and complete expression of what she calls the ‘feminine instinct’.

Rather than turn to the ‘state’ to deliver women’s emancipation (as her sister suffragists were doing), Goldman desired women to free themselves by unleashing their ‘instincts’. She even called for the freedom of ‘feminine desire’ to permit the ‘deep emotion of the true woman’ (1969a: 217). This language sounds suspiciously conservative and even echoed some of the language of the anti-suffragists. Despite her early and open defense of homosexuality,4 for example, some of her rhetoric evoking notions of femi- ninity and true womanhood could today be suspected of harbouring hetero- sexist norms and gender essentialism.

I will argue, however, that Goldman’s assumptions about women’s ‘difference’ as well as her vision of sexual freedom and revolutionary love offer a radical critique of intimacy that can contribute to contemporary feminist debates. Since Goldman had to constantly butt up against conventional norms, she was unable to express feminine desire fully in the way that she thought would be most freeing. In short, for a variety of reasons, Goldman was not always able to live out her beliefs and commit- ments in the ways she had hoped. Feminists have expressed disappoint- ment over this apparent ‘failure’ to live up to her ideals, but I will take a different approach. An appreciation of Goldman’s thought, as well as the interactions of her thought with the social and political climate in which she lived, engender multiple historical insights into our own concerns.5

Understanding the complexities of Goldman’s theory of love and sexu- ality in conjunction with the dilemmas of desire she experienced in her own life helps us to appreciate both Goldman’s life and work, and the context in which it developed. What may we learn from Goldman’s experi- ence about the relationships between theory and practice, one’s life and one’s beliefs, and one’s desires as they conflict with prevailing norms, and how to carry on in the face of disillusionment and despair? I am particu- larly interested in thinking through Goldman’s life and work, as she experi- enced and understood it, as an example of how even the most radical and forward thinking women can get trapped by the contemporary patriarchal norms under which they live, often even unconsciously internalizing these norms.

306 Feminist Theory 4(3)

Although Emma Goldman consistently and fundamentally challenged the political status quo, gender roles and normative sexuality, she remained ambivalent about the meanings attached to femininity. At the same time, Goldman’s vision of intimacy and eroticism has plenty to teach us about shortcomings in our contemporary understandings of intimacy, both in what is possible and what is hoped for. I explore Goldman’s views on these matters, as well as her writings on her personal experiences, in order to illuminate the continuing paradoxes feminists face in regard to definitions and experiences of femininity.

Goldman’s writings on marriage, love, sexuality

Goldman defines anarchism in the following way:

[Anarchism] stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liber- ation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. (1969b: 62)

Goldman’s ‘beautiful vision’ necessitated the emancipation of women. Although many anarchist writers acknowledged the importance of women in the movement, none of the principal (male) theoreticians gave sustained attention to questions of feminism (Ackelsberg, 1991: 17). Like socialist feminist Alexandra Kollantai (1972), Goldman had to fight her political colleagues on the question of which issues were to be labeled ‘digressions’ and which were central to the revolutionary movement. Goldman recalls a conversation with Peter Kropotkin, for example, in which he complains that the anarchist paper, Free Society, would do better were it not to ‘waste so much space discussing sex’ (1970a: 253). And even when there was agreement on the political importance of sexuality, there was, as Ackels- berg puts it, ‘more than one way to apply an anti-authoritarian analysis to sexual and familial relations’ (1991: 26).

Could free sexual expression exist between equals and how would woman’s reproductive role influence her social and political contributions? Goldman was certain about at least one thing. Her life experience had made it clear that no true freedom for women could exist without a fundamental revolution at the intimate level between human beings in their relation- ships of love and sexuality. She insisted on bringing to light the inequality that is manifested in our most intimate relationships, such as marriage and the nuclear family. Debating the role of women in the 1935 Spanish anar- chist movement, Goldman berates a colleague for claiming that it is the ‘innermost wish’ of Spanish women to have ‘broods of children’. Goldman retorts:

All your assurance not withstanding, I wish to say that I have yet to meet the woman who wants to have many children. That doesn’t mean that I ever for a moment denied the fact that most women want to have a child, though that, too,

Marso: A feminist search for love 307

has been exaggerated by the male. I have seen too many tragedies in the relations between the sexes; I have seen too many broken bodies and maimed spirits from the sex slavery of woman not to feel the matter deeply or to express my indigna- tion against the attitude of most of you gentlemen. (1975: 186)

Goldman recognized sexual and reproductive freedoms as the cornerstone to basic human rights, seeing the curtailment of these freedoms in the most common and accepted practices mandated and promulgated by and through the state. Marriage, for example, condemns women to ‘life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social’ (1969c: 228). It compounds the degrading effects of capitalism, anni- hilating woman’s ‘social consciousness, paralyz[ing] her imagination, and then impos[ing] its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character’ (1969c: 235). The home, ‘though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars’ (1969c: 233).

