Tongue of Fire

Donna M. Kowal

Description

Finalist for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Women's Studies category
Winner of the 2017 Everett Lee Hunt Award presented by the Eastern Communication Association<

Silver Medalist, 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Women's Issues Category

In this book, Donna M. Kowal examines the speeches and writings of the "Most Dangerous Woman in the World" within the context of shifting gender roles in early twentieth-century America. As the notorious leader of the American anarchist movement, Emma Goldman captured newspaper headlines across the country as she urged audiences to reject authority and aspire for individual autonomy. A public woman in a time when to be public and a woman was a paradox, Goldman spoke and wrote openly about distinctly private matters, including sexuality, free love, and birth control. Recognizing women's bodies as a site of struggle for autonomy, she created a discursive space for women to engage in the public sphere and act as sexual agents. In turn, her ideas contributed to the rise of a feminist consciousness that recognized the personal as political and rejected dualistic notions of gender and sex.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Anarchist Women and the "Sex Question"

2. Bodies That Love: Emma Goldman's Sexual Revolution

3. Sex, Labor, and the Public Sphere

4. "Tongue of Fire": A Radical Subjectivity

5. Framing "The High Priestess of Anarchy"

Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Discourse analysis
• Stylistics
• Semantics

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 16 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438459752
• Langue: English

