Living My Life - Emma Goldman [11]
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; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. (Anarchism and Other Essays, 211)
With sexuality no longer confined to a private realm but instead shaped and constrained by social conventions and institutions, Goldman argued that sexual liberation must ultimately challenge and transform church and state, the very edifices that protect sexual repression (Haaland 136). As the attentats of bullet and bomb might injure and humiliate authorities, so too individual acts of flouting sexual conventions might undermine state institutions. Goldman insists vehemently that anarchism engages “every phase” (Anarchism and Other Essays, xiii), the “internal” as well as the “external,” and that the liberation of sexual repression could be a “force hitherto unknown in the world” (ibid., 211).
4. “EVERYBODY’S RIGHT TO BEAUTIFUL, RADIANT THINGS”—AESTHETICISM AND MODERN DRAMA
During the early years of the twentieth century, Emma Goldman became a popular lecturer, welcomed to venues of middle-class respectability like the Manhattan Liberal Club and the Brooklyn Philosophical Society, where she spoke to audiences considerably different from the crowds of workers who hurrahed her impromptu speeches from carts in Union Square or crowded into the back rooms of Lower East Side cafés. To be sure, some of her radical political comrades were suspicious of her willingness to carry her message into the more respectable venues of the liberal middle class. Communist leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for example, reflecting on this period, wrote that “As long as Emma Goldman spoke to poor people in the small halls with sawdust on the floor there was an agitational vibrance in her speeches,” a vibrancy Flynn found missing when Goldman became “the idol of middle-class liberals” (50).
Goldman intended, however, to carry her message—anarchism, birth control, free love, free speech—into the American mainstream. She had gone through a period of anguish and depression following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. When she was falsely accused of assisting the assassin Czolgosz, Goldman was hunted down, bloodied by police, and briefly jailed. Alone among her anarchist comrades she sympathized with the young anarchist Czolgosz, whom she had briefly met; and she was stunned when Berkman wrote to her from prison that Czolgosz’s act had been ill conceived, directed mistakenly against a political foe rather than an economic one, an attentat therefore, without any social importance. Years later Goldman and Berkman, reliving their American activism while in exile in Europe, were still quarreling over Berkman’s response to Czolgosz, whom Goldman regarded as a well-intentioned unfortunate (Nowhere at Home, 95). Goldman defended the “Buffalo tragedy” in her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence,” again disavowing the political effectiveness of violence but ascribing the greater violence to those conditions that led such tortured young men as Czolgosz to act. “Poor Leon Czolgosz,” she wrote, “... your crime consisted of too sensitive a social consciousness. Unlike your idealless and brainless American brothers, your ideals soared above the belly and the bank account” (Anarchism and Other Essays, 90). As for Alexander Berkman, it was “the brutal slaughter