Ironically and tragically, these prison bars of marriage rarely fail to tanta- lize young women. The bars appear ‘golden’, their shininess ‘blind[ing] woman to the price she would have to pay as wife, mother, and house- keeper’ (1969a: 224). In spite of her oppression, ‘woman clings tenaciously to the home, to the power that holds her in bondage’ (1969d: 197). Goldman seizes on the heart of the problem: what women are taught to desire is that which also denies them their freedom. The very substance of what makes a woman feminine is what holds her in bondage. Being a mother, a wife, a lover, as defined by Goldman’s historical moment, was to be financially, emotionally, socially and politically dependent. Studying sexuality in 19th-century feminist thought, feminist historians Ellen Du Bois and Linda Gordon note the contradictions women lived: ‘what was conceived as women’s greatest virtue, their passionate and self-sacrificing commitment to their children, their capacity for love itself, was a leading factor in their victimization’ (1983: 12).

But the options for women were very limited. A woman may even be aware of her potential slavery within marriage and walk into it open-eyed having surveyed other, even less desirable, alternatives. ‘We find many emancipated women who prefer marriage, with all its deficiencies, to the narrowness of an unmarried life, narrow and unendurable because of the chains of moral and social prejudice that cramp and bind her nature’ (Goldman, 1969a: 221).

What were the alternatives beyond marriage? If a woman were to remain unmarried, she might have been labeled a spinster, a ‘loose’ woman, or a whore. Partially in response to these limited alternatives, the late 19th century witnessed the rise of the feminist movement. Women activists of many political persuasions advanced new visions of gender relations, women’s social role and even, of course, women’s potential role in politics. Some feminist historians have called the late 19th century a ‘golden age for single women’ noting opportunities for gainful employment and even new fashions – confining corsets and hoop skirts were replaced by dark skirts and simple blouses (Ware, 2002: 3).

Yet, even the more progressive options had their drawbacks. Emma Goldman claimed at the time, that taking on the role of the ‘new woman’

308 Feminist Theory 4(3)

was to accept the notion that women must make themselves professional (even male) in order to be taken seriously. She found that the American suffragists, for example, bought into the idea that if woman was to be emancipated, she must give up on her femininity, her sexuality, everything that makes her a woman. Echoing conservative anti-suffragists, but from a profoundly different political perspective, Goldman argued that the suffrage model taught women that they needed to relinquish any claims to femininity in order to be free.

Susan B. Anthony, as the most famous example, seemed to embody this sacrifice of femininity for the cause by being openly critical of the time and effort that ‘baby-making’ stole from the women’s rights movement (Wheeler, 1995: 49). Goldman argued that the suffrage model made it appear that gaining freedom as a woman could only be purchased at the price of losing one’s femininity.

And as suffrage became married to the Progressive Movement, the emphasis on female morality repulsed Goldman.

Yet, while she ridiculed the claim that women were morally superior to men and especially the suffrage claim that ‘women’s nature suited them to the new social responsibilities of the state’ (Evans, 1997: 154), she also emphasized that women should be allowed and encouraged to express freely their ‘true’ femininity. What Goldman calls partial or external emancipation makes modern woman an ‘artificial being’, a woman who must be confronted ‘with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation’ (Goldman, 1969a: 214, 215). This woman is a ‘compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or gripping her soul’ (1969a: 217). This woman is not ‘brave enough to acknowledge that the voice of love is calling, wildly beating against [her] breast, demanding to be heard, to be satisfied’ (Goldman, 1969a: 222). ‘Emancipation, as understood by the majority of its adherents and exponents, is of too narrow a scope to permit the boundless love and ecstasy contained in the deep emotion of the true woman, sweetheart, mother in freedom’ (Goldman, 1969a: 217).

In short, Goldman disagreed with her suffragist sisters on almost every- thing. Goldman argued that the fight for and even the winning of, the vote was bound to ensnare woman in new chains.6 The kind of freedom gained through the law would constitute only a partial freedom, an empty promise. Goldman repeatedly insisted that the vote would never and could never fundamentally transform women’s lives: a woman may think herself free, but in reality, only be trapped within new confines (Goldman, 1969a: 224).

The alternatives, then, as Goldman assessed them, were severely limited. Why would any woman willingly choose to live an unconventional life? Were there even any models a woman could choose to follow if she desired something more than a conventional life or partial emancipation? Seeking to articulate a vision of ‘true freedom’, Goldman offered her own life as an example to others. It is in her life as example that she attempts to most clearly distinguish her politics from the suffragists as well as the moralists inside and outside the suffrage movement. In her two-volume

Marso: A feminist search for love 309

autobiography, Living my Life (1970a, 1970b), Goldman speaks candidly about her early and varied sexual experiences, her longings and desires and her many passionate love affairs, often with younger men.

