Abstract
Anarcha-feminism emerged as a ‘school of thought’ in late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Informed by the experience of female subjugation, anarchist women undertook a radical critique of sexual double standards and the gendered division of labour in ways that anarchist men were less inclined to recognise. In addition to describing the sociopolitical conditions from which anarcha-feminism arose, this chapter highlights the following key thinkers: Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman. As a dynamic, loosely formed network of activists who came from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, these women held differing ideas on how to create a free society. Yet, several intersecting principles were reflected in their activism, if not explicitly through their public advocacy, then implicitly through their unconventional lifestyles: the liberating potential of individual autonomy, the necessity of sexual freedom in order to achieve autonomy, and the inseparability of women’s liberation from the larger schema of human liberation. Beyond supporting the broader efforts of the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminism offered a model of womanhood that articulated women’s sexual agency as an economic and personal imperative, which in turn provided a radical alternative to the suffrage movement and a critical framework for modern feminism.
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Notes
- 1.
This essay reinforces and extends two of my prior publications: Donna M. Kowal, Tongue of Fire: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016) and Linda D. Horwitz, Donna M. Kowal, and Catherine H. Palczweski, ‘Anarchist Women and the Feminine Ideal: Sex, Class, and Style in the Rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and Lucy Parsons’, in Martha Watson and Thomas Burkholder (Eds), The Rhetoric of Nineteenth Century Reform and the Perfecting of American Society, vol. 5 Rhetorical History of the United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 309–353.
- 2.
Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 68–69; Margaret Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 20–21.
- 3.
Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 197.
- 4.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, 72.
- 5.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, 19.
- 6.
Benjamin Tucker, ‘On Picket Duty’, Liberty, 8:24, whole no. 206 (November 21, 1891). HathiTrust Digital Library: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015032019310;view=1up;seq=1
- 7.
Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun (Ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 124.
- 8.
For an analysis of the differing argumentation and rhetorical styles of anarchist women, see Horwitz, Kowal, and Palczewski.
- 9.
L. Susan Brown, The Politics of Individualism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 106.
- 10.
Kowal, Tongue of Fire, 14–21.
- 11.
For further analysis, see Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011) and John Lauristen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935) (New York: Times Change Press, 974).
- 12.
‘Translators’ Introduction’, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. and trans. Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (University of Alabama Press, 1981), ix.
- 13.
Gay L. Gullickson, ‘Militant Women: Representations of Charlotte Corday, Louise Michel, and Emmeline Pankhurst’, Women’s History Review, 23:6 (2014), 842–843.
- 14.
Ibid., 843.
- 15.
Louise Michel, ‘Women’s Rights’, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. and trans. Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 140.
- 16.
Ibid., 141.
- 17.
Ibid., 142.
- 18.
Marie Marmo Mullaney, ‘Sexual Politics in the Career and Legend of Louise Michel’, Signs, 15:2 (Winter 1990), 306–307.
- 19.
Ibid., 13.
- 20.
Nicolas Walter, ‘Charlotte M. Wilson, 1854–1944’, The Raven Anarchist Quarterly, 6:1 (January–March 1993), 71.
- 21.
Hinley, ‘Charlotte Wilson, the “Woman Question”, and the Meanings of Anarchist Socialism in Late Victorian Radicalism’, International Review of Social History, 57:1 (2012), 9.
- 22.
Ibid., 12–13.
- 23.
Walter, ‘Charlotte M. Wilson’, 70.
- 24.
Hinley, ‘Charlotte Wilson’, 27.
- 25.
Ibid., 10.
- 26.
Ibid., 32.
- 27.
Ibid., 33.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver: Arden Press, 1995), 76.
- 30.
Martha A. Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 138.
- 31.
Temma E. Kaplan, ‘Spanish Anarchism and Women’s Liberation’, Journal of Contemporary History, 6:2 (1971), 105.
- 32.
Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 91.
- 33.
Ackelsberg, Free Women, 138.
- 34.
Ibid., 126.
- 35.
Jean Andrews, ‘Poetry and Silence in Post-Civil War Spain: Carmen Conde, Lucía Sánchez Saornil and Pilar de Valderrama,’ in Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame (Eds), The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 48–49.
- 36.
Cited in Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain, front matter.
- 37.
Cited in Tabea Alexa Linhard, Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 132–134.
- 38.
Cited in Kaplan, ‘Spanish Anarchism’, 106.
- 39.
For further information see Vision on Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, David Porter (Ed) (Chico: AK Press, 2006) and Alice Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
- 40.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, 6–7.
- 41.
Carolyn Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1976), 13–14.
- 42.
Lauren L. Basson, White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 162.
- 43.
Cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 63.
- 44.
Lucy Parsons, ‘Speech to the IWW’, in Libcom.org: https://libcom.org/library/speech-iww-lucy-parsons
- 45.
Parsons, ‘To Tramps, the Unemployed, the Disinherited, and the Miserable’, The Alarm (October 4, 1884), in Chicago History Museum: http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/act1/fromTheArchive/wordToTramps_f.htm
- 46.
Parsons cited in Gale Ahrens (Ed), Lucy Parsons: Freedom Equality and Solidarity (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2004), 55–56.
- 47.
Cited in Ashbaugh, Lucy Parsons, 204.
- 48.
Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 65–66.
- 49.
Ibid., 4–6.
- 50.
Emma Goldman, ‘Voltairine de Cleyre,’ in Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell (Eds), Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Anarchist, Feminist, Genius (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 29–44.
- 51.
Voltairine de Cleyre, ‘In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation,’ in Alexander Berkman (Ed), Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre (New York: Mother Earth, 1917), 217.
- 52.
Paul Avrich, An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 152.
- 53.
de Cleyre, ‘Why I Am An Anarchist,’ in Exquisite Rebel, 56.
- 54.
de Cleyre, ‘The Woman Question’, in Exquisite Rebel, 223.
- 55.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, 131.
- 56.
Crispin Sartwell, ‘Priestess of Pity and Vengeance’, in Exquisite Rebel, 15.
- 57.
Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931; New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 21–23.
- 58.
Ibid., 83–88.
- 59.
Marsh, Anarchist Women, 14.
- 60.
For a discussion of Goldman’s elitism, see Lance Selfa, ‘Emma Goldman: A Life of Controversy,’ International Socialist Review, 34 (March–April 2004): http://www.isreview.org/issues/34/emmagoldman.shtml
- 61.
Kowal, Tongue of Fire, 116–118.
- 62.
Goldman, ‘The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation’, Anarchism and Other Essays, 3rd. rev. ed. (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910; New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 221–222.
- 63.
Wexler, Emma Goldman: An Intimate Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 155.
- 64.
Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 1, 137–138, 185–186.
- 65.
See Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 169–177; Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 523–530; and Kowal, 45–51.
- 66.
Goldman, Living My Life, vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931; New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 987.
- 67.
Marsha Hewitt, ‘Emma Goldman: The Case for Anarcho-Feminism’, in Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos (Ed), The Anarchist Papers (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 169–170.
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Kowal, D.M. (2019). Anarcha-Feminism. In: Levy, C., Adams, M.S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_15
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