Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Unfortunately, it turned out that this was not all she had to do. As ever with feminism, the situation was more complex than that. The post-First World War woman had the vote, she was highly educated if she had the will and ability to wish to be, she had some legal protection, she could enter most professions and now she had access to birth control: one by one difficulties in the way of self-fulfilment caused by gender had been overcome. Yet immediately a new and much more sinister dilemma emerged. The women who “chose” everything found themselves appreciating nothing, and the women who “chose” one or the other were miserably aware that they were doing so. The longed for, at last realized thing called “a proper choice” began to wreck the life of the feminist woman in very many cases. She began to curse the necessity for making her choice, to long for the days when fate or nature or even men decided her destiny. She had to learn how to use her options for her own benefit and not so that they worked against her, and in the process she came to learn a great deal about herself which until then had been obscured.

  Concern about that “feminine spirit” of which Margaret Sanger was so fond of talking (and so bad at defining) emerged as a powerful factor. What was “feminine”, what was not? How much of “femininity” was innate and how much conditioned? Was “femininity”, if it existed as separate from female, desirable? Or was it a curse? How much should be retained and how much discarded? Was it illogical to be both feminine and feminist? Had progress gone far enough, as far as it could go in all essentials, or even too far? There were a great many questions still to sort out and if possible to answer before feminism, for the time being, could rest on its laurels. It had come a long way in a hundred years, shaping and redefining woman’s role in society with great thoroughness, but it still lacked a final sense of direction. Nobody quite knew any more exactly what to aim for. Hundreds and thousands of important details still needed to be filled in on the Grand Design but in the feminist writings of the inter-World War period, even while Margaret Sanger was assuring everyone all problems were solved through birth control, there was the pressing urgency of deciding exactly what this Grand Design was: what did feminism want? And did this conflict with what it might have? Once more, there was no single hypothesis.

  IDEOLOGY

  Emma Goldman

  (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

  Emma Goldman

  1869–1940

  THE 1920S PROVED a dangerous era for active feminism. On the one hand, there was so much at which to rejoice but on the other so much about which to worry. There was no doubt at all that by the time the vote was won there had also been a great loosening of all those social restrictions which had handicapped women as much, if not more than, their lack of political power. From the 1890s onwards the effects of the bicycling rage and of the dress reform that went with it had produced a new female image which was decidedly easier to conform to than any that had gone before. It was also easier for women to work. Working-class women had always worked but those legions of “respectable” middle-class daughters, who had been kept idle at home, found it acceptable to become typists and secretaries in the thousands of offices which began to emerge following the invention of the typewriter and the huge growth in those business activities using cheap female labour. The working middle-class girl was not yet the norm but she was no longer the exception. And her movement out of the home was part of a general movement away from nineteenth-century attitudes which was felt throughout the Western world. Yet all was not well with feminism. There was only one certainty: the old, narrow interpretation of woman’s rights would not do. A wider, deeper ideology was needed and needed quickly before feminism floundered in a sea of complacency.

  There was no doubt that winning the vote did produce complacency and that it weakened feminism. It was not just the feeling that there was nothing more to do – the natural result of having promised the vote would achieve everything – but the dangerous belief that there was nothing that could be done. Everyone expected women to use the vote to further their own interests. When they did not, it was a shock. “Modern young women,” as one English feminist of the time put it, “know amazingly little of what it was like before the war, and show a strong hostility to the word ‘feminism’ and all which they imagine it to connote.”1 In the equal rights days it had been so easy to see the targets. In the 1920s it became impossible. It was in this atmosphere of ambiguity that Emma Goldman made her distressing announcement that women now needed emancipating from emancipation.

