Goldman, Emma (1869-1940)

Also known as “Red Emma,” Emma Goldman is much more than an anarchist who protested against the imperialist capitalism as a feminist lecturing on issues ranging from birth control to jealousy. An energetic lecturer rather than a reticent theoretician, Goldman spoke to the masses to challenge the prevailing ideas on marriage, free love, prostitution, and homosexuals.

At a time when the main target of bourgeois feminists was the right to vote, Goldman took revolutionary steps to transgress the narrow political boundaries and seek women's liberation within a wider arena. Against all governments, Goldman thought the vote would only mean improving a system that fosters the tools of victimization for women. Thus, she often attacked women professionals and suffragists both in her lectures and articles she wrote as the editor of the monthly journal Mother Earth. Her critique of the mainstream feminists can also be observed in her comparison of the educated women to the working-class girls whom she deemed less tainted by the suffocating social roles.

For Goldman, women's liberation begins in one's soul and only the liberated individuals can eradicate bourgeois values from their roots. To this end, Goldman showcased Nora of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a model who closed the door of her cage for freedom. Goldman's lecture “Marriage and Love” describes marriage as an insurance policy for women who practice dependence on men. Prisoners at its best, married women are sex objects sold like a piece of meat. In “Traffic in Women,” she concludes that if poverty tempts women into prostitution, then wives are prostitutes. Physical beauty is the only asset women are allowed to put on the market, so they see each other as rivals to further imprison themselves. Critical of bourgeois marriage, Goldman supported free love and the necessity of birth control. For her, motherhood was to remain a matter of free choice. The authorities of the time found such claims too bold, and short arrests following the special birth control issue of Mother Earth led to a final deportation from the United States to Russia, where she came from in 1886.

Her life is an emblem of the values she fervently supported; Goldman apparently enjoyed the capacity [Page 398]to create a new life out of practically nothing. Unlike most mainstream Communists of her era, Goldman believed that beautiful things are necessities, not luxuries. Her response to the disapproving comrades, “If I can't dance, it isn't my revolution!” became a motto. Her autobiography Living My Life, Martin Duberman's play Mother Earth, E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, and Warren Beatty's film Reds are the key sources to explore a life started in Lithuania as a middle-class member and ended in Toronto as a world citizen.