Woman of Valor (11 page)

Bill grew increasingly jealous of Margaret's time away from home and intensely suspicious of her collegiality with such free spirits as Haywood, Tresca, and Reed. One of her early articles in
The Call
betrayed growing problems in their marriage with its utter contempt for any man who championed the liberation of an entire class, while his own wife remained enchained to a domestic servitude. “Most radicals are stirred by the Socialist call to the workers to revolt from wage-slavery, but they are unmoved by the Socialist call to women to revolt from sex slavery,” she wrote with an abrupt and startling authority in her prose. “They are still too oversexed, too tainted with the sins of their fathers, to be able to look upon women's claims as their own.” She soon discovered, however, that most of her new political associates were hardly less chauvinistic in their attitudes toward women than her own husband. Joining Haywood at a rally in Paterson, for example, she spoke passionately about a woman's right to limit her family, yet he followed with a rosy picture of the “economic commonwealth of the future” where women “could have without fear of want all the babies they pleased.” A sister organizer in the audience remembered feeling totally insulted.
¹⁰

Deeply moved by the physical hardship endured by the women and children of the Lower East Side and in Lawrence and Paterson, Margaret came to resent what she saw as the narrow focus of the radicals on economic gains for a predominantly male work force. If Socialists and unionists had failed to organize women workers, the Wobblies were compounding the error by ignoring the special needs of mothers and homemakers. “They were failing to consider the quality of life itself,” she later recalled. The theme, of course, recapitulated the drama of her own childhood with a father whose lofty principles never translated into comforts for his own wife and children.
¹¹

Yet however personally she felt these grievances, Margaret quite clearly adopted her feminist ideology, and much of the rhetoric she later claimed as her own, from Emma Goldman. Disenchantment with masculine reasoning and with the organized initiatives of male radicals and labor activists drew both women inexorably to an anarchist faith in individual renewal, but it was Goldman who first fused a concern for economic and social justice with bold issues of personal liberation. In a sweeping vision that freed working people from cultural conformity as well as from economic tyranny, she made enemies of both capitalism and Comstockery. Unlike the far more publicly demure Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Goldman never felt compelled to hide her own personal flamboyance, in deference to the traditional social and religious beliefs of her still largely foreign-born constituency. Instead, she openly challenged more conventional comrades, who argued that the emancipation of women would have to await the coming of a totally new economic order, while, at the same time, she deliberately courted audiences of middle-class women whose lives may have been better endowed in a material sense, but were no less alienated in other respects.
¹²

 

Emma Goldman, perhaps more than any other prominent woman of her times, understood the perplexing psychological and sexual dimension of women's subordination in modern industrial culture. Until the early nineteenth century in Europe and America, households had typically been economic constellations, centered around the production of goods or services and often encompassing workers and servants. Men worked at home as farmers, artisans, and tradesmen, while women birthed and nurtured large numbers of children well into the final years of life. These were hardly asexual and emotionally austere environments, to be sure. Love and personal affection were valued, yet marriage, as often as not, was made to serve collective needs over individual ones, and personal behavior deferred to fundamental religious convictions—to the twin fears of divine retribution and community sanction that defined the prevailing world view.

By 1800, however, these cloistered worlds had begun to come apart. The revolutionary pamphlets of British freethinkers, French encyclopedists, and American nationalists had challenged not only the sovereignty of kings, but also the dictates of ministers and priests, and, along with them, the immutability of nature itself. Enlightened thinkers, whose ideas had achieved wide circulation, encouraged a higher level of achievement and control in all dimensions of human behavior. And the sudden shift in the demographic data of the period reflected that marriages were increasingly serving the objective of individual happiness over the traditional obligations of procreation and patronage. The custom of arranged couplings declined. Rates of premarital pregnancy and illegitimacy increased dramatically, and contraceptive information began to circulate, as a more democratic philosophy of family life encouraged the voluntary limitation of family size.
*
Traditional avenues for transmitting values and enforcing social discipline weakened further as established patterns gave way to the distinguishing features of modern life—the emergence of large-scale manufacturing, the commercialization of agriculture, the expansion of markets, the beginnings of mass migrations from Europe to America and from town to city. Universal public schooling brought widespread literacy, and along with it the possibility that reasoned, utilitarian arguments about social conduct could prevail over religious jeremiads. A buoyant commerce developed in secular tracts offering moral and practical advice on marriage and family life. Husband and wife were to marry on the basis of affection, rather than convenience or arrangement, and subject their relationships to the tension of heightened romantic expectation, he becoming the household's sole provider, she, governing at home with a scientifically disciplined attention to domestic organization, individual hygiene, nutrition, and psychology. Emphasis was to shift from the child's value as a producer of labor and lineage for his parents, to the parent's—and especially, the mother's—responsibility for the enrichment of the child. And with fewer children, the experience of parental love and discipline would shape individual expectations of social interaction and authority—the very attributes that inspired Friedrich Engels's derisive commentary on the bourgeois personality in London in 1848 and, later in the century, shaped Freud's disquieting ruminations on family dynamics.
¹³

This new ideology never challenged traditional assumptions of patriarchy, but in pursuing a goal of mutuality in marriage, it sanctified a separate, private sphere of influence for women and enhanced their status within it. Husband and wife were intended to serve complementary roles, he retaining authority for the family's economic life, she, protecting its heart and its soul, he moving ahead in the public world, she guarding the intimate and the private. Men were to be coarse, competitive, and aggressive, women, by contrast, pure, obedient, and passive, a dichotomy that rigorously barred women from politics and public life and explains why organized campaigns for women's rights and suffrage met with such formidable opposition.
¹⁴

