Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  She was away a year. In Vienna, she took a course in midwifery as planned and another in children’s diseases, earning two good diplomas. She also attended Freud’s lectures which fascinated her. Although later she was to say too much weight was given to family inhibitions she found many parts of her own family life were illuminated and she was glad of it. Socially and intellectually Vienna enriched her and she returned to New York reluctantly. Ed met her carrying a bunch of red roses and took her back not to their old flat but to a new one where the rooms were more spacious. He had furnished it with “lovely old mahogany” and put prints on the walls. There was a large kitchen with a big window overlooking a garden. Emma was thrilled because she was now living for the first time in a place that had “atmosphere and taste”. Ed made her an elaborate dinner and toasted her return with good wine. He told her he was well-off (but only by anarchist standards) and that they were going to have a wonderful life together now that she was back. Emma, not ungrateful for his efforts, would have liked to believe it, but was suspicious. She now had a proper profession and intended to enter it with dedication and enthusiasm. Not only would she be a working woman, but she was if anything even more zealous in the anarchist cause than she had been before she went to Vienna – every spare minute of her non-working time would be devoted to it. Did Ed know what he was welcoming back?

  Time quickly showed that nothing had changed. He might continue to say he did not want to get in the way of anything she wanted to do but in fact he was intensely jealous of all the hours she spent away from him, treating with equal contempt her work as a midwife (bringing all these “unwanted, squalling brats into the world”) and as a leading anarchist agitator. He accused her of having “no thought for anything else – your love has no thought of me or my needs . . . you are simply incapable of deep feeling . . . you will have to choose.”34 Emma had heard those words before. Men, it seemed, were obsessed with dictating choices to women, choices they never saw themselves as needing to make. “It is me or work,” men said. Which women ever said the same and did not expect to be ridiculed?

  When Emma refused to choose, Ed stormed out of the flat. Left alone, Emma struggled with conflicting emotions. She saw perfectly clearly how Ed was trying to make her feel guilty and she rejected completely his rationale, but at the same time she missed him. A life of work was barren – worthy, certainly using her many talents to the full, but barren. There seemed no point in all her daily labours if at the end of them there was no Ed. It was not just that she craved him physically (although she did) but that she had a great emotional hunger that only he could satisfy. It seemed to her that learning to do without Ed was a pointless sacrifice, so she took the extraordinarily humiliating step of writing to him begging him to return. He came, and they had a joyful reunion. In the following weeks Emma tried to achieve a new balance in her life. She cut out some of her evening meetings and spent the time at home with Ed. In a way, this did help but the trouble was that it did not help enough. The more she gave Ed, the more he wanted. She was heavily involved at the time in birth control work but her commitment to this particular cause was limited by Ed’s increasing monopoly of her leisure. What was even more disastrous for her own self-esteem was the way in which worrying about Ed’s resentment spoiled her concentration. He had no faith in the value of her work so she began to doubt herself. The strain of fighting his disapproval produced “strange nervous attacks” during which she would fall to the ground, not unconscious but suffering from some sort of temporary paralysis. Ed triumphantly diagnosed overwork. He told her he wanted to care for her, that if she stayed at home and gave in to being a woman for a change he would soon restore her to health.

  For a while, because she felt so weak, Emma tried to do things Ed’s way. She stayed at home – no work, no anarchist activities. The weeks slipped by “happy and peaceful”. Ed went out to work every day and when he came back there she was, rested, ready to be kissed and cosseted. They read together (Racine, Moliere, Corneille) went to concerts (their favourite composers were Wagner, and Beethoven) and took trips into the country. It could, Emma reflected, go on forever. It was an easy life, she wasn’t in the least bored. Then one day they had an argument about Nietzsche whose philosophy meant a great deal to her. Ed thought Nietzsche was a fool. As the argument grew more heated Ed suddenly drew back and begged her to stop. There was no point in spoiling their happiness by a silly row over Nietzsche. “It isn’t Nietzsche it is you,” Emma burst out. “Under the pretext of a great love you have done your utmost to chain me to you, to rob me of all that is precious to me in life. You are not content to bind my body, you want also to bind my spirit! First the movement and my friends – now it is the books I love . . . You are going to clip my wings . . . I’ll free myself even if it means tearing you out of my heart.”35 Ed was devastated. He did not even try to reply.

