Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  The care of Sasha and Fedya restored Emma to health, and Most sent her flowers. He appeared to have forgiven her for her little rebellion. She went on a New England tour with him and her admiration for him again overwhelmed her. He was very pleased with how she was developing as a speaker and said he was grooming her to be his successor as leader of the anarchist cause. Her life was developing as she wished it to. Back home in New York City she was the centre of various activities – organizing education groups, arranging and giving lectures, holding socials and dances and all the time working hard as a dressmaker to support herself. At twenty-one she was more fulfilled than she had ever thought it possible to be and yet there was no hint of complacency. Every day brought new evidence of the world’s outrages which called for anarchist involvement and Emma felt each one personally. In the winter of 1890 she was particularly moved by news of the indiscriminate killing of “politicals” at Yakutsk in Russia and decided, with Sasha, that they must return at once to help. Johann Most was against this. Certainly Sasha could go but not Emma who was “too valuable” where she was. Suppressing her desire to ask why she was too valuable Emma went with Sasha to New Haven where he was going to train as a printer so that when he got to Russia he could bring out a newspaper. She had not decided if she would disobey Most and go with Sasha but she wanted at least to help him prepare. She went back to factory life as well as increasing her private dressmaking work to raise money for his voyage. She also opened an ice-cream parlour where the sandwiches and “dainty dishes” she made sold so well that in no time at all she was a proper little capitalist making a handsome profit. She invested part of the profits in a soda-water fountain and some coloured dishes she was unable to resist. The money needed for both of them to go back to Russia in the anarchist cause was suddenly within her grasp.

  The only problem was Most, who told her that she would have to choose between him and Sasha. This enraged her. Remembering that Sasha had not asked her to choose she began to look at Most’s “love” more critically and to suspect he was not so much advanced as retarded in his thinking. Once, he had laughed in her face and said, “Love, love, it is all sentimental nonsense, there is only sex!” Even if he was right, why did sex need to be exclusive? And yet there was this pull towards Most which could not be denied. Again and again Emma tried to analyse her feelings but it was useless. She behaved in Most’s company like a typical female, a species she herself endlessly denied existed. Her response seemed to her sexually instinctive, having nothing to do with her personality or mentality, but what could she do about it? What ought she to do?

  She was saved from deciding on that occasion by the imprisonment of Most (he was always in and out of prison for his anarchist activities) and by an event that drove all thoughts of going to Russia out of her head. At Homestead, near Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, Henry Clay Frick, had ordered hired thugs to open fire on his workers who had demanded higher wages. Some of the workers had been killed in the resulting fracas. The minute he heard this Sasha had felt inspired. He felt “a blow aimed at Frick would re-echo in the poorest hovel, would call the attention of the whole world to the real cause behind the Homestead struggle.”27 He would go to Pittsburgh and kill Frick then himself. It would be Emma’s job to live on and “articulate” the meaning of his act to the workers of the world. Overnight, the ice-cream parlour was sold. Sasha and Emma caught the first train to New York, talking non-stop about their plan. There was no danger of being overheard because neither of them spoke good enough English to use it as their first language. Sasha was wildly excited and Emma hardly less so but for different reasons. Once more, she was confused. Something in her – was it that wretched femaleness? – was protesting against Sasha’s proposed death. Even if it could be proved that this self-sacrifice would greatly advance the anarchist cause she still did not want it to happen. “Message, cause, duty, propaganda . . . what meaning could these things have compared with the force that had made Sasha flesh of my flesh . . .”28 She loved him too much to want him to die for whatever worthy reason. He said he loved her too but how could he if he was prepared to separate them. Did it mean her love was stronger, or that women loved in a different way from men? “Is not love, not ordinary love but the love that longs to share to the uttermost with the beloved, is it not more compelling than aught else?” she asked herself. The only solution seemed for her to die with Sasha. They would both assassinate Frick then kill themselves. But this made Sasha angry – that, it seemed, would ruin half the point.

  On and on they argued, with Sasha conceding that she could at least accompany him to Pittsburgh when they had made the bomb that was to kill Frick. This proved harder than they had thought. Sasha accidentally exploded the bomb he made (without harm to anyone) and that changed matters. There was no more money to buy materials for another bomb – all that was left was enough for a pistol and one train fare. Emma saw Sasha off, equipped with a cheap revolver and came back to their flat. She had so little time to raise the money to follow him. Unless she could do it within forty-eight hours, the time it would take Sasha to organize the assassination, the deed would be done and Sasha dead and she would be alive without him. It seemed to her that desperate measures called for desperate solutions. She would go on the streets and in one night buy her passage to her lover’s side and her death with him.

