Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  At first, she tried to make the best of it. Jacob was persuaded to go to the doctor. He returned with the charming news that if he was to be cured it was up to his wife “to build up his manhood.” Depression made her incapable of doing so even if she had known how. “The material anxiety of making ends meet,” she wrote, “excluded everything else. I had stopped work: it was considered a disgrace for a married woman to go to the shop.”16 They lived on Jacob’s fifteen dollars a week which would have been enough, with judicious management, if he had not taken to gambling. The talks about literature and the outings to dance halls stopped. The man Emma thought she had married disappeared. It was the kind of situation from which there was no possible escape and Emma saw herself being dragged further and further down. She recovered enough of her innate determination to put a stop to it the only way she knew – by insisting on a divorce. Her family were appalled. A divorcée in their community was a social leper. They begged her to stay with Jacob and threatened her with ostracism if she left him. But she was adamant. The same rabbi who married her divorced her and she promptly left Rochester for New Haven where she took another factory job. She made some congenial friends but unfortunately fell ill and had to take refuge with Helena who had just married.

  Almost as soon as she returned to Rochester she met Jacob in the street. He began to plead with her to marry him again, swearing things would be different. Dramatically, he produced a bottle of poison and said he would drink it if she did not agree. So she took the astonishing step of remarrying him, simply commenting, “I could not be responsible for his death.”17 She did not imagine he had really changed (“I was not naïve enough to think that a renewed life with Kershner would prove more satisfactory or lasting than the first”18) but she did not care. Marriage was a sham anyway. This being so, she might as well treat it as such. She was simply expressing her contempt for the institution. And yet, when she came to write about this episode in her autobiography, Emma was uneasily aware that her remarriage was hard to explain away. She did not usually plead indifference as a reason for positive action and her insistence that she was saving Jacob Kershner from suicide is curiously unconvincing. But at least she went into marriage for the second time more prepared than the first. Secretly, she took a course in dressmaking and saved to buy her own sewing-machine so that she could make her living without resorting to factory employment. What she intended to do, when she was ready, was to go off on her own to New York (presumably no longer worried about her husband’s suicide threats).

  Nowhere does she mention if Jacob remained impotent but since, soon after their remarriage, she refers to “the futility of a patched life” it seems likely that he was. After only three months she had had enough. There were “bitter recriminations” from her husband and parents when she announced she was leaving and that this time she would never come back. Only Helena was kind and loaned her money for her fare to New York. Off she went, swearing that “if I ever love a man again 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.”19

  August 15th, 1889, the day Emma Goldman arrived in New York, aged twenty, was a very hot day. The city was oppressive and stifling. But Emma, although suffocated by the atmosphere, felt a return of that same exhilaration which had buoyed her up on the original voyage from Russia. There was no rational basis for her excitement and optimism, considering that behind her she left a broken marriage and hostile parents and that nothing had gone right for her in the country from which she had expected so much, but she felt on the edge of “something new and wonderful.” She had discovered in herself “a great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself . . .” To what? To anarchism. She was to say later that she was an anarchist “of the Topsy variety – I was just born so” but in fact there had been specific reasons for her interest and also a specific starting point. It had all begun when she went with Helena on Sunday afternoons to meetings in a hall in Rochester. They had gone to alleviate boredom, to give themselves something to do apart from sit at home hearing “the ever lasting talk about money and business.” One day, Johanna Greie, a well known anarchist, came to speak about the case of the eight Chicago anarchists who were being tried for allegedly throwing a bomb which had killed six policemen. Emma had read about the case and was already passionately interested in what would happen but Johanna Greie convinced her not only that the eight men were innocent but that their work – calling for a strike among the steelworkers to secure an eight-hour day – must be continued. When, soon after this meeting, she heard that five of the anarchists had been hanged, her mind was made up. She would go to New York City, the centre of anarchist activity, and learn more about this movement to which she felt so irresistibly drawn. It was this mission which made her feel so expectant.

  For a girl of twenty to arrive in New York City virtually penniless announcing she wished to dedicate her life to anarchism, which she really knew nothing about, was nothing short of madness. But Emma Goldman had done with convention. She had tried to behave and live as a girl of her age and class was expected to and she had been repelled by the process. She had tried making her living the only way she was equipped to do so and had discovered it was nothing more than a form of slavery. She had tried marriage and discovered it was another. She saw clear evidence that her sex penalized her, that it disabled her so that she was fit for nothing but drudgery. She felt she had nothing to lose because it was absolutely plain that in her circumstances everything had been lost the moment she was born. What had been instinctive in her was not anarchism but feminism. She rejected outright her fate as a woman and by her decision to go to New York City and stand on her own she completed the first stage of her feminist education. It looked very much, on that day, as if it might end disastrously. She only had five dollars, a small bag with a few clothes and her precious sewing-machine, symbol of her independence, which she left in a locker on 42nd Street. She also had three addresses of people with whom she might stay while she found her feet. One was that of a married aunt, another of a student she had met during her short stay in New Haven after her divorce, and the third was that of the Freiheit offices (the German anarchist newspaper). She had no knowledge whatsoever of the layout of the city and could not speak more than a few words of English at that stage. Naturally, she had great difficulty locating any of the addresses. The aunt, when tracked down, gave her such a frigid welcome that Emma proudly rejected the grudging offer of a bed but the student restored her spirits by giving her a warm and genial invitation to stay as long as she wanted. More important, he took her that very evening to Sach’s café on Suffolk Street, the headquarters of the East Side radicals. There, he introduced her to the Minkin sisters, who were providentially looking for someone to share a flat, and also to Johann Most, the editor of Freiheit. The last introduction of significance was Alexander Berkman.