  Next day, knowing her love was now “like a cracked bell”, Emma rushed off to Philadephia to make a speech again and to begin lecturing. Her lectures, to her distress, somehow lacked inspiration but she kept going, to Washington, Pittsburgh and Detroit, where a long, loving letter from Ed awaited her. After that, still feeling disorientated and upset, she went on to Rochester where her father was dying (Helena had sent her a telegram earlier to which she had replied HE SHOULD HAVE DIED LONG AGO). Now, seeing him so old and ill, she felt compassion for him too. He had been the first of many men who had tried to dominate her and to make her conform to his idea of the feminine stereotype and she had truly hated him for it, but now she saw him as someone to be pitied, just “one of the mass of the exploited and enslaved for whom I was living and working.”36 When she returned to New York she took her brother Yegor with her. Both of them were welcomed by Ed as though nothing had happened.

  But of course it had. Emma had made the “choice” which Ed had imposed upon her. She had chosen to follow the dictates of her own conscience, to reject her soft life as the little woman at home. She had made her bid for freedom and was never again to be sucked into the domestic cocoon. Very soon she was off on another speaking tour, this time to California. In San Francisco she had a strange experience, highly relevant then to her troubled thoughts on how women were treated by men. A “Mr V.” offered to be her manager. Because he was “a fine Jewish type” and “a likeable person” she accepted. He reserved a luxurious room in the best hotel for her and when she entered it there were roses to greet her. There was also a black velvet dress. “Is this going to be a lecture or a wedding?” she asked sarcastically, but she put it on and was pleased at how she looked. The next day, there was another new dress provided for her, this time black chiffon. Emma waited cynically for the catch and sure enough it came. “Mr V.”, although assuring her he had been motivated only by the desire to help the cause, declared his passion for her and proposed marriage. He did not in the least object to her working but she must give up her “free love stuff”. Emma took great pleasure in telling him that the only love she was interested in was the free variety. In fact, she could think of no other sort that was not a contradiction in terms: all real love was free. That was the end of “Mr V”.

  Once back in New York, Emma continued to live with Ed but uneasily, feeling all the time that she ought to “have it out” with him. Before she could do so, Ed fell dangerously ill with pneumonia. She was terrified he would die and abandoned everything to nurse him back to life. Her relief and gratitude when he did survive were balanced by her horror at the realization that she might have been stupid enough to leave him. Once more, she was back to confronting the ugly truth that she could not pretend work of any kind meant she did not need Ed. She went out to the first meeting she had attended since Ed fell ill feeling she had no right to go. While she was away, the convalescent Ed made what looked like a suicide bid, taking a large dose of morphine from which he was only saved by Emma’s prompt action on her return. Unfortunately, he eventually confessed he hadn’t intended to kill himself at all, merely to frighten her into stopping he
r “mania for meetings”. The revelation of this cruel attempt at blackmail shocked Emma into once more reassessing her already complex feelings for Ed. She loved him but he was destroying her. She had to get out while she was still capable. So she left him, quickly and without more exhausting discussion.

  When next year she met him, a year and a trip to Europe later, he had married and was the proud father of a daughter. He commented that their love had “never been much of a success.” This made Emma bitter. “Is love ever?” she managed to reply. It occurred to her that perhaps love with men was a lost cause – they might not understand what love was really about. Perhaps what she needed was the love of her own sex, a friend “to share feelings I could not express to men.” But although she had many female friends she never quite found what she was looking for and was never remotely sexually attracted to any female. It seemed her fate was to have unsatisfactory love affairs with men whether she chose to or not.

