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

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

organization and zoological observation of how animals help each other survive. In “Modern Science and Anarchism” (1899), Kropotkin writes: “Anarchism is a conception of the Universe based on the mechanical interpretation of phenomena, which comprises the whole of Nature, including the life of human societies and their economic, political, and moral problems. Its method is that of natural sciences, and every conclusion it comes to must be verified by this method if it pretends to be scientific.”

What parts of your own worldview do you attribute to or are derived from science? Do you think it’s important to relate moral schema to principles from the natural world?

4. Gornick writes, “Emma Goldman was not a feminist; she was a sexual radical, which made her a supporter of birth control and a defender of sex without marriage but not a proponent of women’s rights as that term is generally understood.” (75) Some anarchists (such as Katherina Yevzerov Merison) were also part of the suffragist movement, while others like Goldman were emphatically not. Goldman writes:

Needless to say, I am not opposed to woman suffrage on the conventional ground that she is not equal to it. I see neither physical, psychological, nor mental reasons why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man. But that can not possibly blind me to the absurd notion that woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed. If she would not make things worse, she certainly could not make them better. To assume, therefore, that she would succeed in purifying something which is not susceptible of purification, is to credit her with supernatural powers. Since woman’s greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil, her true salvation lies in being placed on earth; namely, in being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes… As a matter of fact, the most advanced students of universal suffrage have come to realize that all existing systems of political power are absurd, and are completely inadequate to meet the pressing issues of life. (Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p106)

Why did Goldman oppose enfranchisement/citizenship as the standard of equality? How did she critique the arguments for universal suffrage in this passage? How do you define feminism? What do you think is the ideal relationship between feminism, law, and the state?

PART III: EXILE

1. Goldman and Berkman defended themselves in court, with Goldman speaking at length on the right to free speech and freedom of the press. (p95) Take a look at her newspaper, Mother Earth, for which she was prosecuted: https://libcom.org/library/mother-earth

Compare her literary and artistic taste with that of Margaret Anderson’s anarchist-Modernist Little Review: https://modjourn.org/journal/little-review/

How would you describe their overall style and Goldman’s aesthetic preferences as an editor? What is the role of art, graphics, and illustration for these anarchist papers? What struggles for a free press are taking place now?

2. Goldman entered the Missouri State Penitentiary in February 1918. (Section begins on 102) Gornick describes the comradeship and friendship she found with other women inmates there. Terence Kissack’s book Free Comrades, Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917 (AK Press, 2008) describes the support of Gilded Age anarchists for LGBT rights. Kissack notes that Berkman’s memoir described the relationships between men as “a form of resistance to the spirit-crushing environment of prison.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

3. This chapter discusses Goldman’s “disillusionment in Russia,” as she titled her book about those two years. While there, Goldman met with prominent figures, including Gorki, Lenin, Kropotkin, and representatives of Makhno. (Gorki, 112; Kronstat, 114) Goldman refers to the Revolution as “a kaleidoscope of Lenin’s compromises and betrayal of his own slogans.” She also witnessed Kropotkin’s mass funeral procession—the last anarchist gathering permitted by the Bolsheviks, before their full-throttle persecution of anarchists began. Goldman critiques Lenin’s crushing of the sailors at Kronstadt:

“On March 17th the Communist Government completed its ‘victory’ over the Kronstadt proletariat and on the 18th of March it commemorated the martyrs of the Paris Commune. It was apparent to all who were mute witnesses to the outrage committed by the Bolsheviki that the crime against Kronstadt was far more enormous than the slaughter of the Communards in 1871, for it was done in the name of the Social Revolution, in the name of the Socialist Republic. History will not be deceived. In the annals of the Russian Revolution the names of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Dibenko will be added to those of Thiers and Gallifet.”

Read Goldman’s statement on Kronstadt in full here:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch27.htm

Read Goldman’s statement on Kronstadt in full here:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1920s/disillusionment/ch27.htm

Watch documentary footage of Goldman and Berkman at Kropotkin’s funeral procession:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt4SFsmOvlk

PART IV: LEGACY

1. How did you first hear of Emma Goldman? Did you see her face on a T-shirt, or perhaps know someone named after her? What do you consider her legacy to be? Why do you think she still holds such fascination in the 21st Century?

2. In an interview about her recent book Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive, Clare Hemmings explains why she finds Goldman such a compelling figure for contemporary gender studies:

“One of the things that is very particular about Goldman, though not unique to her, was her interest, as an anarchist, in the centrality of what she described as sexual freedom to the idea of revolution. On the one hand, she was a mainstream anarchist: she was very popular, there were lots of press reports about her. On the other, she absolutely believed that women’s sexual oppression was central to why women and men did not develop as revolutionary political subjects. For her, one of the reasons why there hadn’t already been a revolution was because of women’s labour: going along with the easy route to prevent poverty and violence in their lives, women’s dependence on men made of them, as she put it, ‘parasitical subjects.’ For Goldman, the social institution of marriage is one of the key lynchpins through which capitalism and nationalism work. She viewed women as uniquely positioned as femininity reproduces capitalist dependencies, but also places women at the centre of revolutionary feeling due to their reproductive and unpaid domestic labour in the private sphere. So any account of revolution that doesn’t think you need to get rid of marriage and emancipate women sexually and emotionally cannot work. For her, you can’t wait until after revolution, because without women, there will be no revolution in any real way.” https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/03/19/authorinterview-considering-emma-goldman-with-professor-clare-hemmings/

Compare Gornick and Hemmings’ approaches to the role of sexuality in Goldman’s political philosophy. What do you think are the similarities and differences in how they relate to this figure?