Throughout her essays on sexuality, love and marriage, Goldman main- tains a distinction between marriage and ‘real love’, forced motherhood and the ‘mother instinct’, false or partial and ‘true’ emancipation. ‘Marriage and love have nothing in common’, she writes (Goldman, 1969c: 227). A ‘healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion’, must be ‘free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church’, rather than ‘subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit’, in the battle to abstain from ‘the sex experience until a “good” man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife’ (Goldman, 1969c: 231). Marriage sanctions a motherhood ‘conceived in hatred, in compulsion’ (Goldman, 1969c: 236): ‘Yet, if motherhood be of free choice, of love, of ecstasy, of defiant passion’, it would be a ‘free motherhood’ (Goldman, 1969c: 236, 237).

Real or true freedom, in Goldman’s definition, does not spring from exter- nally granted laws or rights, but rather from ‘woman’s soul’. If woman is to be truly free, not only in law but in terms of personal liberation, ‘her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself’ (Goldman, 1969d: 211). By refusing to be a ‘sex commodity, refusing to ‘bear children, unless she wants them’, refusing to be ‘a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family’, woman will make herself a force for ‘real love, for peace, for harmony’ (Goldman, 1969d: 211).

But the choice of true freedom involves difficult sacrifices and brings on complicated dilemmas. Can ‘sexual varietism’ satisfy a person’s emotional desires, one’s need to have an intimate confidante and committed lover? Does one have to completely give up on emotional commitment and/or mutual dependency in order to be truly free? Goldman’s wish was to live her life as a free woman while simultaneously living within community and mutually supportive bonds. She hoped to live in accordance with her philosophical and political ideals, demonstrating that women’s lives could be free as well as emotionally satisfying. She proclaims: ‘if partial emanci- pation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be sweet- heart and mother, is synonymous with being slave and subordinate’ (Goldman, 1969a: 224).

In an effort to realize the goal of ‘free motherhood’ and work towards true emancipation for women, Goldman employed various political methods. She worked tirelessly on the birth control campaign for over 10 years. Advocating knowledge of and access to birth control for all women fruitfully combined Goldman’s philosophy of anarchist freedom with concrete measures towards political and social change.

At the same time, however, the philosophical problem that the reality of children and lovers posed remained a thorny one for anarchist feminists like Goldman. Even if motherhood and mutual love were freely chosen, could a woman be fully free as an individual when her life was emotionally

310 Feminist Theory 4(3)

intertwined with another, or as in motherhood, if she were completely or even partially responsible for another human life? Questions of mutual dependency and reciprocity remained nagging ones for Goldman in her philosophy and in her life.

Living within the confines of femininity

Finding few contemporary women who shared her ideals, Goldman sought role models and companions in history. Reading the work of Mary Woll- stonecraft, Emma Goldman finds a model of a heroine’s life that, according to Alice Wexler (1981), was both inspiring and terrifying at the same time. In a speech written in 1911 as a tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and work, Emma Goldman focuses on the contradictions between the repu- tation of Wollstonecraft as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the private life of the woman who needed, as Goldman contends, ‘love, unreserved, passionate love’ (1981: 119).

This unreserved need for love is revealed in private letters from Woll- stonecraft to her American lover, Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft met Imlay during the heady days of the French Revolution. Believing that with Imlay she might experiment with more democratic forms of domesticity, she fell in love, gave birth to a daughter outside marriage and was soon after aban- doned by her lover.

Wollstonecraft’s voice in letters to her unreceptive former lover is that of a melancholy, lonely, desperate woman struggling to raise a child by herself in a decidedly unfriendly environment for single mothers. Engulfed with grief at the failure of French Revolutionary goals as well as the failure of her experiment with revolutionary forms of conjugality, Wollstonecraft admits in one letter that ‘when I am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I doat on her, is a girl – I am sorry to have a tie to a world that for me is ever sown with thorns’ (1979: 273). These aspects of Wollstonecraft’s life fit uncomfortably with her reputation as author of the most important feminist writing of the 18th century, a canonical woman thinker who advo- cated a vision of women as strong, independent and potentially rights- bearing individuals. In conjunction with this claim to feminist authority, the fact that Wollstonecraft was sometimes a dependent, needy and despondent woman did not surprise and, in fact, attracted Emma Goldman.