  Emma never doubted for one moment the rightness of what she proposed to do. She would be selling her body to gain the money to help Sasha – there could be no more worthy reason. Since time began women had been reduced to exploiting their femaleness in this way, to offering sex to gain some advantage for themselves and others. It was wrong that society so arranged things that this should be sometimes necessary but the deed itself although terrible for the woman, was not wrong. Emma aligned herself with Sonya in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and was just as sure as Sonya that the end justified the means. What she suddenly found herself not so sure about was whether she could go through with it. Was her body just a body? Could she persuade it “to do it with strange men?” Despising herself for her own cowardice she began preparing herself on the morning of Saturday, July 16th, 1892. First of all she assessed her market value. “I stepped over to the mirror to inspect my body. I looked tired but my complexion was good. I should need no make-up. My curly blond hair showed off well with my blue eyes. Too large in the hips for my age, I thought. I was just twenty-three . . . I would wear a corset and I should look taller in high heels (I had never worn either before)”.29 Clothes were another problem. With surprisingly romantic ideas of a prostitute’s dress Emma thought “dainty underwear” imperative. She bought some soft flesh-coloured material and made some.

  Then, as it began to get dark, she put herself on 14th Street. After only an hour she was in tears. As soon as any man approached her she found herself walking away. If he got hold of her, she shook him off. The vulgarity of her prospective customers, their crude remarks and leers, aroused in her an automatic rejection she was unable to control. A body was not after all just a body. Again and again she tried to force herself to accept the advances she invited but loathed and again and again she failed. Convinced she would have to give up she made one last effort, promising herself that the very next man who wanted her should have her. It happened to be “a tall distinguished looking person” with white hair who took her to a café, bought her a drink, said he could tell she was a novice and advised her to go home because she would never have the knack. He gave her ten dollars. She was “too astounded for speech.” It was proof of something she had always wanted to believe in: that there existed a class of men who did not see women as sex objects and who practised what they preached.

  Emma now had half the money she needed to follow Sasha but before she could raise the rest the news came that Frick had already been shot. Unfortunately for Sasha he had bungled his hasty attempt. Frick was only wounded and Sasha had failed in his own suicide bid. He was in prison facing what would
undoubtedly be a long prison sentence if not the death penalty. Emma’s prodigious energy now went into canvassing support for him. She immediately organized and chaired a large public meeting at which she was correctly described as being “possessed by a fury”. When Johann Most, now out of prison, publicly sneered at Sasha’s action and called him a misguided fool who had damaged the anarchist movement Emma went to a gathering he was addressing, stalked up onto the platform and proceeded to whip him in front of his audience with a horsewhip she then broke over her knee. Neither this touch of melodrama nor all her speeches helped. Sasha was moved to Murderer’s Row in prison and she herself was put on the wanted list. She was hunted by the police and spent her days hiding and her nights riding the Bronx streetcar wearing a blue and white striped dress and long grey coat which gave her some protection because she was taken for a nurse. As soon as Frick’s survival was assured Sasha was brought to trial: he got twenty-two years. Horror at the savagery of such a sentence at first blinded Emma to her own tragedy. Her happy life was smashed. Estranged from Johann Most and without her beloved Sasha she was confronted with the need to rebuild her own world. It was not that she was a helpless, dependent female who could not function without a man to direct her – far from it – but it could not be denied that she desperately needed the kind of strong supportive love and respect both Most and Sasha (though not Fedya) had given her. There was a terrible fear in her mind that she could not manage without them. It seems not entirely fortuitous that at this crucial stage a new man called Edward Brady entered her life.

  At one of the many meetings she held to rouse support to get Sasha’s sentence commuted, Emma became aware that a man in the audience was staring fixedly at her. She noted he was tall, broad, well-built and that he had soft blond hair and blue eyes. He was fiddling with a box of matches which irritated her. After she’d finished speaking she walked over to him and said he shouldn’t play with fire. “I love fire,” he said. “Don’t you?” With this promising opening he began pursuing her. He told her he had just arrived from Austria after serving a ten-year sentence for publishing illegal anarchist literature, that he was forty-years’-old and a scholar. He also said he greatly admired Sasha for what he had done. Gradually, says Emma, a “beautiful comradery matured between Brady and me.”30 It rapidly matured even further into a love affair so passionate Emma wondered if she had ever known what passion was before. Within weeks, Ed was indispensable to her. She discovered that sexual love could be “ecstatic” and her flat became “a temple of love”. Her regained happiness frightened her – “so much peace and beauty could not last; it was too wonderful, too perfect.”31

  She was right in her estimation. Her work soon got in the way of her personal relationship. In 1892 the industrial crisis of that year had thrown thousands out of work and Emma saw her main job as helping the unemployed. When she told Ed this, “his mood changed.” He said he did not want her to tire herself, especially as she had been ill again. She was, he said, his to hold and protect and watch over. Alarmed, Emma asked him if he actually meant she was his property, “a cripple who had to be taken care of by a man?” He said no, it was merely concern for her health that had prompted his words not any desire to stop her doing what she wanted to do. Relieved, Emma threw herself into committee sessions, collecting food and feeding the homeless. Ed helped. Her biggest effort was a mass meeting in Union Square which she led carrying a red banner. She made a brilliant speech which the newspapers claimed was “just what the ignorant mob needed to tear down New York.”

