Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  All the time she was working on Mother Earth Emma was looking towards an important event: the release of Sasha from his long imprisonment. She had never stopped writing to him and campaigning for his release and she knew she still loved him in spite of all the years which had passed. But Sasha coming back into her life was also an ordeal she dreaded. He would not be the same, she was not the same, the world was not the same. Another challenge to love was undoubtedly going to be issued. In May 1906 Sasha came out and Emma faced him. Of the two of them, Sasha had the greater shock. He himself was grey, pitifully thin, old-looking and exhausted but then that was how it had been expected he would look after fourteen years in prison. The change in Emma was unexpected. She was self-assured and authoritative. She was a mature woman and not his “little sailor girl” looking to him for advice. Things could never again be the same between them. Sasha had had no other woman in his life, obviously, and Emma had had several lovers. Strangely, it was Emma who no longer had any sex appeal for Sasha, not the reverse – “whatever physical appeal I had for you before you went into prison was dead when you came out”43 she alleged years later. But even more distressing than the realization that although they still loved each other they were no longer in love was the embarrassing fact that Sasha no longer occupied a central position in the anarchist movement as Emma now did. He could not return to his old position because it did not exist. The group to which he had belonged was broken up. He was, of course, a hero to most anarchists but not a hero with a role clearly defined. The strains and stresses of becoming aware of all this produced a nervous collapse which Emma feared at one point might end in suicide. It was to help Sasha that in 1908 she made him editor of Mother Earth. She hoped that having a proper job would help him reorientate himself.

  To a large extent her hope was fulfilled. Sasha changed the balance of Mother Earth into being more anarchist than feminist and in the process once more became involved in quite an important way in the direction of the movement. It was just as well because Emma was moving away from him personally and he would have found her new love affair hard to tolerate without the security his editorship gave him – to have been drifting and feeling unwanted just as Emma began her most passionate love affair yet would have finally wrecked any chance of rehabilitation. As it was, Sasha still found the new lover difficult to endure as did all Emma’s friends.

  He was called Ben Reitman, known as Chicago’s King of the Hobos, and Emma met him when he helped her organize a meeting in his town against great opposition. She was immediately attracted to him but most people found him repulsive. He was described by her as “a tall man with a finely shaped head covered with a mass of black curly hair which had evidently not been washed for some time. His eyes were brown, large and dreamy. His lips, disclosing beautiful teeth when he smiled, were full and passionate. He looked a handsome brute . . .”44 The appeal this character had for Emma was so strong that she was unable to sleep. His sexual attraction overwhelmed her – she was “caught in the torrent of an elemental passion I had never dreamed any man could rouse in me.”45 Yet she did not approve of Ben as she had of Sasha, Most and Ed Brady. He was an intellectual light-weight, and even worse what she had always called contemptuously “one of those reformers of social evils” for whom no anarchist could have any time.

  Born in 1879, and therefore ten years younger than herself, he had an exotic background quite unlike that of any other man with whom she had had a love affair. His family came from Galicia in Poland (then Russia) in 1877. As soon as Ben was born, his father, a pedlar, deserted his mother and Ben by eight years of age was virtually fending for himself. At eleven, he finally ran away and became a vagabond until he was twenty when he got a job as caretaker in a hospital. Here he was befriended by some doctors who encouraged him to believe he could enter medical school himself. This he did and duly qualified (although Sasha always doubted it and sneered at the “Dr” Ben put in front of his name). He became a personality in Chicago not only because of the flamboyant way he dressed – “with a large black cowboy hat, flowing silk tie and huge cane” – but for the way he made himself champion of the unemployed whom he led around the city in large and slightly menacing gangs. Ben solemnly defined his problem as “what the psychologists call Immediacy – I just got to do things fast.”46 He suffered, he said, from “weakness of the body, an inferiority complex, and unmanageable balls.”47 Perhaps it was this brutal honesty which made Emma love him in spite of the fact that she said, “my reason repudiated the man but my heart cried out for him.” Apart from sex the truth was they had not a thing in common.

