Living My Life - Emma Goldman [28]
The allure was particularly appealing to feminists in the 1970s, who could plausibly assign to Emma Goldman an early enunciation of the feminist doctrine that “the personal is political.” Goldman positioned her feminism within her anarchism, insisting that no woman’s freedom could be found by appealing to a state government for redress of grievance. But at the same time she redefined the male-centered anarchism she inherited by insisting that sexual liberation be included in its agenda. Insufficiently accredited as an original thinker, Emma Goldman in her battle against sexual repression in radical political thinking made an important contribution to twentieth-century political thought. Sexual liberation, on her terms, was not only a fundamental human right, it was foundational to the creativity necessary for social revolution itself. The flouting of repressive sexual taboos, found among the puritans of the left or right, was, she believed, a strategy for political change, an attentat to shock and humiliate authorities. Quite appropriately, a contemporary greeting card bearing her name records her challenge: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” These were not the words engraved on her tombstone at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago. But they might have been.
In 2003, when once again a military drumbeat was sounding in her adopted country, America, the words of that old anarchist warhorse Emma Goldman were stirred into life on the front pages of The New York Times. Apparently a letter to subscribers to the Emma Goldman Archive housed at the University of California at Berkeley included Goldman’s early-twentieth-century jeremiad against the impending slaughter. Underneath the letterhead of the university archive, her angry words rang out: those “not yet overcome by war madness [must] raise their voice of protest to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them.” Learning of the contents, the University of California vice chancellor for research took alarm and suppressed the letter; but front-page headlines in America’s foremost newspaper reported the story with its worrisome implications for the suppression of free speech. So doing, the newspaper gave Goldman’s jeremiad national coverage, a more powerful sounding board against, yet again, another war. Had she been granted prescience to foresee her twenty-first-century rebirth, she would have, as she had so many times, thanked those who wished to silence her for giving her voice so much more public notice than she might ever have achieved on her own.
Not much later, when the American hostilities broke out against Iraq, graffiti artists painted Goldman’s antiwar declarations on the cliffs above a San Francisco beach. There, where only the wind and tide might erase the words her pen preserved, Emma Goldman still hurled her own anathemas against the malignancies of indifferent states.
Works Cited
Berkman, Alexander. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. New
York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1912.
Chalberg, John. Emma Goldman: American Individualist.
New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. What Is to Be Done? (1863). Ann
Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Publishers, 1986.
Drinnon, Richard. Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma
Goldman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Duffus, R. L. “Review of Living My Life by Emma Goldman.”
The New York Times, October 25, 1931, p. 1.
“Emma Goldman.” The Nation 138 (March 21, 1934): 320.
Falk, Candace. Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. The Rebel Girl. New York: International
Publishers, 1955.
Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Essays. Edited by
Richard Drinnon. New York: Dover, 1969.
—. Emma Goldman, A Documentary History of the
American Years. Vol. 1, Made for America, 1890-1901.
Edited by Candace Falk, Barry Pateman, and Jessica Moran.
Berkeley: University of California Press,