  From then on she was known as Red Emma. New York detectives followed her wherever she went and finally arrested her in Philadelphia in August 1893 for inciting revolution. She was tried and sentenced to a year in prison on Blackwell’s Island. She withstood the hardships this entailed very well except for being deprived of cigarettes which, since she smoked forty a day, she found torture. She was put in charge of the sewing shop where she refused to slave drive the women to satisfy the matron. When she fell ill and spent some time in the prison hospital one of the doctors, noticing her concern for the sick, suggested she might help out when she recovered. This she did, finding nursing congenial. It consoled her to be looking after “those derelicts on the social dung heap.”

  When she came out of prison she felt derelict herself. She was only twenty-five but felt tired and ancient. There was a meeting called to welcome her back to the anarchist movement at which she planned to speak to express her gratitude but she could not find her voice. Ed, at her side, said she simply needed looking after. He urged her to go away with him somewhere quiet and peaceful. On the way home they happened to discuss a very pretty newcomer who had spoken at the meeting and Emma confessed how depressed the woman’s beauty had made her feel. Ed said this woman wouldn’t stay beautiful long, so not to worry – she was Italian and “Latin women mature young, they grow old with their first child, old in body and spirit.” Emma said in that case the woman shouldn’t have any children if it was going to wreck her. Ed replied, “No woman should do that. Nature has made her for motherhood. All else is nonsense, artificial and unreal.”32 They had a blazing row about this then and there in the street. Ed tried to end it by embracing Emma but she pushed him off and ran away. Next day, Ed came round and asked her to go for a walk on Manhattan beach with him so that at least they could talk things over calmly. She went and as they walked on the beach, the sun bright even though it was November, he tried to explain what he really meant. He said he could not help it, he did want her to give up speaking and devote herself to something less exhausting and time-consuming like writing. He begged her not to be angry about his opinions on motherhood. “You are a typical mother, my little Emma, by build, by feeling.” In spite of herself, Emma was “profoundly stirred” and tried to examine her own reaction to what Ed had said more honestly. What he was really suggesting was that all women, even she herself, wanted to be mothers and that they were thwarting their own natures and instinctive desires if they tried to suppress this. Was this true? Was Ed right to imply that her work for anarchism, in all its various demanding forms, was simply a substitute for motherhood? As she thought about this, it occurred to her that this kind of charge was never levelled at men – fatherhood was never seen as in any way incompatible with work fulfilment. The reason why was clear: “Man’s physical share in the child is only a moment’s; woman’s part is for years . . .” If she acknowledged, as she did, that she would indeed like children and that yes, she was indeed subduing her instinct, this did not solve the problem. What Ed failed to realize was that, motherhood and work being incompatible, it did not necessarily follow that a woman must automatically choose motherhood or she would suffer. Either way there would be suffering. Either way, one half of her must be denied. In her own case, work was the more important. Ed was wrong, it was not a substitute but her whole reason for living. But since she did love him, and did want to be with him, she suggested that they should move in together and try to make it work. He would have to accept she was going to continue her work, that nothing would stop her, that there was not the faintest chance not only of her becoming a mother but of becoming a wife or any other version of the standard female role. Ed accepted.

  Emma and Ed moved into a four-room flat together on Eleventh Street and bought a brand new double-bed. To Ed’s annoyance, Emma insisted that one of the rooms should be her own private sanctum. Long before Virginia Woolf had ever thought of it she saw a room of her own as essential for her own well-being. She also began working as an auxiliary nurse at the new Beth-Israel Hospital on East Broadway. Ed was earning good money at the time (as an Insurance Agent) and protested there was no need for her to work at all, but she insisted. Women supported by men were “parasites” and anyway she was growing more and more interested in nursing. What she really wanted to do was train properly. Surprisingly, since he was so possessive, Ed agreed that she should go to his native country and train in Vienna. He liked the idea of her sharing his heritage and he was
“willing to let me go knowing it was for my own good.” In August 1895, Emma sailed for Europe feeling “rich” because she had “experience, a name . . . friends . . . the love of a beautiful personality.”33 Only the thought of Sasha in prison spoiled her pleasure at leaving America so much happier than she had arrived ten years before.