Living My Life - Emma Goldman [8]
Goldman was drawn to notions of the individual capable of triumph in heroic combat with crushing authority. During her residence in 1895 in Vienna, where she studied nursing and midwifery, Goldman discovered the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher whom she described as hurling his anathemas against old values. Earlier, she admired the German philosopher Max Stirner’s notion of the paramount drive of individuals to seek their own self-interest, an “egoism” that positioned the fully free individuals in a permanent stance of resistance to that which threatens to thwart their will. Out of this conviction that the individual will is impelled by profound forces to assert its own needs, Emma Goldman explained the psychological conditions that result in political violence and the baleful effects of sexual repression. Convinced that a social revolution must be preceded by the education of the masses, Goldman ultimately laid the failure of the Russian revolution and progressive European and American political movements on the failure of the will of the masses to insist upon their own interests (Nowhere at Home, 82).
3. NO “DENIAL OF LIFE AND JOY”—SEXUAL LIBERATION AND AESTHETIC PASSION
As Emma Goldman folded the American individualist tradition into European anarchism, she also expanded the notion of the essential liberty of the autonomous individual—an anarchist axiom—to include the fundamental rights of sexual expression. Although anarchists urged equality between the sexes in their resistance to all forms of authoritarianism, in practice they were reluctant to spend their political capital advocating sexual freedom. When Emma Goldman became a spokesperson for birth control reform, sex education, and the free-love movement, ideas which she found in proselytizers like the American free-love advocate Moses Harman, not all anarchists were willing to share such platforms with her. At the international meeting in Paris in 1900 she was rebuffed by anarchists who would not allow her to add sexual freedom to their political agenda (Living My Life, 163).
To be sure, she had sensed a breach earlier between her understanding of her own desires and what she came to recognize as puritanism among her revolutionary comrades, a sexual puritanism that went hand in hand with a more general ascetic disdain for pleasure. Her own beloved Sasha, for example, had responded angrily to the extravagance of her taste for flowers. Another comrade reproached her for the vivacity of her dancing at a party following a political meeting, to which the young Goldman responded angrily: “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” (ibid., 42).
Challenged at such moments, Emma Goldman defended impulses in her own nature that seemed at once profound and immutable, but she was nonetheless troubled. Her response to aesthetic and physical pleasure seemed to yoke her to her own personal desires, while the more self-denying Sasha burned with an altruistic and purifying zeal. Comparing herself to her friend, Goldman wrote in her autobiography, “I was woven of many skeins, conflicting in shade and texture. 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” (ibid., 104).
In 1885 in Vienna, a city she found “fascinating,” “light-hearted,