Goldman’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s life points to the ways in which she was thinking about the dilemmas within her own life and the feminist politics of her time. Building her case against the suffragists, Goldman points to Wollstonecraft’s life to prove the ‘inadequacy of mere external gain as a means of freeing their [our] sex’ (1981: 116). Goldman notes:

Mary’s own tragic life proves that economic and social rights for women alone are not enough to fill her life, nor yet enough to fill any deep life, man or woman. It is not true that the deep and fine man – I do not mean the mere male – differs very largely from the deep and fine woman. He too seeks for beauty and love, for harmony and understanding. Mary realized that, because she did not limit herself to her own sex, she demanded freedom for the whole human race. (1981: 116)

Marso: A feminist search for love 311

Referring repeatedly to beauty, love, deep emotion and affection in this essay on Wollstonecraft, Goldman emphasizes the importance of the trans- formation needed in intimate relations for the revolutionary movement. Goldman identifies Wollstonecraft as a kindred spirit, a woman with deep and unwavering commitment to intellectual life and the revolutionary movement, but also a woman who longed for true love. As Goldman puts it, ‘Life without love for a character like Mary is inconceivable, and it was her search and yearning for love which hurled her against the rock of incon- sistency and despair’ (Goldman, 1981: 119).

The dilemma of the political and feminist woman in love, the relation- ship between feminine desire and anarchist feminist authority increasingly occupied Goldman’s thoughts as she ended one failing or unsatisfying relationship after another. Goldman’s autobiography makes clear her frus- tration in trying to live in intimacy with someone while maintaining her political activities and identity. Her constant desire was to find a partner with whom she could combine politics with intimacy.

Ed Brady, for example, an anarchist colleague with whom Goldman shared her life, work and bed for almost five years, initially was someone on whom Goldman pinned her ‘dream of love and true companionship’ (Goldman, 1970a: 151). ‘Surely it must be possible’, she hoped, ‘for a man and a woman to have a beautiful love-life and yet be devoted to a great cause’ (Goldman, 1970a: 154). The tug of war between the emotional and the political was a constant dynamic in Goldman’s life: ‘To the end of my days I should be torn between the yearning for a personal life and the need to giving all to my ideal’ (Goldman, 1970a: 153). Though Goldman claimed that her ‘giving to humanity’ only increased her own need, making her ‘love and want Ed [Brady] more’ (Goldman, 1970a: 193), Brady felt, in contrast, that Goldman’s ‘interest in the movement’ was nothing but ‘vanity, nothing but craving for applause and glory and the limelight’ (Goldman, 1970a: 183).

Examining her work in conjunction with her life, it is clear that Goldman was trying to reconcile sexual and individual freedom with the demands of love and reciprocity. One of Goldman’s feminist biographers, Candice Falk, has argued that the tension between a desire for love and the commit- ment to anarchist principles remained a primary one throughout Goldman’s life. In reading Goldman’s enormous volume of correspondence, Falk has identified a ‘tone of desperation, even of resignation’ (Falk, 1990: xii) that is not associated with Emma, the freedom fighter. When Goldman ‘was vulnerable to political repression, she responded with daring and defiance, but when she was vulnerable in a love relationship it triggered feelings of abandonment and desperation’ (Falk, 1990: xiv).

Goldman’s dream of an ongoing political partnership and intimacy was realized only for moments at a time. When she met another of her lovers, Ben Reitman, Goldman hoped it might signal the start of a ‘new chapter in [her] life’ with someone ‘who was lover, companion, and manager’ (1970a: 425). Reitman was Goldman’s lover during her most tumultuous years on the birth control campaign. Goldman writes of the ‘great hunger for someone who would love the woman in me and yet who would also be able

312 Feminist Theory 4(3)

to share my work’ (1970a: 433). In Living My Life (1970a, 1970b), Goldman intentionally denies her intense passion for Ben Reitman and the ways in which she was beholden to her desire to make the relationship work.7 In a 1909 letter to Reitman, Goldman expresses the contradictions she feels in her life. She desperately fears losing Reitman’s love and companionship, while still desiring to be a model of freedom and independence for others:

Meetings, free speech, are nothing to me now, if my love, my life, my peace, my very soul is to be mutilated. Work with you, so long as I had faith in your love, meant the greatest sweetest joy in life. That may account for my utter abandon- ment, my utter dissolution to my love for you. That may also account, why I the woman who has been treated with respect by friend and foe, could crouch on her knees and beg and plead with you . . . I have no right to bring a message to people when there is no message in my soul. I have no right to speak of freedom when I myself have become abject slave in my love. (2001: 98)