  Emma Goldman gave voice early to the fear that others soon began to feel about the position of the “new” woman. True, hordes of women had by the 1920s been liberated from the home but to what? A new bondage? Women who had jobs did not find that what they had to do in the home was in any way decreased. The burden was now often double and different. Emma Goldman observed the women who came to a massage parlour she once ran in New York and felt sorry for them. “Most of the women claimed to be emancipated and independent,” she wrote, “as indeed they were in the sense that they were earning their own living. But they paid for it by the suppression of the mainsprings of their natures . . . the emancipation of the women was frequently more of a tragedy than traditional marriage would have been.”2 It was, to her, simply no good pretending the “new” woman was a happier being. Independence was a pathetic farce. “Glorious independence!” she wrote sarcastically. “No wonder that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their ‘independence’ behind the counter . . .”3 It was not that she thought the Woman’s Rights movement had achieved nothing – on the contrary, she was well aware that it had “broken many old fetters” and she wholeheartedly approved. Her point was that in the process it had forged new ones unwittingly. Emancipation had never really been understood, that was the trouble. The emphasis on suffrage had been “absurd”. Woman had been duped into thinking political power would solve everything. “In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is not so much by man as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage cannot ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.”4 It was only a means of strengthening woman’s basic subordination. Not having the vote had only been one of woman’s external handicaps. Removing that handicap was good but actually irrelevant. Real emancipation was to do with abolishing internal tyrannies. “Artificial stiffness” and “narrow respectabilities” were the chief enemies. And how would these be overcome? By women changing themselves from within. “True emancipation,” said Emma Goldman firmly, “begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in a woman’s soul.”5

  It was a shocking thought, but then Emma Goldman’s whole life was dedicated to shocking people into thought. It took courage to proclaim that the new Jerusalem, far from having been gained, as the feminists like Margaret Sanger boasted, was a mirage. Women, thrilled by their new independence, excited by their new status, hated to have this attacked. They also hated to be told they were betraying their own natures. It looked like simply another, uglier, side to the old anti-feminist argument that a woman’s natural place was in the home being a good little wife and mother. But Emma Goldman thought no such thing. Through her own experience she had discovered the trap posed by so-called emancipation and she struggled heroically to make a way out of it towards a quite different liberation. In doing so, she heralded the later feminist movement of the 1970s, sowing seeds that were to germinate only very slowly indeed. But they were there, and eventually they provided feminism with the ideology it needed.

  * * *

  Emma Goldman liked to date her “birth” as the day she arrived in New York City at twenty years of age. It was on that day that she felt that everything which had gone before was “cast off like a worn garment.” But, in fact, Emma Goldman carried the history of her youth slung round her neck like an albatross, hating the memory of it and yet unable to forget. It was the whole experience of those twenty pre-natal years which made her into the kind
of feminist she became – a kind quite distinct from any that had gone before.

  She was actually born on 27thJune, 1869 in Kovno (now Kaunas) in what became modern Lithuania. The province had been given to Russia in the land division of 1795 so technically she was a Russian. Prior to 1795, Kovno had been in Poland and the inhabitants went on regarding themselves as Polish, especially the large Jewish population. Russia did nothing to welcome them. Work was difficult to get and discrimination against Polish Jews quite open. Emma’s father, Abraham, an unhappy man, frustrated by his bad luck, managed to get a job as an innkeeper in the small Baltic town of Popelan soon after her birth. Emma he saw as part of his misfortunes since he had passionately wanted a son. His wife Taube already had two daughters, Lena and Helena, from her first marriage. She had married very young to a man she adored and after his sudden death her arranged second marriage to Abraham had not brought her the happiness she had once enjoyed.

  The Goldmans were dissatisfied with each other and, even after the birth of the longed-for son (and then another) a few years later, their bitterness continued. Their marriage prejudiced Emma against that institution from the start. Her father’s “harsh treatment of Mother . . . ending in Mother’s fainting spells”6 distressed and angered her. When she discovered that her father had swindled her half-sisters of their rightful inheritance her disgust grew. She began to hate and despise him, seeing him as a brute who dominated and punished the whole family. As she grew up, she was confused to discover that mixed with her hatred was a strong measure of physical attraction. Abraham was “the nightmare” of her childhood but there was something about his sheer strength and his strong good-looks which aroused in her a secret admiration. Outwardly, though, she was all challenge and rebellion. She argued and fought with him over every conceivable issue and he exerted his power over her by beatings and blows.