  This rapid acquaintance with such a different environment left Emma almost too happy to speak. Her instinct had been right – she was going to be among people who thought like herself, who shared her barely formed ideals and principles. The next day was even better. Alexander Berkman called on her, inviting her to visit the Freiheit office with him. She had greatly taken to this young man the night before and now liked what he told her about himself. He had been born, like her, in Russia, in 1870, but unlike her had gone to the St Petersburg Gymnasium. There he had been a brilliant student but was expelled for writing an essay entitled There is no God. He had arrived in New York in 1888 and instantly established himself in the anarchist circle. He took her along with him to the Freiheit office where Johann Most suggested that if she wanted to she could come along the following week and help to bring the paper out. Emma went, proved diligent and a quick learner, and was taken out to dinner as a reward. Meanwhile, she had started work (which she hoped would only be temporary) in yet another corset factory and found a place to live with the Minkin sisters not far from Sachs’s café. Life was moving alm
ost too fast. It hardly mattered that she was still working a long, monotonous, poorly paid factory day because of what there was to look forward to in her free time. She had real friends, endless stimulating discussions with them, the social life she had dreamed of in Sachs’s café, and a niche in the Freiheit office doing “real” work which might lead to other worthwhile things. One of the things it did lead to was an affair with Johann Most. He was her idol and she was completely under his influence. He valued her, she believed, for her mind. The fact that she was a girl was irrelevant. He took her to the Opera and gave her meals with wine but assured her it was her ideas that attracted him. She could be his protégée, he told her. She had “great talent” and must begin to use it. He would teach her how to become a great public speaker in the anarchist cause.

  Emma began in a small way, making speeches (in Russian and German but not as yet English) on topics like the necessity for an eight-hour day at various Trades Union gatherings. They were not at first a success. She felt sick, had to grip a chair to keep her upright, couldn’t see her audience for the haze suddenly clouding her vision, and was unable to control her trembling voice. Whenever she stumbled to a halt she found herself bathed in a cold sweat. But Johann Most pushed her on. He told her that nobody could tell she was suffering from the signs of nervousness she said she experienced, and that these would gradually diminish as she gained more experience. Her confidence grew a little but she found speaking a terrible strain and Johann Most’s insistence that she should speak more and more did nothing to help. The love of Alexander Berkman, whom she called Sasha, did. Together, they found an apartment and invited an artist friend, known as Fedya, and Helen Minkin to share it to meet the costs. At last, Emma felt secure in a way she had never done before. She loved Sasha deeply – “we were engulfed in a wild embrace . . . deep love for him welled up in my heart”20 and he very obviously loved her. Their little commune was her ideal, based as it was to be on mutual trust and respect with everyone’s personality allowed expression.

  Unfortunately, this domestic idyll showed signs of strain almost from the beginning due to the different interpretations all four partners put on what it was actually necessary for the household to spend out of their communal earnings. Sasha’s idea of necessary things was uncompromising: the minimum of plain cheap food, heating only if it was freezing, no new clothes and absolutely no luxuries. It was the luxuries which caused the most disagreement. Emma was disturbed to discover that she could not reject so-called luxuries as Sasha did. She liked flowers, for example, and since they lived in a city without a garden these had to be bought if she wanted them. Surely if she passed a flower seller in the street and bought some violets very cheaply that was not forbidden? But it was. Sasha was furious when he saw the offending violets in a jug on the table. He demanded to know how she could pretend to care about the starving millions in the world if she spent money on violets. Emma was ashamed and yet resentful. All she wanted was a little fleeting beauty. “I did not believe that a cause which stood for a beautiful ideal,” she wrote, “for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy . . . I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”21 Nor did she want to hear Sasha despise her “feminine” yearnings to make their apartment look attractive and to make meals more than just a means of keeping alive.