Goldman despised her dependency – on Brady, on Reitman, on her own longing for intimacy and affection from another human being. Living outside the boundaries of conventional society and defying all expectations for women made it nearly impossible for Goldman to achieve the kind of emotional fulfilment she so desperately hoped for. This was certainly not an unusual situation for feminists of the period, particularly for anarchist feminists as they chose to reject so radically social norms. Feminist theorist Ann Ferguson reminds us, ‘our fragmented subjectivities require support by a number of oppositional communities that provide alternative meanings and material support’ (1995: 373). While Goldman was the centre of multiple anarchist communities and alternative forms of ‘family’, she continued to long for a special intimacy with one individual. Redefining models of family and ways of intimacy was a particularly difficult chal- lenge for women of Goldman’s historical moment. Others, too, were strug- gling with these same questions, yet lacking the material and psychological resources it would take to redefine so radically ways of loving, each indi- vidual felt they were struggling alone. Documenting ‘modern love’ in Greenwich Village in the early 20th century, Ellen Kay Trimberger argues, ‘women might give each other private support, but there was not at this time a women’s movement that publicly discussed changes in personal life, marriage, and sex, nor one that helped women articulate what changes were in their interests’ (Trimberger, 1983: 143).

Goldman’s contemporary, feminist Voltairine de Cleyre, also struggled alone with questions of self-definition. In a study of anarchist women, Margaret Marsh argues that de Cleyre’s correspondence reveals ‘that grinding poverty drove her to contemplate marriage for economic security, that she suffered periods of acute despondency because she considered her life a failure, and that on one occasion her depression nearly resulted in suicide’ (Marsh, 1981: 135). In a letter written in 1925, Emma Goldman confides to Berkman:

We all need love and affection and understanding, and woman needs a damn sight more of that when she grows older. I am sure that is the main cause of my misery since I left America. For since then I have had no one, or met anyone who gave a fig for what I do and what becomes of me. Of course, you dear, I am not speaking

Marso: A feminist search for love 313

of our friendship; that is a thing apart. But I mean exactly what you mean, someone intimate, someone personal who would take some interest, show affec- tion, and really care . . . I am consumed by longing for love and affection for some human being of my own. I know the agony of loneliness and yearning. (1975: 128)

Telling Berkman that she longs to express ‘love and affection for some human being of [her] own’, Goldman suggests a break with the philosophy of anarchist feminists who argue that sexual freedom necessarily implies a rejection of emotional possession. Putting sexual freedom and the critique of domesticity at the centre of her analyses, Voltairine de Cleyre felt that to conquer jealousy and to reject any claims or hold over any other individual was central to a revolutionary strategy. To be jealous or possessive was to make a claim to private property.8 While Goldman makes similar claims against jealousy, seeing it as the ‘most prevalent evil of our mutilated love- life’ (Goldman, 1998: 215), she tempers her condemnation by acknowl- edging that the ‘two worlds’ of ‘two human beings, of different temperament, feelings, and emotions’, must meet in ‘freedom and equality’ if they are to conquer the ‘green-eyed monster’ (Goldman, 1998: 221, 216).

As Goldman fluctuated between desires for political and personal fulfil- ment, times of political disappointment became for her the moments when she felt most powerfully that something was lacking in her life as a woman. Writing to Berkman in 1925 of an anarchist friend and colleague, Goldman describes the ‘tragedy of all us modern women’:

It is a fact that we are removed only by a very short period from our traditions, the traditions of being loved, cared for, protected, secured, and above all, the time when women could look forward to an old age of children, a home and someone to brighten their lives. Being away from all that by a mere fraction of time, most modern women, especially when they see age growing upon them, and if they have given out of themselves so abundantly, begin to feel the utter emptiness of their existence, the lack of the man, whom they love and who loves them, the comradeship and companionship that grows out of such a relation, the home, a child. And above all the economic security either through the man or their own definite independent efforts. Nearly every modern woman I have known and have read about has come to [this] condition. (Goldman, 1975: 131)

This is a condition Goldman knows well. Despite the fact that she has struggled to free herself from the confines of traditional marriage and motherhood, despite the fact that she has lived a life of sexual freedom and political activity, in private correspondence Goldman says that she suffers from having failed to achieve a long-term relationship that would satisfy her ‘feminine’ desire.

Goldman’s ‘beautiful ideal’

How may we understand the meanings and contradictions of what Goldman refers to as ‘feminine’ desire? When Emma Goldman makes refer- ence to ‘femininity’, the ‘mother instinct’ and ‘woman’s soul’, she articu- lates a very basic difference between men and women, failing to specify whether that difference is based in biology, psychology, social/political hierarchies, psycholinguistic/symbolic organization or some combination

314 Feminist Theory 4(3)

of these factors. Goldman’s appeals to difference are often used rhetorically, but reflect her own observations about her life and the lives of other women she knows. Goldman’s radical life and practical activities put her in contact and solidarity with huge numbers of women of all classes and types. In her lectures and campaigns for birth control and women’s sexual freedom, she reached out to women of the middle classes; at the same time, working for the rights of prostitutes and homosexuals, Goldman appealed to both lower and middle classes, radical and liberal audiences. In addition, her years working as a midwife for impoverished women who could not afford doctors, healthcare, or a back-alley abortion put Goldman in intimate contact with the destitution of the poorest and most desperate women.