Extrait

TONGUE OF FIRE
TONGUE OF FIRE
Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question
DONNA M. KOWAL
Cover photo courtesy of PhillyHistory.org ,
a project of the Philadelphia Department of Records.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Jenn Bennett
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kowal, Donna M., 1967-
Tongue of fire : Emma Goldman, public womanhood, and the sex question / Donna M. Kowal.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5973-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-5975-2 (e-book) 1. Goldman, Emma, 1869–1940. 2. Women anarchists—United States—Biography. 3. Jewish anarchists—United States—Biography. 4. Feminists—United States—Biography. 5. Women and socialism. I. Title.
HX843.7.G65K6897 2016
335'.83092—dc23
[B]
2015011073
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Anarchist Women and the “Sex Question”
2 Bodies That Love: Emma Goldman’s Sexual Revolution
3 Sex, Labor, and the Public Sphere
4 “Tongue of Fire”: A Radical Subjectivity
5 Framing “The High Priestess of Anarchy”
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
5.1. Emma Goldman cartoon in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands), 1901.
5.2. Illustration of Emma Goldman in the St. Louis (MO) Republic , 1901.
5.3. Feature story about Emma Goldman by a female reporter in the Herald Republican (Salt Lake City, UT), 1910.
5.4. Illustration of Emma Goldman as a man in the World (New York), 1893.
5.5. Character portrait of Emma Goldman as an alleged accomplice in the assassination of President William McKinley in the World (New York), 1901.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to my colleagues, family, friends, and countless other beings for their support, sustained over many years. The foundation for “Tongue of Fire”: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the “Sex Question” was built with my dissertation The Public Advocacy of Emma Goldman: An Anarcho-Feminist Stance on Human Rights (University of Pittsburgh, 1996). I am grateful for the mentoring I received from Lester C. Olson, who served as my dissertation director and encouraged my interest in “disorderly” rhetorics. In the years that followed, I teamed up with Linda Diane Horwitz and Catherine Helen Palczewski to explore the rhetorical styles of anarchist women, a project that broadened my understanding and appreciation of the social influence of anarchist-feminism and culminated in “Anarchist Women and the Feminine Ideal: Sex, Class, and Style in the Rhetoric of Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, and Lucy Parsons,” which appeared in volume 5 of A Rhetorical History of the United States (Michigan State University Press, 2008). “Tongue of Fire” expands on some of the arguments made in this essay, while focusing exclusively on Goldman as the most prominent anarchist-feminist activist in terms of her public notoriety and access to audiences.
This book and the aforementioned works would not have been possible without the extensive documentation of Goldman’s speeches, writings, and correspondence made available by The Emma Goldman Papers microfilm collection (Chadwyck-Healey, 1991) and digital library exhibition (University of California, Berkeley, 1995–2014), under the direction of Candace Falk; the Joseph A. Labadie Collection curated by Julie Herrada (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); and the International Institute of Social History’s digital collection of Emma Goldman Papers . Additionally, the Library of Congress website Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers is a wonderful resource that enabled me to research how the press covered Goldman’s activism.
My colleagues in The College at Brockport’s Department of Communication and Honors College have provided much encouragement and support over the years. I am also grateful for the financial support I have received, particularly sabbatical leaves and scholarly incentive grants. In the early stages of planning the manuscript, I benefited greatly from the feedback and inspiration of fellow participants in the feminist rhetorics writing workshop led by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and sponsored by Syracuse University’s Feminist Research Network Forum in 2008. Likewise, I wish to thank SUNY Press Acquisitions Editor, Amanda-Lanne Camilli, for her enthusiasm for this project, along with the support of the Production Editor, Jenn Bennett, and the Marketing Editor, Kate R. Seburyamo. The anonymous reviewers of the manuscript provided me with invaluable suggestions for revision, especially “reviewer C” who encouraged me to extend the implications of my analysis. I am also grateful to Mary McCrank, former student turned colleague and friend, who helped me prepare the final manuscript.
Lastly, I am indebted to family members and friends—near and far—who have provided me with ceaseless support and camaraderie. Most of all, I am grateful for Tom, whose loving support and fun sense of humor made it possible for me to bring this project to completion.
INTRODUCTION
I have decided to take up the fight here and to fight it out to the end. I do not want to go to prison. I want to walk under the sky, under the stars—but not the stars and stripes—but prison or no prison, I will not be silenced.
—Emma Goldman, “Free Speech Strangled,” Free Society , April 21, 1901
O n December 21, 1919, Emma Goldman stepped on to the SS Buford , also known as “the Soviet Ark” and “a Christmas present” for Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. She was one of three women deported to Russia that day. 1 The 249 passengers were deemed to be undesirable aliens who posed an imminent threat to the United States government—many were subject to anti-communism raids conducted in New York City and other urban centers, authorized by the US Department of Justice in the context of mounting hysteria over the Bolshevik Revolution. The New York Tribune dramatically portrayed the ship’s departure from Ellis Island, noting “the voices of the members of the ‘Red’ colony raised in song. They were singing ‘The Internationale.’” 2 Although Goldman’s thirty-year career as the voice of American anarchism had come to a close with the departure of the Buford , her ideas about living, working, and loving in freedom continue to resonate, especially for women. Indeed, as problems such as pay equity, pregnancy discrimination, marriage equality, and access to contraception, abortion, and sex education continue to get argued out in the public arena, Goldman’s sexual politics has enduring relevance to twenty-first century gender struggles.
Prior to the second wave of feminism, the notion that a woman could be a sexual agent and be in control of her own body—that is, seek sexual pleasure and make reproductive choices—was an exception to the norm. Furthermore, it was a violation of feminine docility for a woman to speak from a podium to a “promiscuous audience” 3 of women and men, let alone speak about sex in public. Yet, the association of second-wave feminism with advances in sexual freedom—and likewise the first wave with political enfranchisement and the third wave with identity politics and transnational action—ignores the “frequencies” or “radio waves” that have oscillated across centuries of women’s movement activism, argues Nancy A. Hewitt (2012). 4 Indeed, if we employ the conventional narrative of feminism as a series of waves, it quickly becomes apparent that Goldman’s anarchist-feminist discourse has rippled across time. While suffrage activists who viewed obtaining the right to vote as a benchmark for equality were among Goldman’s first-wave contemporaries, her ideas are often understood to be more aligned with the goals of second-wave feminism because she rejected the notion that suffrage would liberate women, instead calling upon women (and men) to realize emancipation by exercising individual autonomy. Additionally, the emphasis she placed on sexual pleasure and her critique of the binary construct of gender dovetail with third-wave feminism, particularly its focus on sex positivity and the problematization of identity. Even recent post-feminist arguments for replacing collective action with individual action can be linked to Goldman’s human rights advocacy and call for radical individualism. 5
A woman “who prefers hell to heaven,” 6 “an apostle of discord and dynamite,” 7 “a nuisance to society,” 8 “the High Priestess of Anarchy” 9 —these are just a few of the many vivid characterizations of Goldman, a Russian-Jewish woman who immigrated to America in 1885 and launched her career as a