WOMEN´S RIGHTS
I demand the independence of woman," Goldman wrote in 1897, "her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases." Unlike many turn-of-the-century anarchists, who believed that any problems faced by women would simply disappear when anarchism ushered in a new society, Goldman worked from the conviction that women labored under distinct disabilities, which had distinct causes.
Throughout her career, Goldman addressed the need for the economic, social and sexual emancipation of women. According to her, the patriarchal family, sexual and reproductive repression, and financial difficulties all contributed to women's inferior status and prevented the full flowering of their individuality. Marriage, in her opinion, was simply a legalized form of prostitution, in which women traded sex for economic and social standing. Convinced that enforced childbearing further eroded women's economic and sexual autonomy, she became a prominent figure in the struggle for free access to birth control.
Goldman's determination to speak out on her controversial views on sexual and reproductive freedom led to frequent arrests. It also brought her into conflict with the mainstream women's movement, which she saw as conservative and benefiting primarily the middle class. Goldman opposed the contemporary fight for women's suffrage and efforts to open professional careers to women, believing they would result at best in the illusion of improvements to a fundamentally corrupt system. To her, these causes were mere distractions from deeper, more important internal struggles. "[Woman's] development, her freedom, her independence," she claimed, "must come from and through herself. First by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body;... by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc.... By freeing herself from the fear of the public opinion and the public condemnation."
SEX & LOVE
Unlike some of her comrades, whose radical politics were matched by often conventional private lives, Goldman believed individuals should enter into and leave personal relationships with no constraints, a view determined by both her commitment to the principle of absolute freedom and her own disappointing experience of marriage. "If I ever love a man again," she said in 1889, "I will give myself to him without being bound by the rabbi or the law, and when that love dies, I will leave without permission."
Goldman applied her ideas about free love consistently to women and men, homosexuals and heterosexuals. Her advocacy of homosexual rights earned her opposition even from some within the anarchist community, who believed such an unpopular position would only heighten hostility toward the anarchist movement. As usual, Goldman was as ready to defy her own comrades as her political adversaries.
Believing that love and sexuality were crucial to personal and professional fulfillment, Goldman engaged in numerous passionate affairs throughout her life. Her first important relationship was with her life-long comrade, Alexander Berkman; her longest and most torrid affair was with her manager, Ben Reitman, who aroused a sense of her own sexuality that at times overwhelmed her rational, analytic side. "You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood," she wrote to him. "[A]ll the passion that was unsatisfied in me for so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea."
Goldman cycled often between the energy, excitement and ecstasy that accompanied a new affair and the despair and hopelessness she experienced when the relationship failed to live up to her expectations. Despite her commitment to free love, Goldman was unable to overcome desperate feelings of jealousy, and she had trouble reconciling her public image as a strong, independent woman with the insecurity and pain men caused her. "[T]he world would stand aghast," she commented, "that I,...the strong revolutionist,...should have been as helpless as a shipwrecked crew on a foaming ocean."
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