  The alliance between the King of the Hobos and the Queen of the Anarchists naturally caused a sensation. Margaret Anderson who edited the influential Little Review said “the fantastic Ben R . . . wasn’t so bad if you could hastily drop all your ideas as to how human beings should look and act.” (Ben, when he heard of this, was very hurt, maintaining Margaret Anderson had always been friendly). Sasha was shocked and disgusted and never missed an opportunity to expose Ben’s worthlessness. His intellectual crudity and social naïvety jarred on everyone’s nerves and his endless boasting about his pathetic exploits was nauseating. He talked sheer nonsense half the time and had not the faintest understanding of what anarchism stood for. Even worse, he was a liar and a cheat and had hordes of camp followers without a principle between them. Yet Emma, aged almost forty, had taken him as her lover. It seemed scarcely credible. What made her infatuation even harder to comprehend was that she was not blind to Ben’s many faults. She admitted all the allegations made against him were true. He lacked true social feeling, had no rebel spirit (beyond a schoolboy desire to cause mischief) and embarrassed her with his “love of swagger”. But she loved him. He was, she said, “the first man who would love the woman in me and yet who would also be able to share my work.”48 The way he shared it was to become her superbly effective and efficient manager. He went with her on tour and under his adroit handling of publicity her audiences greatly increased and arrangements went more smoothly. In the autumn of 1908 after she met Ben, Emma visited thirty-seven cities in twenty-five states and spoke in universities for the first time. Her lectures, especially on morality, went down well. Ben looked after her tenderly as well as master-minding the tour and she found herself more relaxed than she had ever been in her life. Sasha might ask what the awful Ben knew about anarchism but she had faith that in time he would learn and meanwhile his contribution to the movement was practical and solid. Furthermore, for the first time she found herself the dominant partner. Ben shared her work: the difference was vital.

  By this time, Emma was an important figure in America. Everyone had heard of her even if they were not quite sure what they had heard. In 1910 she consolidated her position as a leading anarchist and feminist with the publication of a book of essays, Anarchism and Other Essays. This made available to a wider public those ideas upon which she had been lecturing for over a decade and established her not just as an agitator but as a thinker of some stature. The feminist content of the essays was considerable, pointing women as they did towards a different sort of equality than that symbolized by the vote and legal rights. Marriage, she said in more than one essay, was women’s greatest enemy. It made parasites of women. Women should not enter into such a ruinous legal arrangement but on the other hand they should not hold themselves back from love itself. “I believe,” wrote Emma, “when woman signs her own emancipation her first declaration of independence will consist in admiring and loving a man for the qualities of his heart and mind and not for the quantities in his pocket.”49 She wanted women to make such declarations of real, fearless independence and not to repress their natural instincts. Again and again she emphasized the dangers of women being misled into imagining that any part of true feminism must involve antagonism to men. Nor must they imagine that, if they were given an equal share in political power, it was up to them to change the world. To expect them to do so was monstrous. It was “absurd” to think
that woman “will accomplish that wherein man has failed.”50 If woman tried to take on this impossible role she would be “wasting her life force.” The targets were all wrong: what woman ought to be attacking were conventions and traditions which, “in her exalted conceit,” she was not recognizing as much more her enemy than man was. Puritanism was what made woman’s life insufferable. The Calvinistic idea of life was her true curse, making her “repudiate every natural impulse.” What women must do was to liberate themselves from this stranglehold while at the same time holding onto their femininity.

  Emma was pleased with the reception her book received and not at all put out by the disapproval of many feminists. It seemed to her that she ought not to be afraid to draw from her own experience lessons which could be applied generally and which called doubt upon some of the more extreme feminist attitudes. Over the next eight years she was learning the hardest lesson ever taught her by experience which reinforced many of her earlier suspicions about the nature of women. Ben Reitman was her teacher. At first, she was “like a schoolgirl in love for the first time,” basking in Ben’s adoration and admiration. He thought she was “easily the greatest woman in the world . . . you’ve got a great brain and soul and remarkable courage and Jesus what a wonderful lover . . .”51 Gradually, he began to behave more naturally with her friends and it was grudgingly admitted by them that at least he was a hard worker and that he was prepared to suffer for the cause even if he still did not wholly embrace it. (Once, in San Diego, he was tarred and feathered and badly beaten by vigilantes who had gathered to stop Emma speaking, and on several other occasions he fought off those who tried to attack her with convincing determination.) Nobody doubted any longer that whatever existed between Ben Reitman and Emma Goldman could not be described as a passing emotion. But then it was noticed that Ben was also having other women without telling Emma.

  Eventually, she found out and was more devastated by his deliberate deceit, which ran counter to all anarchist principles, than by the affairs themselves. Ben swore none of them meant anything to him, that he could not help it, that he hadn’t even known the names of those with whom he had had brief liaisons. But the lies went on – silly lies about where he had been or how he had financed his secret trips. Emma wrote that when she discovered the full extent of his duplicity the “depths of my woman’s soul” were appalled. She found her feelings slowly changing. By “free” love she had not meant this, by giving herself fearlessly without need of marriage she had not expected to be betrayed. She pondered long and hard on this feeling of betrayal, wondering what new aspect of love she had now humiliatingly learned. It seemed that love did not work unless the love given and received was the same on both sides.

