Abstract
You might wonder upon seeing this title whether we really need another book on the well-known anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940), given the enormous number of books which have already been written by or about her. However, Clare Hemmings’ Considering Emma Goldman is not so much about Emma Goldman herself, but about how feminists have transformed her into a feminist icon, smoothing out her rough edges, forgiving her lapses, and using her for their own purposes. Very much in the spirit of her earlier work on the stories feminists tell (Hemmings, 2011), this book investigates feminist thinking on femininity, sexuality, race and feminist politics and forces the reader to confront the ambivalences in feminism today. It is a must-read, invariably insightful, sometimes painful, always provocative and, in my humble opinion, uncomfortably spot-on.
Hemmings takes up Emma Goldman as a figure who has inspired and continues to inspire feminist activists and scholars with her unconventional life and her passionate politics. A life-long advocate of free love, Goldman had many lovers, both male and female, was vehemently opposed to matrimony and what she called the drudgery of domestic life, and was a staunch supporter of birth control. As an internationally renowned anarchist, she held huge audiences all over the world in her thrall, speaking on the ills of capitalism and the necessity to place sexual politics at the heart of anarchist activism. Hers was a revolution in which joy and politics would go hand in hand and she reputedly countered the criticisms of comrades about her exuberant dancing with: ‘If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution’ (p. 218).
In her thoughtful and provocative consideration of the relevance of Goldman’s life and politics for contemporary feminist scholarship, Hemmings draws upon various ‘archives’: the subjective archive of Goldman herself (her autobiography, the letters she wrote to friends and comrades and the letters they wrote back to her); the critical archive of scholars engaged with Goldman’s life, politics and writings; the theoretical archive which is the feminist and queer project of the present (what counts as gender equality, sexual politics, the role of ‘race’); and the imaginative archive which looks for the gaps and fissures in the existing archive and tries to imagine – as she puts it – ‘a future grounded in a different past’ (p. 8). This fourth archive involves a creative effort by Hemming to imagine the correspondence between Emma Goldman and her lover, the fellow anarchist and union organizer Almeda Sperry (1912–1913). Goldman’s letters to Sperry were destroyed (whether by her own hand or not is unclear), but Sperry’s are on record, full of her desire and longing for Goldman and replete with steamy sexual references, passionate recriminations and jealous threats. Hemmings explores her own yearning for the missing letters and writes responses to Sperry’s letters by stepping into Goldman’s shoes and bringing to life ‘a sexual history in which [Goldman’s] ambivalence, same-sex passion and disgust, fear and bravery must have crafted the words she wrapped around Sperry’s heart’ (p. 36). This creative exercise enables Hemmings to re-envision both the past and the present in a way that embraces rather than glosses over the ambivalence of her heroine.
For, let there be no doubt: Emma Goldman has always been an ambivalent feminist heroine and in much of the archive, we can see her treading on many of contemporary feminism’s most cherished ideals. She repeatedly failed to live up to her own ideals; she was subservient in her relationships with men and her affairs were often fraught with jealousy and insecurity. She could be vicious in her critique of other women and berated them for their hypocrisy, their pettiness and their vanity. She felt nothing but scorn for the duplicity of females who conform to the norms of femininity in order to get what they want, while passively lamenting their lot (p. 49). Nor was she charitable in her assessment of feminists, referring to them as ‘dried-up’ suffragettes with no love in their lives who settled for too little (p. 49). In short, despite her unswerving support for women’s full participation in revolutionary politics, Goldman regularly distanced herself from other women, from the feminists of her day, and even from feminism itself.
If Goldman was conflicted about femininity, she was even more so about race. While she was aware of the oppressive conditions in which people of colour lived, she failed to theorize race or racism in any substantial way. Nor did she analyse the effects of slavery, preferring to treat it as a metaphor for all kinds of oppression (‘There are two kinds of slaves – one are scourged to their work by the whip; others by their ignorance’, p. 101). In her support of birth control for breeding ‘better’ families, she came perilously close to the eugenic thinking prevalent at the time. She would have had no sympathy with the identity politics which are popular today. Her political project entailed a deep humanism that treated all oppressed individuals equally and was aimed at the eradication of all forms of difference in the name of a new and revolutionary communitarianism (p. 105).
And, finally, while Goldman was a fervent advocate of sexual freedom, the centrality of passion, and alternatives to the family, she did not extend her analysis to include non-heterosexual pleasure and relationships as part of her alternative vision (p. 118). She expressed a belief that sexual drives and opposite sex attraction are a matter of ‘nature’ – something which feels disturbingly essentialist today. She was ambivalent in her support of homosexuals and conflicted about her own same-sex desires.
Contemporary feminists have struggled with these aspects of Goldman’s thought. In their desire to retrieve her as a feminist, they have tended to gloss over what they see as her failings. Excuses are provided along the lines that she did not always live up to her own ideals, something for which she should be forgiven (p. 57). Or scholars concerned about her inattention to race have described her politics as ‘intersectional’, pointing to her own experiences of multiple oppression as an immigrant, a Jew and a woman (p. 103). Others have used her passionate relationship with Almeda Sperry as proof of Goldman’s ‘queer-ness’.
Hemmings is uncomfortable with these attempts to white-wash Goldman. Despite her admiration of Goldman’s spunk and unconventionality, she does not go along with these attempts to smooth over those aspects of her life and thinking that do not fit our politics today. She finds it problematic that contemporary scholars insist that Goldman was a feminist when she herself consistently claimed that she was not. In her view, most feminist scholars entertain ambivalent feelings about femininity and, for that matter, about feminism themselves (as evidenced by the uneasy ‘I’m not a feminist, but …’, p. 65). Goldman’s inattention to and displacement of race and racism deserves critical attention without trying to retrieve her credibility as ‘intersectional feminist’ by emphasizing her ethnic background.
Instead, Hemmings makes a convincing case for a serious engagement with Goldman’s ambivalences about femininity, race and sexuality. The crux of her argument is that it is perhaps precisely Goldman’s critique of feminism that provides her most fundamental contribution to feminist history (p. 39). Hemmings views Goldman’s ambivalences as a source of inspiration for a different kind of politics – a politics which would attend to the ‘tenacity of our attachments to the objects that poison our lives’ (p. 6). This ‘politics of ambivalence’ – as she calls it – would not opt for the ‘correct line’, but rather would focus on the affective dimensions of feminist politics and the inevitable process of struggling and never quite reaching one’s goal. Ultimately, it is Goldman’s passion – a passion performed with panache – which ‘enables her to hold contradictions together without having to resolve them’ and to struggle for ‘her utopian dream despite frequent disappointment in politics and love’ (p. 218).
Passionate politics performed with panache. Could there be a more fitting project for contemporary feminism? I think not.