These arrangements also fostered the unusually high degree of emotional anxiety and tension with which the middle-class Victorian cultures of England and America are so often identified. Small, closely knit families became economically sensible and socially desirable in environments that did not suit all temperaments or provide universal economic opportunity, as the experience of Michael and Anne Higgins so well demonstrates. And fewer children became an asset while contraceptive technology remained essentially primitive and unreliable, and while pregnancy still posed the possibility of an ordeal of pain and suffering. Under the circumstances, it became necessary to devalue sex itself and instead extol the superior virtues of metaphysical, romantic expressions of love and sentiment. Traditional stereotypes that viewed women as innately and powerfully sexual were abandoned in favor of more refined and delicate representations of femininity. Women were encouraged to be emotional and affectionate, but not physically passionate, a prescription for behavior that became heavily invested with the weighty authority of biological science, as physicians increased their control over popular beliefs and behavior and assigned to themselves, and to all men for that matter, the more powerful sex drive.
¹⁵

Few could live contentedly by these rules. Moral and social standards constitute ideals of conduct, not accurate descriptions of behavior. No culture can be expected to produce unanimous agreement on what constitutes the correct relationship between men and women, no less between personal aspiration and sexual expression, and the nineteenth century obviously produced its share of individuals unwilling or just unable to subscribe to the rigidities and repression that its children, long since Margaret Sanger, have so casually ascribed to the era.
*

Yet women, with rare exception, were expected to remain chaste outside marriage, and even within it, to practice a degree of restraint sufficient to realize the generally agreed-upon objectives of smaller families, emotional cohesion, and economic mobility. And as a result, many who could afford to do so simply took to bed, finding refuge from their discontents in the neurasthenic ailments and other hysterical complaints that doctors of the era widely condoned as reasonable behavior. Others rid themselves of tension at the sanitaria, water cure establishments, and other such retreats that proliferated in this era. Still more stayed home and got high on the opiates that circulated freely as the principal ingredients of household tonics sold by mail order and in neighborhood pharmacies. Many educated women also began to reject marriage outright, refusing to subject themselves to its potential degradation. In larger numbers than ever before or since, they remained single and worked as servants or secretaries, like Margaret's own sisters or, in the more fortunate circumstances of many of the reformers and suffragists, pursued professional openings to women in fields such as education, medicine, and social work. Poor women, meanwhile, who had neither the chance to conform to middle-class habits of discipline, nor the luxury to reject them, often taught their children bourgeois manners nevertheless, and in the process, as Margaret's story again so poignantly demonstrates, subverted the legitimate economic grievances of their fathers. Many of those children then themselves rebelled.
¹⁶

 

Foremost among the rebels was Goldman, a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Despairing of the possibility of collective political action to achieve social change, Goldman narrowed her strategy to the elusive realm of the personal and individual will to act. By 1910, she had proclaimed herself an anarchist, declaring that true emancipation for women would only begin in achieving liberation from within, not in breaking down institutional barriers to achievement, such as suffrage. “[Woman's] development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself,” she later wrote. “First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them, by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer.”
¹⁷

Considerably gifted as a speaker and writer, Goldman disseminated her revolutionary ideas on politics, sexuality, and culture through lectures, articles, and books. Her well-read journal,
Mother Earth
, along with
Anarchism and Other Essays
, a distillation of her best lectures published in 1910, provided a rationale for the libertarian attitudes toward love and marriage that became so fashionable in bohemia. In reality, Goldman was personally tormented by her own subordination to her lover and manager, the exploitative and philandering Ben Reitman. But as a philosophical matter, she stood firmly against any relationship that compromised a woman's independence, and she condemned repressive traditions of marriage and motherhood, institutions that existed, in her view, only to “subdue women's innate and powerful sexual cravings…undermine her health…make her dull…break her spirit…stunt her vision.” She demanded a thorough transformation of social and moral values—one that would transcend what she saw as the “artificial stiffness and narrow respectabilities” of issues of political and economic independence for women, extolled, on the one hand, by leading male radicals and, on the other, by such prominent advocates for women's rights as Susan B. Anthony and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Goldman's thinking gave intellectual weight to the confusion and self-doubt born of Margaret's own experience.
¹⁸

Just as important, Goldman introduced Margaret to a neo-Malthusian ideology then fashionable among European Socialists, who disputed Marxist orthodoxies that condemned contraception as hopelessly bourgeois and encouraged a high proletarian birthrate. They argued instead that women's control over reproduction was no less essential to the goals of a revolutionary class struggle than control over conditions of employment. After attending the historic meetings of the Socialist International in Paris at the turn of the century, where this ideology became conventional wisdom among the Europeans, Goldman returned to the United States and began to promote contraception in her own lectures. With only a handful of lesser known dissidents in this country, she dared to advance what were still considered socially incendiary ideas. She supported “voluntary motherhood,” for example, to serve the revolutionary goal of a “birth strike,” which would at once liberate women from the bondage of maternity and, at the same time, withhold the steady supply of human labor that fuels the industrial machine.

When the first scholarly history of contraception was published in 1938, it paid homage to Margaret Sanger's pioneering efforts in the field but never even mentioned Goldman. Ben Reitman immediately wrote the author, Norman Himes, and reminded him in mock epic verse: