Tongue of Fire

Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question

Donna M. Kowal

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438459752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Women's Studies category
Winner of the 2017 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association In this book, Donna M. Kowal examines the speeches and writings of the "Most Dangerous Woman in the World" within the context of shifting gender roles in early twentieth-century America. As the notorious leader of the American anarchist movement, Emma Goldman captured newspaper headlines across the country as she urged audiences to reject authority and aspire for individual autonomy. A public woman in a time when to be public and a woman was a paradox, Goldman spoke and wrote openly about distinctly private matters, including sexuality, free love, and birth control. Recognizing women's bodies as a site of struggle for autonomy, she created a discursive space for women to engage in the public sphere and act as sexual agents. In turn, her ideas contributed to the rise of a feminist consciousness that recognized the personal as political and rejected dualistic notions of gender and sex.

1

Anarchist Women and the “Sex Question”

The question of souls is old—we demand our bodies, now. We are tired of promises, God is deaf, and his church is our worst enemy.

—Voltairine de Cleyre, “Sex Slavery,” 1890

I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.

—Emma Goldman, “Marriage,” 1897

“The Sex Question,” also known as “The Woman Question,” implies a sense of epistemic uncertainty about the nature of womanhood, or the “proper” place of women in society. Introduced in Europe and debated throughout late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, the question was part of an international dialogue in response to the social unrest that was evident among a growing number of women who began to challenge the notion that their sphere of influence was “naturally” limited to the roles of sweetheart, wife, and mother. Far from being singular in focus, the sex question pointed to an array of questions about whether (or to what extent) the bodies women occupy should delineate their rights and participation in public life, including questions about voting rights, access to higher education and professional employment, and the freedom to make choices about interpersonal relationships, marriage, and childbirth independently of the influence of men. Embedded within a dialectical discourse of femininity and masculinity, these debates, in turn, reinforced the nature of manhood and masculine roles. Of course, the prevailing definition of manhood was perceived to be that which women were not: rational, intellectual, independent, capable of fulfilling civic duties, productive in supporting the family and society, sexually dominant, and physically powerful.

Questions about women’s sphere of influence were a product of the consciousness-raising efforts of the early women’s movement both in the United States and abroad. These questions were further shaped by responses to Charles Darwin’s arguments on human evolution and natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859) and John Stuart Mill’s rejection of social and legal inequality in The Subjection of Women (1869). Darwin’s controversial book fueled disputes that centered on the philosophical tensions among social, biological, and divine determinism, while Mill’s essay attacked the notion that women are naturally inferior to men. Are femininity and masculinity based on innate and biological traits or are they products of socialization and environment? Is the basic family structure in the form of a father and mother with children natural and divined by God or is it socially constructed (and therefore subject to change)? Is it possible and appropriate for a woman to make a contribution to society beyond her natural and God-given role as mother and wife? Could a woman receive an education equivalent to that of a man, participate in civic affairs, and live independently of a male authority figure? Would such behaviors violate what was seen as the natural place of women in the home and in the church? These were among the sex questions that were debated at the turn of the century by suffragists, progressives, scientists, Christians, and others; however, anarchist women took these debates even further by focusing literally on sex—that is, sex as a bodily pleasure and mode of human expression—and by questioning the binary opposition of “woman” and “man,” “feminine” and “masculine.” Questions about enfranchisement and access to participation in public institutions were, after all, irrelevant for anarchists, who understood the political and economic system to be inherently corrupt. Anarchists largely rejected all forms of institutionalized power.

Anarchist women asked questions that were broad in scope and transcended any proposals for social and legal reform. They aimed to realize individual and collective freedom beyond rights and privileges sanctioned by the power of the state. What does it mean to be truly free? What role do human relationships play in aspiring toward a free society? How do biological and social aspects of human beings influence interpersonal relationships? What is the role of sexuality in achieving fulfilling relationships? What are the possible ways in which sexual fulfillment can be achieved? What are the connections between economic freedom, sexual freedom, and individual self-realization? Can women have a home and a family and still be free? What knowledge and resources do women need to care for their own bodies and make decisions about sex and reproduction? What social and economic conditions are necessary in order for both women and men to achieve equality, freedom, and self-realization? These are the sex questions that were raised by Emma Goldman and her contemporaries; and they are questions that continue to be asked today as evidenced in a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first century debates that center on equality and sexuality, including issues such as equal pay in the work place, access to birth control and abortion, availability of parental leave, the freedom for adults to engage in sexual intercourse without state intrusion, and the freedom to engage in same-sex relationships and receive equal recognition of domestic partnerships and marriages. Whether within the context of the nineteenth-century cult of female domesticity or present-day patriarchal hegemony, the persistent questioning of gender equality and sexual freedom reveals how the constitutive discourses of propriety and power concerning women’s bodies have adapted to the historically specific needs of economic and political spheres of influence.