  Emma was by this time (1899) thirty years of age. She felt, after she left Ed, that she had learned everything there was to learn about what part love played in a woman’s life but in fact she still had a long way to go. As with Sasha and Johann Most so it was after leaving Ed – she could not do without a lover. Immediately after leaving Ed she had “an exhilarating companionship” with an anarchist called Max Baginski. He left her for another woman and she was extremely hurt – “I laughed aloud at the folly of my hopes. After the failure with Ed how could I have dreamed of love and understanding with anyone else? . . . I felt robbed by life, defeated in my yearning for a beautiful relationship.”37 During her second trip to Europe (from November 1899 to the summer of 1900), she had a violent argument with Peter Kropotkin about women and sex in which she tried to rationalize her own feelings. Kropotkin’s view was that equality had nothing to do with gender. When women became men’s intellectual equals, through at last sharing their much privileged education and training, and when they also began to share men’s ideals instead of being content with the domestic ones imposed upon them by circumstances, then they would be free. He did not believe women’s sex made them intrinsically different. Emma disagreed. She maintained this was faulty thinking on the part of both feminists and socialists. Sex was a problem which no amount of equality would alter. In sexual relations women could not be made equal. Although she called the idea that women need love more than men “a stupid romantic notion, conceived to keep her ever dependent on the male”38 she nevertheless thought women were affected differently by sex and that this had to be allowed for in any vision of true emancipation. For herself, she had decided to make an attempt to “live and work without love.”

  It was an attempt that failed. By trying to live without love Emma discovered that she became only half a person and that even that half person was stunted and diminished by this enforced deprivation. She was intensely miserable after her second European visit. Partly this was due to being suspected of provoking the assassination of President McKinley on 6th September, 1901. The young man who committed the crime had attended one of her meetings and though Emma had done no more than shake hands with him she was hounded by the police and press as being party to the assassination. Her innocence was established but her depression at the treatment meted out to her deepened into a more serious and lasting disillusionment with the anarchist movement itself. Many of its adherents, she wrote, filled her with loathing. They bore no resemblance to herself and Sasha and all the other hopeful, inspired East Side Radicals often years ago. So she effectively dropped out. She lived incognito as Miss E. G. Smith in a flat on 1st Street which she shared with her brother Yegor. Her days were spent as a semi-recluse. She did some nursing to support herself but otherwise she stayed at home, abiding by her self-imposed rule that love should be cut out of her life in all its many forms. Love, anyway, “seemed a farce in a world of hate.”

  She was rescued from this existence by a young friend of Yegor’s called Dan. Dan was nineteen, “naïve and unspoiled.” He said he didn’t care for young girls. His “pleading voice” was like music to Emma’s ears which suddenly opened once more to “the seductive whisperings of love.” She and Dan became lovers and she at once felt alive. She came out of her seclusion and with a return of her former energy and vitality joined in the anarchist action yet again. Her lesson had been learned: no matter how painful and difficult, love and sex were essential to her and she would never again be ashamed of this or try to pervert her own nature. She still had not found the way to absorb her emotional needs into the framework of her life without wrecking it but she was now dedicated to doing so. There must, surely, be a way of finding total self-fulfilment.

  Ironically, just as she had recovered her equilibrium, everything she had resolved was threatened by the reappearance of Ed Brady. He came to see her and confessed he had made a mistake – he, too, had underestimated the force of real love. He now recognized that he and Emma had known real love and that his marriage had been a sham, not based on love at all. He was bitterly sorry for the pain he had caused her. On Christmas Eve 1901 he showered her with presents – “a wonderful coat with a real astrakhan collar, muff and turban to match . . . a dress, silk underwear . . . stockings and gloves.” Emma dolled herself up in this finery and Ed exclaimed, “That’s the way I have always wanted you to look.” Seeing her expression change he added, “Some day everybody may be able to have beautiful things like these”39 but he had missed the point. It was not so much the economics of the gifts which worried Emma as the implication that the way he wanted her to look was feminine in the accepted sense and that what went with that was the same old desire to constrain her as a person. But their affair was resumed even though this time Emma made no concessions about work. She was deep in birth control lecturing and she kept it up.

  In the spring, Ed said he was leaving his wife and running away with his daughter to Europe. Would she come with him? Emma said she would certainly go with him but not if he took the child. She would not have another woman robbed of her child on her account. Ed accused her of being “like all feminists who rail against man for the wrongs he supposedly does to woman without seeing the injustices that the man suffers.”40 He adored his daughter, she was much more precious to him than to his wife and he would give her a far better life. All Emma was doing was reasoning subjectively “like a woman”. But Emma stood fast, even though she had always believed the act of physically bearing a child did not necessarily make a woman a “true” mother. Motherhood was more subtle than that, to do with caring and responding. She would even be prepared to admit that theoretically a man could “mother” as well as a woman. Yet in the case of Ed she felt an instinctive revulsion to being party to what he proposed. She was frightened that her uncharacteristic display of female solidarity for the sake of it would scare Ed off but it did not. His constant visits went on being “beautiful Events”. Then in April 1902 Ed died with brutal suddenness of a heart attack. Emma’s shattering grief was tinged with guilt. She felt that if she had given in to love and put it first and gone off with Ed to start a new life together he might not have died. Her confidence in her new philosophy – that love should be listened to but not allowed to dominate everything else – was shaken. She saw herself as having “this hunger for love” but “an inability to hold it for long”. Something always went wrong, her life was always being wrecked by personal disasters.

  The antidote for remorse was, as ever, work. There was nothing to stop her giving all her time to it and she did. Her niece Stella, Lena’s daughter, came to live with her, and Emma gave up nursing in order to run her own beauty parlour, specializing in head-and-neck massage, on Broadway. It was her clients there who were the ones that aroused her compassion for the “emancipated” woman and made her begin to formulate the thoughts which were eventually expressed in her essays. What she realized she wanted to do was not only try to live her life as she wanted to, and not as society dictated, but also to help other women do so. This was what brought her to the idea of starting
a magazine specifically feminist as well as anarchist in content which she could use as a platform. It was to be “not just a venture but an adventure”.41 The money for what she referred to as her “child” came from a Russian actor she had helped. She called it Mother Earth. The first issue came out in March 1906 carrying the motto “The Earth free for the free individual”. Right from this issue an uncompromising feminist tone ran through the magazine reflected in almost every article, story and poem. No. 6 for example carried an attack on modesty – “let us go on in the good old modest way, sick and ailing all our lives but not sacrificing one shred of the precious conventions that we have collected about us at such a terrible cost, let us live maimed, deformed, decrepit ignorant half-sexed caricatures of women – but let us be modest.” No. 5 had a stirring tale about the dangers of subscribing to what the world called morality entitled “In the Treadmill” and Emma herself wrote strong pieces on prostitution and related topics in almost every issue. Anthony Comstock, that guardian of American morals, was a constant target for jokes and ridicule.

  Within six months, Mother Earth had established itself as a leading voice among feminist agitators even though many of Emma’s ideas ran counter to prevailing attitudes in the feminist “movement” as a whole. At that time, many feminists thought it essential to shut men out if women were to make any real progress – men were enemies, even the sympathetic ones. Emma rejected this. She agreed there was a great deal wrong with the male sex as a whole but her vision of a better future for women included a better relationship with men. She saw no future in a state of hostility between the sexes. Nor did she like the notion that feminist and feminine were contradictory. Just as she hated anarchism being thought of as excessively puritanical so she hated feminism being branded as equally rigid. She saw nothing wrong in frivolity and even acknowledged the importance of making yourself as beautiful as you wished. “Physical attraction always has been and no doubt always will be a decisive factor in the love life of two persons,”42 she once wrote. This being so, the power of beauty should not be denied and women ought not to be taught that making the most of their beauty was in any way letting themselves down as feminists. Similarly, having fun was not anti-feminist. She herself held regular Mother Earth parties at which she danced with great abandon (even inventing a dance called the Anarchist Slide). Women, she warned, were simply going to be alienated if feminism became equated with joylessness. What feminism was about was self-fulfilment as a woman not as some kind of neutered species. She would not go along with the so-called radical feminists of her day who were busy trying to get women to reject the traditional role as wives and mothers, nor with the woman’s rights feminists who accepted woman’s basic position in society so long as it was better safeguarded. Her own feminism, which first found public expression in Mother Earth, was original. She was determined to acknowledge the differences in being female and find a way that these could be retained without making of woman a subordinate creature.