  Emma was not compensated by having a better relationship with her mother. The birth of two brothers put Emma in the unenviable position of being in the middle of the family between two daughters born of a much loved husband and two welcome sons. Taube Goldman was always tired, depressed, overworked and resentful. Most of all she resented the way Emma caused so much trouble. Sensing that in adolescence the situation could only grow worse she dreaded the onset in Emma. When her daughter began to menstruate at eleven she was unable to control her fears. “Early one summer morning,” wrote Emma, “I woke up in great agony. My head, spine and legs ached as if they were being pulled asunder. I called for Mother. She drew back my bedcovers and suddenly I felt a stinging pain in my face. She had struck me. I let out a shriek, fastening on Mother’s terrified eyes. ‘This is necessary for a girl,’ she said ‘when she becomes a woman as a protection against disgrace.’”7 With this elliptical comment Emma had to be content. It shocked her so much that it was no good her mother afterwards trying to take her in her arms to comfort her. She rejected the embrace. Being a woman was branded on her mind as being something to be ashamed of, like all the other natural instincts she experienced.

  The strongest of these instincts was sex. Emma maintained she could remember clearly erotic sensations at six and she was always contemptuous of how parents treated any such feelings in children. By the age of fifteen she had been seduced by a hotel clerk with whom she had been secretly going out for several months. She did not enjoy the experience much – “not until after the violent contact of our bodies and the excruciating pain he caused me did I come to my senses.”8 She began to see sex between men and women as something not necessarily as pleasurable as the urge which led to it. At any rate, she became wary. “After that,” she wrote, “I always felt between two fires in the presence of men. Their lure remained strong but it was always mingled with violent revulsion. I could not bear to have them touch me.”9 This suited Abraham whose plans for her were an early, decent marriage, arranged by him to his own profit. He was furious when Emma refused to entertain such a notion and showed signs of wanting to educate herself more. He threw her French grammar in the fire on one well-remembered occasion and yelled at her, “All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefülte fish, cut noodles fine and give the man plenty of children.”10 Determined though she was to escape this fate, Emma was ill-equipped to do so. Her prospects were poor. She had never managed to get to the German Gymnasium in Konigsberg, where the family had moved in 1876, although she was undoubtedly bright enough (her way was blocked by a teacher’s refusal to give her the required good-conduct certificate). Her only real education had been the last six months of her schooldays, spent in St Petersburg because her family had again moved in 1881. There, she had been on the fringe of intellectual and political activity, coming into contact with students who had loaned her works like Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But none of this helped her when she began to look for work. All she could find was a low-paid job as a seamstress in a corset factory.

  There Emma might have been obliged to stay, forced eventually to submit to her father’s authority and marry a man of his choice, if her half-sister Helena had not in 1885 announced she was going to emigrate to America. Her sister Lena was already there and sending home good reports. This news put Emma into a panic. She had never cared much for Lena but adored Helena who had been very nearly the only comfort of her childhood. If she lost Helena she would not only lose her only source of affection but also the only buffer between herself and her father whose matrimonial designs loomed nearer every day. She determined to accompany Helena. Her father would not hear of it. For weeks the Goldman house echoed to the roars and screams of threats and counter-threats as Abraham and Emma engaged in their most vicious battle yet. When her father would not given an inch, Emma played her final card. She threatened suicide. So convincing was her promise to throw herself in the river that Abraham for once was frightened and capitulated. She could go, get the hell out and never darken his door again. He gave her the princely sum of twenty-five roubles and off she went, triumphant. The two girls, one sixteen, the other twenty, left St Petersburg in December 1885 for Hamburg where they boarded the Elbe. Emma was utterly happy. She was with the person in the world she loved best and leaving behind the person she hated most. Nothing could spoil her happiness, not even being packed like cattle into the steerage quarters of the ship. Throughout the long journey to America which everyone else found so frightening and tedious she remained in a barely controlled state of intense excitement.