In this chapter, I examine how a collective of female anarchists at the turn of the century interrogated the sex question.1 Although the two terms were employed interchangeably, I use the term “sex question” instead of “woman question” because when anarchist women addressed sexual freedom and women’s liberation, they called attention to how women’s power over their own bodies was at stake. Utilizing the spoken and written word as well as acts of protest to disseminate their ideas, anarchist women threatened the gendered separation of spheres by their critiques of economic privilege, labor exploitation, and feminine gentility and piety. Among anarchist-feminist activists, Goldman enjoyed the greatest access to audiences. During her career in the United States, which spanned from 1889, the year she moved to New York City, to 1919, the year she was deported, she spoke to large audiences in lecture halls and public squares across the country; and on at least one occasion she even spoke from a pulpit. As an immigrant, Goldman spoke English as a second language. She delivered some of her early lectures in Russian, German, and Yiddish, and in later years she was able to speak in Italian and French. Some of her lectures were free, while others required an admission charge of about twenty-five cents. Smaller, impromptu audiences occasionally formed around her in saloons. She primarily addressed “promiscuous audiences”2—that is, crowds consisting of both men and women—with the goal of promoting anarchism to the masses, although occasionally she sought female-only audiences for select topics such as birth control. As she developed into a national public figure, her audience widened to artists interested in exploring unconventional forms of self-expression3 and spectacle-seekers who wanted to see in person this “High Priestess of Anarchy.” Government reports and newspaper articles indicate that it was not unusual for Goldman to draw a crowd of five hundred to eight hundred people to hear her speak. Chapter 5 thus examines the media sensationalism of this avowedly public woman, touted by tabloid-style newspapers across the country as “Red Emma, Queen of Anarchists.” Goldman’s prominence among anarchists, writes Margaret Marsh, is largely due to “her wide-ranging propaganda efforts that reached well beyond the confines of the anarchist movement.4 And her popular appeal is especially noteworthy in the context of a male-dominated movement.

Anarchist women led unconventional lifestyles that signaled the rise of an economically and sexually independent “New Woman.” Anarchist women rejected institutionalized authority in all its forms; and their philosophical ideas and rhetorical practices, which were not uniformly shared, led to the formation of a radical counterpublic that was situated in opposition to not only the public, as an extension of the state, but reformers and radicals who were not willing to go as far in attacking the root causes of oppression. In this analysis of the contributions of Goldman, a central figure of the anarchist-feminist counterpublic, it is crucial to begin by understanding the sociopolitical context in which some women were drawn to anarchism as the only viable solution to the conditions of capitalism.

EMERGENCE OF AN ANARCHIST-FEMINIST COUNTERPUBLIC

For over two decades, theories about the nature of the public sphere have been analyzed, challenged, and amended, especially in response to Jürgen Habermas’s (1989) influential theory in which he distinguishes the public as a space that “mediat[es] between state and society, a sphere in which the public as the vehicle of opinion is formed.”5 The constitution of the public realm has historically been understood to be shaped by the gender dichotomy that associates public affairs with masculinity (deliberating with the rational mind) and private matters with femininity, and, in particular, domesticity and reproduction (engaging the emotions and the body).6 In this regard, Judith Butler and Elizabeth Weed (2011) write, “gender is operating to help in the very definition and historical production of major dimensions of social and political life, including labor, class, politics, and rights.”7 The perceived division of these two discrete spheres is thus complicated by the “interweaving of gender, labor, and publicness.”8 Employing a singular construct of the public (and by implication the private sphere) has ideological implications that risk the exclusion of women and marginalized groups and the issues that matter to them in gaining a public hearing. Indeed, women of all classes and ethnicities, working-class people, people of color, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people share in a history of exclusion from Habermas’s bourgeois public. As an alternative, Michael Warner (2002) conceptualizes a three-part construction of the public as a “social totality,” a “concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space,” and as a “self-creating and self-organized” relationship among strangers.9 Additionally, Warner, along with Rita Felski (1989) and Nancy Fraser (1992), among others, has argued for the necessity of recognizing a plurality of publics, and, most notably, counterpublics that exist as sites of oppositional discourse.10

A counterpublic is a discursive (and sometimes physical) sphere of social influence that is generated by the collective speech and action of a subaltern group. Counterpublics are not fixed, discrete entities but rather they have borders that shift and overlap with one another as well as with the dominant public sphere. Subaltern counterpublics, as defined by Fraser, function as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourse to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”11 Furthermore, as Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (2001) contend, “Counterpublic spheres voice oppositional needs and values not by appealing to the universality of the bourgeois public but by affirming specificity of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or some other axis of difference.”12 Therefore, whereas Habermas’s bourgeois public brings together private individuals to engage in rational dialogue on public issues, thereby excluding private or domestic matters such as intimate relationships and family, counterpublics provide a space to deliberate openly about gender, sexuality, and other private affairs—and they may do so in a way that is not necessarily rational nor in service to hegemonic notions of the public good. The early anarchist movement in the United States was a dynamic “bodily habitus” that intersected multiple publics through the participation of women and men, immigrants, laborers, intellectuals, progressives, and radicals.13 The anarchist-feminist counterpublic was formed through the experiences of radical women whose interests were not adequately supported or represented by their male comrades.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the exclusion of women from public affairs was evidenced in the discourses of legal, political, economic, social, and religious institutions.14 Political disenfranchisement prevented women from influencing the policies that affected their quality of life, and economic disenfranchisement in some states prohibited them from owning property, controlling wages, and forming business contracts. Social and religious norms delimited women’s influence principally to the private sphere and obliged them to carry out domestic duties “appropriate” to their sex by demonstrating the virtuous qualities of piety and submissiveness—especially in the case of white, middle-class women who were not expected to work outside the home and contribute to household earnings.15 Poor women, who had no choice but to work in factories, farms, mills, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Anarchist Women and the “Sex Question”
• 2 Bodies That Love: Emma Goldman’s Sexual Revolution
• 3 Sex, Labor, and the Public Sphere
• 4 “Tongue of Fire”: A Radical Subjectivity
• 5 Framing “The High Priestess of Anarchy”
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover