DISCUSSION QUESTIONS PART I: TEMPERAMENT 1. Goldman’s speeches regularly brought thousands of people to listen—in fact, the crowds were so large that she sometimes needed to be driven through them on a cart, repeating her lectures. What is the relationship between speeches/orality and literature for a social movement? How did Goldman’s multiple venues of expression shape her public persona? Which do you think is the more effective mode of persuasion: the written or the spoken word? (This theme begins on p17, on lecturing in cafes) 2. Since her earliest appearance in the political arena, both her critics and comrades cast Goldman’s intellectual contributions as mere emotion. Goldman was an autodidact who probably lived with dyslexia, but despite these educational challenges, she became a prolific writer and reader. Yet reviews of her memoirs by male anarchists tended to emphasize her feelings over her thought: one review by the editor of a Yiddish anarchist paper, for example, decries that she arrived at her anarchist philosophy through her “passionate nature,” rather than through “scientific” political reasoning. Gornick argues in this vein that her personal capacity for feeling was “the core of Goldman’s radicalism: an impassioned faith, lodged in the nervous system, that feelings were everything. Radical politics for her was, in fact, the history of one’s own hurt, thwarted, humiliated feelings at the hands of institutionalized authority.” Gornick returns to this trope in the conclusion, writing: “Emma Goldman was not a thinker, she was an incarnation. It was not her gift for theory or analysis or even strategy that made her memorable; it was the extraordinary force of life in her that burned, without rest or respite, on behalf of human integrity. Hers was the sensibility not of the intellectual but of the artist…” How have your own experiences of life shaped your politics? Do you consider your intellectual development driven by your emotional experiences, or do you think those are two distinct processes? How is this idea of a split between intellect and emotion gendered? Do you draw a line between artist and intellectual?
PART II: IN THE LIFE 1. Gornick compares Goldman to the Weathermen. (p45) What other historical comparisons could be made between movements? 2. Goldman trained as a nurse in Vienna. (p53) She then practiced as a nurse in New York City for more than ten years. During that time, she valued medicine as a way to serve poor communities and support destitute women. There were many doctors among the anarchist movement, from the respected orator Dr. Hillel Solatoroff to the gynecologist and journalist Katherina Yevzerov Merison to Ben Reitman, who served sex workers in New York and Chicago. Do you think the labor of care is political? What is the role of (medical) care in social movements? (See also Cynthia Anne Connolly, “‘I am a trained nurse’: the nursing identity of anarchist and radical Emma Goldman,’ in Nursing History Review, 2010: 84-99.) 3. In Part One, Gornick writes, “Anarchism is itself a protean experience, as much a posture, an attitude, a frame of mind and spirit as it is a doctrine.” (4-5) In Part Two, she returns to this framing in her references to Kropotkin’s study of Darwin. (57-59) Radicals have argued against the perception of anarchism as utopian or “protean” for more than 150 years. Theorists from Pyotr Kropotkin to David Graeber and others strove to show that mutual aid was a scientific principle—indeed, a “factor of evolution.” They argued that anti-hierarchicalism is derived from principles of nature; they claimed support from their anthropological research of matriarchal and non-statist social 10