  When the Statue of Liberty loomed ahead out of the New York dawn mist her eyes filled with tears – “Ah, there she was, the symbol of hope, freedom, opportunity! She held her torch high to light the way to the free country, the asylum for the oppressed of all lands.”11 Agonizing disillusionment came almost immediately. When she and Helena were taken to the clearing house for immigrants, then Castle Garden, they were pushed about brutally by the guards and treated with contempt by the officials. The atmosphere was horrible, “charged with antagonism and harshness”. The whole of their first day on American soil was “a ghastly shock”. In haste, she and Helena completed the formalities and were allowed out to go to Lena’s home in Rochester. Although they were warmly welcomed this too was a shock. Rochester was supposed to be The Flower City but the impression on a cold, raw January morning was grim, and in spite of Lena’s ready hospitality both the new arrivals caught the unmistakable whiff of poverty. The rooms in which she and her husband lived were already overcrowded and a baby was due. The only income was the husband’s twelve dollars a week he earned as a tinsmith and on that he also supported an elderly relative who lived with him. Clearly, Lena’s could only be a temporary refuge. They must both find jobs at once.

  Helena found work first, retouching negatives, then Emma got a place in Garson and Mayer’s factory sewing vests ten and a half hours a day for two dollars fifty cents a week. She was told she was a very lucky girl to be so privileged. The friend of Lena’s who had found her the job expressed the opinion that she wouldn’t need it for long anyway as with her red cheeks and prett
y blue eyes a man would soon snatch her up and keep her in silk and diamonds. He gave her “the sense of standing naked in the market place because he even came over and tried to feel my arms.”12 Nor did she find the job he had fixed for her so marvellous. At first, it was true she was impressed. Unlike the premises back in St Petersburg, the Garson and Mayer’s factory was “large, bright and airy” and it didn’t smell. But on the debit side there was the discipline which was rigid and made the already monotonous nature of her job worse. She missed the camaraderie of the dirty, dark St Petersburg factory. The only bright spot in her existence was Stella, Lena’s newborn baby. Otherwise she was as wretched as ever, endlessly yearning to escape to better things. Goaded by feelings of guilt at how little she was able to contribute to Lena’s household expenses Emma finally nerved herself to ask for a raise. It was refused so she left and found a place, with difficulty, in a less modern factory for four dollars a week. It was here that, at the next machine, she met a young man called Jacob Kershner. He was a Russian who had arrived from Odessa in 1881 and had become a cloakmaker. He was attractive and kind to her, “the only human being I had met since my arrival”13 outside the family. Within four months he had asked her to marry him.

  If Margaret Sanger had thought of marriage as a kind of suicide Emma Goldman thought of it as murder – a monstrous act a man committed against a woman. She had set her face steadfastly against it all her short life. Every married woman of her limited acquaintance was a helpless drudge, a pathetic warning of what “love” led to. And she did not in any case love Jacob. She was merely attracted to him. She did not want to marry him only to go to bed with him. But he was the one who wanted, who insisted, on marriage. So she refused his proposal at first. Jacob ignored her refusal. Day after day, week after week he walked to work with her, stayed at her side all the long hours they spent there and afterwards walked her home keeping up his courtship all the time. When she agreed at last to become engaged to please him, he thought the battle won. Halfway through their engagement the rest of the Goldman family arrived from Russia and in order to support them Emma and Helena left Lena’s and took rooms with them. Jacob came as a lodger to eke out their income. He slept on a couch in the living room and Emma found his close proximity torture. “I suffered from sleepless nights, waking dreams and great fatigue at work.”14 The sexual frustration was so exhausting that it sapped her willpower. In February 1887 she finally capitulated to Jacob’s endless pleas to marry him, miserably aware that her motives were wrong. “He filled a void in my life,” she wrote, “and I was strongly attracted to him.”15 The awful irony was that having married jacob primarily to satisfy her sexual urges she discovered on their wedding night that the reason he had been able to be so principled about marriage first was that he was impotent. Just as securely as Caroline Norton, and with far less reward, Emma Goldman was caught in the trap she had always been able to see.