  Though they carried on as before, after each showdown over other women, she saw now that Ben “did not really live in his work or in our love.” They rented a large house together on East 119th Street, with a basement big enough to house the Mother Earth office, and took on a housekeeper and a secretary. Ben’s mother also moved in with them, which precipitated the breakdown of their now shaky relationship. Emma became bored with Ben’s ridiculous mother complex. One day “something snapped” in her and she picked up a chair, threw it at Ben, and ordered both him and his wretched mother out of her house. Though he moved out, he still came each day to work with her; but then he met a girl with whom he had an affair and began to develop “a conscious feeling for fatherhood.” The time had come for Emma to put an end to what was rapidly disintegrating into a farce – what she called “the height of tragi-comedy.” She brought down the curtain in 1916, leaving herself feeling “lonely and unutterably sad.”

  But there was still Sasha in the background, as close as ever to her. She felt she had crushed him, but now turned to him. If her connection with Ben had been “mainly erotic”, as she put it, that with Sasha was both cerebral and emotional – their lives, she never doubted, were “inextricably entwined” even if each of them became involved with others. After news of the Russian Revolution they began to work together closely again, touring America and speaking out on behalf of the revolutionaries and explaining the significance of their struggle. They also organized a No-Conscription league when America entered the First World War and for this both of them were arrested, tried and imprisoned in the summer of 1917.

  Soon after their release they were deported. On December 21st they were despatched on the Buford to Finland from where they travelled under military guard to Russia. At first, it was exhilarating to be home, although right from her arrival Emma felt “an undercurrent of uneasiness”. She saw too many glaring contradictions around, too much fuss about permits, too much evidence that cities like Moscow were nothing more than armed camps. The awful hunger and the brutal treatment of the poor begging in the streets distressed her. People tried to convince her that she had become “a pampered bourgeoisie [sic].” They told her “grey, dull spots” were inevitable at first and she must start working to help to eradicate them. She had interviews with Lenin and Alexandra Kollontai and then set about nursing, establishing camps for deportees, and finally collecting archive material for a Museum of the Revolution. This meant touring the whole vast country and brought her to what she called her Calvary. She determined to leave Russia and speak out against the terrible perversion of a wonderful idea. The old, cruel régime had simply, in her opinion, been replaced by a new, equally cruel one.

  In December 1921 she and Sasha managed to get a visa for Lithuania. From there they went to Estonia and then by boat, on January 2nd, 1922, to Sweden, and finally to Germany. There, she managed to extend her visa long enough to write My Two Years in Russia about her disillusionment; but she was restless and longing to return to America. Absence had made her heart grow very fond indeed but she could not return. Instead she went to England (in 1924) where she was unhappy. The English were not like the Americans. In spite of the warm friendship of Rebecca West she was miserable. The weather, the lack of any real anarchist movement and the apparent impossibility of earning her living depressed her. All England gave her that she valued was a new passport. Joseph Colton, a staunch Scottish anarchist whom she had met in the 1890s, married her to provide her with one. She used it to go to Canada, hoping to smuggle herself into America from there, but failed in her attempt.

  Meanwhile, her many friends had raised enough money to buy a cottage (Bon Esprit) among the vineyards on the hills above St Tropez. There she wrote her magnificent memoirs. Yet her active life was still not over. She toured Germany in the early 1930s, denouncing Hitler and the Nazis, and then during the Spanish Civil War she was invited to Barcelona. At sixty-seven she endured the daily bombardment of that city side by side with her comrades for seven weeks before going to London and then Canada to enlist support. On 14th May, 1940 she died there after a stroke. Her dead body was allowed back into America where she was buried in Chicago near the graves of those anarchists whose deaths had inspired her.

  * * *

  Sasha always said of Emma that she had “a squelching effect” on other women. She was too strong for them and they felt it, especially younger women. She was dictatorial, outspoken and mercilessly direct. She was not afraid to condemn women harshly and would not tolerate uncritical solidarity. Once she had lost her youthful plump blond prettiness and become a stout, squat figure, careless in appearance, she was an unattractive character to meet. Other women understandably were frightened of her. Her chain-smoking, apparent lack of any attention to her dress and her rather grim expression made her seem formidable. They also made her seem unfeminine, and yet she was deeply feminine and made the defence of femininity one of her basic aims. But, although she acknowledged the importance of staying attractive, she rejected the notion that femininity depended upon it. She criticized Margaret Anderson for looking “chic” and Alexandra Kollontai for having “such beautiful clothes.” Femininity, she felt, was an emotional quality, an internal state unaffected by external disguises. And yet she herself fretted about those external mani
festations even when she was old. When she was in her sixties she wrote to a friend in London asking her to send “a sweater coat of very fine wool either mauve or beige with some coloured border, collar and cuffs. I look so sombre in plain colours, I must have some gay strain in it.”52 She didn’t want light blue whatever happened because she said it made her look awful. Another time she requested “nice soft ruching for the wrists of my black dress.” It was not in fact true that she despised clothes and other frivolities as much as she appeared to.