Yet, in spite of Goldman’s knowledge of the ways in which women are divided, she still often grouped women together in a category without any subtle or even obvious distinctions. As a propagandist, Goldman tended to exaggerate many of her claims, speaking of women in an uncomplicated, even essentialist, way. While fully aware of the differences between and among women, Goldman still found it appropriate to speak of women as differentiated as a group within a structure of gender inequity. And she continued to speak of feminine desire.

In challenging the notion of a rational and unitary subject, psycho- analytic theory has been helpful in attempting to explain some of the more seemingly irrational and contradictory aspects of our personalities, especially sexual desire. In labeling her desire ‘feminine’ and in valuing romantic love, Goldman is at odds with her more ‘rational’ or ‘political’ self that would choose to remake these aspects of conventional femininity. In Goldman’s life we witness a philosophical and political commitment to a complete break with traditional norms of femininity combined with what appears as personal sadness over her failure to achieve and maintain what may be considered conventional kinds of feminine/gendered bonds (that is, within a monogamous love affair, or with a child). Here, a psycho- analytic explanation of desire as yearning for unattainable fulfillment (as in Lacanian analysis) may offer a way of understanding Goldman’s lament for an unattainable intimacy that she calls feminine.

Yet, Goldman herself questioned the way the ‘feminine’ has been shaped by social, historical and economic constraints and never accepts the idea of the feminine as an unshaped or unchanging essence. Goldman never specified what women may do with a newfound freedom or with the possi- bility of expressing an authentic feminine desire. She found it more import- ant to make her audiences understand that gender inequity structures the world to limit women’s freedom severely than to specify what women may do or what women may want, once they have the opportunities. Goldman consistently emphasized the importance of the theatrical and the perfor- mative in appealing to audiences, sparking their untapped radicalism and jolting their political consciousness.

In her work to move people to action, Goldman stressed the importance of the utopian dimension of her thought. She was certain that to rouse social discontent with current conditions, an appeal must be launched to ‘both mind and heart’ (Goldman, 1969e: 17). Goldman counted herself

Marso: A feminist search for love 315

among the ‘real revolutionist[s], the dreamer[s], the creative artist[s], the iconoclast[s] in whatever line’ (Goldman, 1987: 51–2). Her searing critique of current political/economic/social conditions promised a new vision; what she called a ‘beautiful ideal’ of a new society where the human spirit would be free of oppression and restored to dignity and worth. Her vision was that of a feminist anarchist future where all would be free in love and work to develop themselves as fully human and creative beings.

Goldman would agree with feminist theorists such as Stevi Jackson who reminds us, ‘our subjectivities, including that aspect of them we call emotions, are shaped by the social and cultural milieu we inhabit, through processes which involve our active engagement with sets of meaning avail- able in our culture’ (Jackson, 2001: 260). Lauren Berlant, too, has empha- sized the material, cultural and historical context which structures how our most intimate relationships get played out. She notes the mix of fantasy and materiality in stressing the importance of understanding ‘how to articulate the ways the utopian, optimism-sustaining versions of intimacy meet the normative practices, fantasies, institutions, and ideologies that organize people’s worlds’ (Berlant, 2000: 2).

Goldman’s life and theory serve as a case study of the ways her desire for a new kind of intimacy and longing for the ‘beautiful dream’ of her anar- chist vision were to butt up against the harsh reality of the lack of community, material and psychological support needed for her vision to transpire. At the same time that Goldman delivers an anarchist dream of woman’s desire to be free from oppressive social conditions and expec- tations, she can only hint at how this revolution may create a space for new forms of intimacy and specifically how a newly liberated feminine desire may be articulated within these changes.

Central to this though, as I have argued throughout, was Goldman’s commitment to the free expression of sexuality. She was as disillusioned with normative conceptions of desire and femininity as she was with the elusive quest for equality. Although Goldman portrayed her own sexuality as heterosexual, and, longing for commitment and constancy, her ideal makes space for people to express themselves sexually in whatever way they may desire. Once freed from the grip of normative heterosexuality with its accompanying claims about the conventional family, traditional motherhood, the duties of men and women and so on, Goldman was convinced that people would invent new and freer ways of expressing themselves in their most intimate relations. Goldman herself flirted with the idea of having a lesbian love affair (and she may have even done so) with anarchist colleague Almeda Sperry who clearly adored her (Katz, 1992: 523–9). Reframing the struggle for women’s (and indeed, for human) emancipation in terms that spoke to our needs for freedom, Goldman was able to put forward the absolute necessity of freeing women on their own terms, without having to sacrifice love or varieties of sexual expression and without reference to male-defined and state-centred notions of equality as the measure by which to judge progress.

Familiarity with Goldman’s experience, however, reminds us of the constraints that patriarchy imposes on the lives of even the freest-thinking

316 Feminist Theory 4(3)

women. Having witnessed the failure to achieve her political ideal in the USA and having become completely disillusioned by the revolution in the Soviet Union, near the end of her life, Goldman was particularly bereft of ideals on which to pin her hopes. In a letter to Berkman written in early 1929, Goldman relates the difficulty of writing her autobiography; having to relive and remember her passions in light of their demise:

It is not only the writing, it is living through what now lies in ashes and being made aware that I have nothing left in the way of personal relations from all who have been in my life and have torn my heart . . . I should have known that it would be torture to revive the past. I am now paying for it. (Goldman, 1975: 145)

Must the inspirational be accompanied by the terrifying, as Goldman witnessed in the life of Wollstonecraft and was fulfilled almost as prophecy in Goldman’s? Surely the fact that these two women were able to talk so frankly in letters about dilemmas they experienced as women trying to recreate models of love and sexuality speaks to the necessity of studying the personal alongside the philosophical/political. Goldman remarks that, ‘Had Mary Wollstonecraft not written a line, her life would have furnished food for thought . . . but she has given us both, she therefore stands among the world’s greatest, a life so deep, so rich, so exquisitely beautiful in her complete humanity’ (Goldman, 1981: 121).

From studying Goldman’s life as it intersects with her philosophy of love, freedom and sexual expression, we are reminded of the contradictions of feminine desire under conditions of patriarchy as well as the necessity of changing consciousness to embrace new forms of intimacy in our most personal relationships. One important contribution that Goldman makes is her theorization of feminine desire as distinct from male models of femi- ninity. Important, too, is the fact that Goldman’s theory of individual freedom and the centrality of sexual expression and desire for this freedom does not exist as an abstract concept untethered by social/political change. Her utopian vision of a feminist future, though unrealized in her own historical moment, is one that may inspire us to move forward.

Drucilla Cornell has asked:

Why is it so difficult to feminism to sustain itself as a movement and transmit its lessons to the next generation so that we can build on what we have achieved in the past rather than be fated to engage in the same battles over and over again? (Cornell, 1998: 48)

Engaging in the work of feminist genealogy is to learn from the experience, disappointments and theoretical inspiration of women who have come before us. This represents one step towards breaking the cycle of endless repetition of the same battles. Goldman’s life represents the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of believing in a utopian aesthetic that can inspire new visions of freedom.

Acknowledgements For helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, thanks to Martha Ackelsberg and Andrea Foroughi. I also thank Marla Brettschneider, Tom Lobe

Marso: A feminist search for love 317

and Patricia Moynagh for their comments on this article and even more import- ant, for engaging in long conversations about Goldman’s life and politics.

Notes 1. Goldman was deported, along with 248 other immigrants in September

1919, after serving two years in prison for opposing the World War I draft. She lost her citizenship on a technicality. The government denaturalized her former husband and by law, at that time, a woman’s citizenship followed her husband’s.

2. Since the 1917 Revolution, Goldman and Berkman had thought about going back to their home country but their political work in the USA (as well as a genuine commitment to the USA on Goldman’s part) precluded their making the move.

3. Upon deportation to Soviet Russia, Goldman and Berkman refused to toe the Communist Party line on the Soviet Union’s potential for human emancipation. Though they had fully supported the Revolution from abroad, witnessing the Soviet repression of political dissidents sobered their early enthusiasm. Goldman’s exposé of Soviet brutality in My Disillusionment with Russia, published in 1923, incurred the wrath of radicals around the world.

4. Goldman called homosexuality the ‘problem most tabooed in polite society’ (1970b: 555). Over the objections of many of her anarchist comrades, Goldman often spoke on the theme of prejudice against homosexuality on her lecture tours. Blanche Wiesen Cook argues that though Goldman felt ‘a profound ambivalence about lesbianism as a lifestyle’ she was ‘the only woman in America who defended homosexuality . . . and was absolute about a person’s right to sexual choice’ (1977: 56). Jonathan Ned Katz includes excerpts from fascinating letters from Almeda Sperry, an anarchist colleague, to Emma Goldman. He argues that it is ‘difficult to know exactly what occurred between Sperry and Goldman’ (Katz, 1992: 523), but the letters from Sperry leave no doubt as to her romantic and sexual feelings for Goldman. If Goldman had a lesbian affair with Sperry, she did not acknowledge this in her own autobiography nor theorize its importance in terms of her own divergence from heterosexual norms. Goldman did, however, openly support homosexual desire and the free expression of sexuality.

5. ‘Without a history, political movements like ours swing back and forth endlessly, reacting to earlier mistakes and overreacting in compensation, unable to incorporate previous insights and transcend previous limitations’ (Du Bois and Gordon, 1983: 8). For an historical perspective on the debates surrounding sexuality in Emma Goldman’s time, see Du Bois and Gordon.

6. Women in the American suffrage movement exhibited a wide range of political perspectives on the singular importance of the vote over the 75 years they struggled to achieve their goal. Even Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the early pioneers, differed regarding women’s rights beyond suffrage. For a fascinating discussion regarding how personal circumstances and family backgrounds may have affected these women’s political perspectives, see A. Rossi, 1995.

7. This was more acute since many of the anarchist colleagues whom Goldman most respected, Berkman included, did not feel that Reitman was

318 Feminist Theory 4(3)

politically committed to the cause and treated him as peripheral, merely Emma’s lover.

8. Margaret S. Marsh notes that Voltairine de Cleyre, an anarchist feminist and friend of Emma Goldman’s, ended an important relationship because she felt unable to conquer her possessiveness (Marsh, 1981: 172).

References Ackelsberg, M. (1991) Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for

the Emancipation of Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Berlant, L. (2000) ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’, pp. 1–9 in L. Berlant Intimacy.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cook, B. Weisen (1977) ‘Female Support Networks and Political Activism:

Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman’, Chrysalis 3: 43–61. Cornell, D. (1998) At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Du Bois, E. and L. Gordon (1983) ‘Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century

Feminist Sexual Thought’, Feminist Studies 9(1): 7–25. Evans, S. (1997) Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York:

Free Press. Falk, C. (1990) Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ferguson, A. (1995) ‘Feminist Communities and Moral Revolution’,

pp. 367–97 in P. Weiss (ed.) Feminism and Community. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Goldman, E. (1970 [1923]) My Disillusionment in Russia. New York: Thomas Crowell.

Goldman, E. (1969a) ‘The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation’, pp. 211–25 in E. Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.

Goldman, E. (1969b) ‘Anarchism: What it Really Stands for’, pp. 47–67 in E. Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.

Goldman, E. (1969c) ‘Marriage and Love’, pp. 227–39 in E. Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.

Goldman, E. (1969d) ‘Woman Suffrage’, pp. 195–211 in E. Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.

Goldman, E. (1969e) ‘The Drama: A Powerful Disseminator of Radical Thought’, pp. 241–71 in E. Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Dover.

Goldman, E. (1970a) Living My Life, Volume I. New York: Dover. Goldman, E. (1970b) Living My Life, Volume II. New York: Dover. Goldman, E. (1975) in R. and A. Drinnon (eds) Nowhere at Home: Letters from

Exile of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. New York: Schocken Books.

Goldman, E. (1981) ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom’, Feminist Studies 7(1): 112–33.

Goldman, E. (1987) The Social Significance of Modern Drama. London: Applause Theatre Books.

Goldman, E. (1998) ‘Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure’, pp. 214–21 in A. Kates Shulman (ed.) Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader. Amherst, MA: Humanity Books.

Goldman, E. (2001) ‘Letters to Ben Reitman, 1909–1919’, pp. 97–101 in

Marso: A feminist search for love 319

S. Ostrov Weisser (ed.) Women and Romance: A Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Jackson, S. (2001) ‘Love and Romance as Objects of Feminist Knowledge’, pp. 254–64 in S. Ostrov Weisser (ed.) Women and Romance: A Reader. New York: New York University Press.

Katz, J. (1992) ‘Almeda Sperry to Emma Goldman: Letters’, pp. 523–9 in J. Katz Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA. New York: Penguin.

Kollantai, A. (1972) ‘Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle’ and ‘Love and the New Morality’ (trans. and intro. Alix Holt Montpelier). Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Marsh, M. (1981) Anarchist Women, 1870–1920. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Rossi, A. (1995) ‘A Feminist Friendship: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’, pp. 45–60 in M.S. Wheeler (ed.) One Woman, One Vote. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press.

Trimberger, E. (1983) ‘Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925’, pp. 131–52 in A. Snitow, C. Stansell and S. Thompson (eds) Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Ware, S. (2002) Modern American Women: A Documentary History of New York. New York: McGraw Hill.

Wexler, A. (1981) ‘Afterword’, Feminist Studies 7(1). Wheeler, M., ed. (1995) One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman

Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press. Wollstonecraft, M. (1979) ‘Letter to Gilbert Imlay, December 1794’, pp. 272–3

in R. Wardle (ed.) Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lori Jo Marso is the author of (Un)Manly Citizens: J.J. Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Marso teaches feminist and political thought at Union College in New York. She is currently finishing a book entitled Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity which explores the lives and work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, Emma Goldman and Simone de Beauvoir.

Address: Department of Political Science, Union College, Schenectady, New York, USA 12308. Email: [email protected]

320 Feminist Theory 4(3)