  But at least Sasha survived a bigger test: he accepted Emma having Fedya as a lover as well as himself and also accepted, though less easily, her more casual relationship with Johann Most. Emma herself had been first put to the test: her belief since her disastrous marriage had been that love should not be bound by rules and restrictions. When love was felt, it should be expressed fully and reciprocated joyously. She loved Sasha but in an entirely different way she loved Fedya. He was an artist whose sensitive nature kindled quite other fires in her (though later she confessed that she endowed Fedya with romantic qualities that perhaps were never in him). Why should loving Sasha mean excluding Fedya? “Could one love two persons at the same time? . . . I felt Sasha had left something untouched in me, something perhaps Fedya could waken to life . . .”22 But did she dare have two lovers living so closely together? She decided to tell Sasha how she felt. “His response was bigger and more beautiful than I had expected.”23 Sasha acknowledged he felt possessive about her but that he hated this side of himself and wanted to overcome it and share Emma’s interpretation of love. When Fedya came home that night Sasha embraced him. Emma was triumphant – she had broken out of the hideous convention which said a woman could only love one man at a time and could only secure him by marriage. She had made “free” love work. “The days and weeks that followed were illuminated by the glorious new light in us.”24

  The only thing that dimmed the light was the thought of Johann Most. Here, Emma was not so sure of herself. Sasha, on the contrary, was perfectly sure. He told her she was being a fool if she believed for one moment that Most treated her like this because he valued her mind. He was notorious – “didn’t I know that he only cared for women physically?” Emma refused to accept this cynical judgement although she acknowledged that Most was interested in her as a woman as well. When she was with him he called her his “blue-eyes” and his “little girl-woman” and she could not deny she responded sexually to him. She was secretly appalled to find that Most seemed so manly compared to the boyish Sasha and Fedya and that it was this strength and force to which she was drawn. When he kissed and embraced her “years of suppressed intensity crushed my body . . .”25 She always felt “limp” in his arms and to her horror found that she enjoyed her own helplessness. Most had the uncanny knack of making her want to serve him – “he was hungry for affection, for understanding. I would give him both.” She did not want to examine what kind of relationship this resulted in but Sasha was there to point it out: she was Most’s dupe, used by him as women had been used by men for centuries, every bit as enslaved as the bourgeois little wives she despised and thought herself above.

  Emma angrily denied this, but felt the first stirrings of doubt about her success in handling her own nature. She also began to query what that nature was, whether there was an innate predisposition in her as a woman, because she was a woman, which caused her to act as she did with Most. When he ordered her to leave her “blissful nest” and go on a lecture tour speaking on the futility now of the struggle for the eight-hour day she was reluctant – but she did what he asked. He took her to Grand Central Station in a cab to see her off (to Sasha’s disgust). She did well in each town but felt all the time as if she was Most’s puppet. On her return she wanted to discuss this feeling but he told her not to worry and cuddled her. She flared up and declared she refused to be treated “as a mere female.” Passionately, she attacked a great deal of what he had told her to say and pointed out she had enough mind of her own, a mind he said he respected, to be able to think for herself and that what she did think was not the same as he did. Most broke out in “a storm of abuse” and said she was “just like the rest” and he was going to cut her out of his heart. Exhausted, miserable and extremely confused Emma crept back to her flat and the comfort of Sasha and Fedya.

  For a while she was ill and depressed. Partly, the trouble was physical. She had suffered ever since she began to menstruate from excruciatingly painful periods which always obliged her to stay in bed for at least a day, usually more, every month. When she first came to New York she had confided her problem to her medical student friend and he had arranged for her to see a specialist who had told her she had a retroverted womb and that she would never be free from pain, nor would she ever experience full sexual release, unless she had a minor operation to correct the condition. Nor, the specialist had said, would she ever be able to conceive and bear a child without such surgery. He had offered to perform the operation, a very simple one, but she had refused. Now, as she lay jaded in bed, feeling that she could not go through this pointless suffering fo
r another thirty years, she wondered if she should after all have it.26

  The thought of a child of Sasha’s tempted her. She had always “loved children madly”. As a child what she had most wanted in life (but never got) was a doll and when her brother Leibale was born she was filled with “ecstatic joy” to have in the family a living doll. Her mothering instincts, at six, were so strong that she continually put the baby to her non-existent breasts in an attempt to feed him and only gave up when he turned blue and began choking at having his nose squashed against her bony rib cage. But remembering this, she also remembered her own awful childhood and the hunger in her lessened. She knew her own experience was quite commonplace and was determined that “no child of mine should ever be added to those unfortunate victims.” She could neither support a child nor guarantee it stability. The love and affection she would give it in abundance were not enough – she had a most realistic appreciation of how inadequate these qualities might prove to be. But her decision not to have the operation, which would effectively remove the in-built form of birth control she mistakenly thought her retroverted womb provided her with was also based on other reasons. At that moment, she was tired and sick of working for anarchism. She only wanted to stay at home. If she had a baby, she would have to stay at home. It would be a form of voluntarily dropping out and when she thought about what that meant sacrificing it was too much. She was only temporarily fatigued – ambition still burned strongly within her. It was essential to remain “unhampered and untied” if she was to fulfil the mission she felt she had. So, stifling her desire for a child of her own, a desire which grew stronger rather than weaker as she aged, Emma decided to endure her monthly torture and “pay the price.” Her need for children as she said in her autobiography and in letters to her friends, must find its outlet in loving all the children in the world already in existence. Her decision was, in essence, exactly the same one as feminists had always had to make. Birth control instead of simplifying it in fact only complicated the decision.