Living My Life - Emma Goldman [10]
While Freud’s lectures had provided the illuminating moment when she understood the harmful effects of sexual repression, her work on the Lower East Side taught her the necessity of birth control. Marriage itself she understood, as did all anarchists, Marxists, and nineteenth-century free-love advocates, as an “economic arrangement,” an “insurance pact” for women, although for many a vastly unsatisfactory one. Marriage, “that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed,” had little to do with love, but alas much to do with the misery of woman’s condition in poverty and the ill health of so many of her children (ibid., 236).
Because Goldman had herself refused an operation that would have permitted her to bear a child, she entered into love affairs with a freedom from fear of unwanted pregnancies that most women did not enjoy. As a nurse and midwife practicing in the tenements of the Lower East Side, she recalled the misery of the squalid rooms in which a woman labored, often with “sickly and ill-nourished,” “ill-born, ill-kept, and unwashed” children trailing at her feet as she helped “another poor creature into the world” (Living My Life, 121). One progressive physician’s opinion that as woman used her brains more, “her procreative organs will function less,” did not ease the anguish of ceaseless childbirth. “I saw,” Goldman wrote, “that it was mockery to expect them to wait until the social revolution arrives in order to right injustice” (ibid., 127).
Goldman’s nursing work was not confined to the desperately poor living in Lower East Side tenements. As her professional work grew, she addressed physical complaints of unmarried middle-class women as well, many of whom were self-supporting and in principle freed from the economic dependency of conventional marriage. From these women and what she understood as their enforced celibacy, Goldman derived what she called the “tragedy of women’s emancipation,” a tragedy she believed began in their stunted and repressed sexual lives. Emancipation for women, as she imagined such liberation, would follow not access to the ballot box but resistance to all forms of prejudice, convention, and authority that thwarted individual liberty.
As an anarchist Goldman was not an advocate of woman suffrage. She considered the ballot a dubious privilege, its having led to no discernible improvement in the lives of women or workers in the few states where voting was extended to women. She called universal suffrage “our modern fetish” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 195), “an evil that enslaves people,” “the new idol” (ibid., 197), and was frankly contemptuous of the American woman’s suffrage movement, which she called “a parlor affair absolutely detached from the needs of the people.” In fact, debased by dependency, corrupted by puritanism into another Mrs. Grundy, the American woman, Goldman believed, was a “danger to liberty wherever she has political power” (ibid., 204): disenfranchising prostitutes in Idaho (ibid., 203), an enemy of free speech in a prudish support of the Comstock laws, and a supporter of Prohibition “which sanctions the spread of drunkenness among men and women of the rich class and yet keeps vigilant watch on the only place left to the poor man” (ibid., 204).
Goldman was impressed with the work of only a “handful of women” in the women’s rights movement, a few lone individuals who issued a manifesto called the Declaration of Sentiments at a Conference in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, a manifesto that had opened higher education and professional life to women. Goldman accepted that the “main evil today is an economic one,” but she added that