Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896-1926

Description

For Emma Goldman, the “High Priestess of Anarchy,” anarchism was “a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions,” but “the most elemental force in human life” was something still more basic and vital: sex. “The Sex Question” emerged for Goldman in multiple contexts, and we find her addressing it in writing on subjects as varied as women’s suffrage, “free love,” birth control, the “New Woman,” homosexuality, marriage, love, and literature. It was at once a political question, an economic question, a question of morality, and a question of social relations. But her analysis of that most elemental force remained fragmentary, scattered across numerous published (and unpublished) works and conditioned by numerous contexts. Anarchy and the Sex Question draws together the most important of those scattered sources, uniting both familiar essays and archival material, in an attempt to recreate the great work on sex that Emma Goldman might have given us. In the process, it sheds light on Goldman’s place in the history of feminism. Contents......Page 6 "Let Us Not Overlook Vital Things": A Few Words of Introduction by Shawn P. Wilbur......Page 8 1. Anarchy and the Sex Question (1896)......Page 22 2. What Is There in Anarchy for Women? (1897)......Page 27 3. The New Woman: An Address by Emma Goldman before the Liberal Progressive Society, of Providence, R.I. (1898)......Page 32 4. The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation (1906)......Page 34 5. The White Slave Traffic (1910)......Page 43 6. Woman Suffrage (1910)......Page 52 7. Marriage and Love (1910)......Page 65 8. The Hypocrisy of Puritanism (1910)......Page 75 9. Mary Wollstonecraft, Her Tragic Life and Her Passionate Struggle for Freedom (1911)......Page 83 10. Jealousy: Causes and a Possible Cure (ca. 1912)......Page 93 11. Victims of Morality (1913)......Page 101 12. The Social Aspects of Birth Control (1916)......Page 108 13. Again the Birth Control Agitation (1916)......Page 116 14. The Woman Suffrage Chameleon (1917)......Page 120 15. Louise Michel (1923)......Page 124 16. Emma's Love Views (1926)......Page 137 17. Feminism's Fight Not in Vain (1926)......Page 140 18. The Element of Sex in Life (excerpts)......Page 143 Sources......Page 155