Emma Goldman’s Radical Imagination

As I worked through the numbers on the page, nothing added up—literally. My calculus equations were contradicting each other. The more I tried to erase and redo parts of the problem, the deeper a hole I dug myself into. Somewhere along the way, some calculation had been messed up, and it was throwing the whole thing off. I had two options: continue to find small mistakes, erase them one by one, creating more mistakes elsewhere in my workings, try to fix them, and continue the cycle. Or, I could erase all my work. Start over. Redo the entire problem, maybe with a completely different approach. Sure, it would take time and effort. But isn’t it better, sometimes, to just scrap everything and start over?

Emma Goldman would say yes. Born into a Jewish family in 1869 under the Russian Empire, Goldman was no stranger to systemic oppression. She grew up surrounded by violence, anti-semitism, and corruption. After moving to Rochester, New York, to flee an arranged marriage set up by her abusive father, Goldman began working in a factory. She soon learned that, although she had escaped one oppressive system in Russia, the U.S.—which she thought was a land of opportunity and a sanctuary—did not live up to its promises. After a group of anarchists was convicted for the bombing of a Chicago labor activist rally in 1886, Goldman had a sort of political awakening. Convinced the accused were innocent, she became engrossed in the world of anarchism and soon would become a face of the anarchist movement herself. 

Despite being a strong activist for women’s equality, Goldman was not a fan of the U.S. women’s suffrage movement: she believed the right to vote would prove to be inconsequential in the face of all other systemic injustices. She believed it was distracting and even pointless to fight for such small victories as suffrage in a system that would continue to oppress women. Although the women’s suffrage movement was a success and resulted in guaranteeing equal rights for every citizen under the law, Goldman was right, in a way. Even today, over a century after being granted the right to vote, women in America still face prejudice and oppression through societal norms and the law. It begs the question: would it be more effective to simply tear down our systems and start over?

Although largely impractical in reality, this thought experiment can be an extremely useful tool for feminism today. Just as it’s fruitless to desire total utopia and settle for nothing less, it has proven ineffective to keep moving, using the tiniest of baby steps, towards the ever-moving goalpost of equality. It’s important to take a step back and consider how an ideal society would work if you could build it from scratch. Allowing imagination to roam free rather than be constrained by reality, like Goldman and similar anarchists, is crucial to building a more equal world.

Though some may view Goldman as a pessimist for holding the idea that systems had to be completely torn down for equality to finally become reality, I’d call her an optimist for it. She believed that, instead of government, which she argued was inherently oppressive in her book Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, keeping the public in line, the morality in everyone would hold citizens accountable. She imagined a world that relied on intrinsic human goodness. Dreaming up this world took incredible optimism; faith in not only what the world could look like but humanity’s ability to achieve it. She did not get swept up in the sadness of living in an unjust world where speaking up against that injustice led to persecution. She wrote in her autobiography, Living My Life, that she would not let such turmoils get in the way of her living a “beautiful ideal”. 

“I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism … should demand the denial of life and joy … If it meant that, I did not want it,” she wrote.

Goldman’s ability to envision and hope for a better world, I’ve found, is lacking in current feminist movements. The suffocating feeling of patriarchy’s ever-present effects restricts our ability to zoom out and imagine an equal world. As Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, editors of The Feminist Utopia Project, put it in their anthology, “How can we dream big when we are constantly playing whack-a-mole with the patriarchy?” We have to be focused on correcting setbacks that are, in the overall fight for equality, tiny: for example, the Pink Tax or quiet voting restrictions for married women. This hardly leaves the time and space to consider what an ideal world would look like, let alone work to achieve it. Goldman was able not just to find the necessity of a total upheaval of corrupt systems, but to find the joy in participating in that revolution.

I scrapped my math homework and grabbed a new sheet of paper. Pink eraser crumbs and broken pencil lead covered my desk. I dusted them off and started working again, not just relieved to have a clean sheet of paper but eager to find the solution.