Considering Emma

Preludes

I. ‘I’m dying to know what you’re laughing at?’ says the man I often share space with in the dismal basement microfilm room of the Doe Library, University of California at Berkeley, as he comes up to me with a smile. ² We have begun to nod at each other in the morning and on leaving, but this is the first attempt to transgress the stale atmosphere of our confinement. I have, I realize, been positively hooting with laughter at Emma Goldman’s published rant in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, in which she roundly castigates women for not loving their men enough to stay with them to the death. ‘It is to be hoped’, Goldman notes, ‘that some there were among the steerage victims at least, who preferred death with those they loved to life at the expense of their loved ones’ (1912: 8). I have spent most of the morning laughing, in fact: at Goldman’s biting attacks on suffragists, and her ability to rout out hypocrisy with an apt turn of phrase. ‘I’m laughing at how nasty Emma Goldman is to women’, I reply. We look at each other. ‘Oh’, he says, smile waning, leaving me to ponder what I just said.

A glow of enthusiasm comes over me, and I find myself nodding furiously as I read Goldman’s analysis of the importance of women’s emancipation: not in its own right, or for votes, but as a central component of a challenge to capitalism, war and consumerist, corrupt desires that make a poor substitute for real passion, love and desire for change. Yes. Yes. Yes, I think to myself: real emancipation will enable us to engage directly with others, and will release our true, politically engaged selves so that we can create a world that allows everyone to flourish. And further: we must focus on quality over quantity, change our tastes, examine ourselves properly, cast capitalist social values aside, and harness the generous, nurturing capacities that are our true nature. Yes! Yes! No, wait. Am I really celebrating an appeal to woman’s true nature? I know better than that, surely. And so, I become more skeptical … But when anyone asks me how my research on Goldman is going, the first thing I feel is that glow.

II. Here is my original abstract for the 8th European Feminist Research conference that this article emerges from:

A Genealogy of Ambivalence: Emma Goldman, Postfeminists and Feminist Politics for Our Times

In an era of ‘postfeminism’, where gender equality is often presumed to have been achieved – in some places and not others, imposed or prescribed as a marker of modernity – it is easy for feminists to feel disheartened. In contemporary Europe, gender equality seems either to have been thoroughly mainstreamed to the point of de-politicisation, or to be sidelined by the always more urgent demands of a financial crisis. In such a moment, it is easy to write a history of feminism as left behind, co-opted, surpassed or abandoned, and to seek to reclaim a familiar feminism, one thoroughly known because one is its historical and contemporary subject. But what if feminism needs to move beyond itself to ask questions relevant to the political problem of gender today? What if we need to think not only about how gender (in)equality may have changed and how it might be differently addressed, but also challenge presumptions about its subject (and thus its history)?

To begin this work, I want to think two seemingly disparate political moments and subjects together. Emma Goldman, that larger than life transnational political actor who could not attach to feminism, but who was consistently drawn back to sexual politics and the gendered character of structures and institutions (including social movements). And a contemporary postfeminist subject, whose articulated distance from feminism remains undercut by the ‘but’ that returns her to the difficulties of gendered negotiations, and whose attachments may be elsewhere (rather than nowhere) perhaps. In the process of thinking these two figures together I hope to argue that cultures of gendering have been under-estimated in the drive for formal gender or sexual equality. What remains under-theorised in our feminist desire for clear histories and attachments (as well as politics) is the ambivalence that also characterizes the present and past of feminism, an ambivalence that political conservatives have no problems identifying and exploiting.

I thought that this sounded like an apt paper for a contemporary international feminist conference, and hoped it might perhaps help in exploring different ways of thinking about the feminist present, pulling through different strands from the past. I thought it might even offer a methodology for thinking about present gender relations, concentrating on the relationship between economic and cultural or intersubjective understandings of gender, which are too often held apart. Yet I ended up getting sidetracked, both in my reading of the archive, and in my reading of the secondary material on Goldman, and suddenly it was hard to see where I was going after all. I will come back to some aspects of my original fantasy talk (an abstract is always a fantasy, but a productive one nevertheless; I haven’t entirely abandoned its parameters), but my interest has now shifted to the significance of nasty laughter and embodied enthusiasm in the feminist reading of a historical figure instead. In this article, then, I aim to take you with me along these sidetracks to explore the question of what I want from Goldman when I return to her to answer questions I have about gender politics in the present, and what you want from me when I talk about her to you.

The making of an icon

There is a veritable explosion of interest in Goldman contemporarily, partly in combination with a more general interest in anarchism, partly through a postcolonial or transnational feminist politics interested in finding antecedents to intersectional, anti-nationalist and anti-capitalist global politics. These strands continue a long tradition of claiming Goldman for a particular politics throughout her life – the media was consistently interested in Goldman during her lifetime, describing her appearance in particular in graphic and often contradictory detail (Frankel, 1996) – and the subsequent iconographic status she has attained on t-shirts and other paraphernalia (Ferguson, 2011: 76ff.). They also reference earlier feminist engagement with and attachment to Goldman, within which writers such as Candace Falk (1984), Bonnie Haaland (1993), Alix Kate Shulman (2007 [1982]) and Alice Wexler (1985/1986) sought to frame her as a feminist heroine: indeed, for Shulman Goldman was a ‘militant feminist foremother’ (2007 [1982]: 242). As with similar attempts to reclaim Mary Wollstonecraft, this feminist interest had to work rather hard to frame her as a straightforwardly feminist heroine, however, both because of Goldman’s attitudes to women and what are frequently read as her hypocritical attachments to male lovers (see Kaplan, 2002; Taylor, 2003). ³ But these feminist writers recover from doubt by reframing her as a conflicted subject with a history we can still learn from, rather than abandoning her altogether.

One of the more recent strands I am interested in, ‘post-anarchism’, self-represents as ‘either a new hybrid of anarchism with poststructuralism or as a return to the radical political content of poststructuralism’ (Franks, 2008: 136). Theorists in this genre are concerned to integrate Bakunin, Kropotkin, Berkman, Goldman or others as the perfect predecessors to French poststructuralists and their Anglo-American and broader European audiences, but must first cleanse them of their understandable, but unacceptable, essentialism. The political aim is to provide new ways of looking at new forms of domination, such as the banking crisis, or sans status migrants in Canada, without forgetting the historical resources we already have (May, 2008; Newman, 2010). In another strand, Goldman herself takes the spotlight, and is harnessed as part of various projects to prioritize intersectional or anti-nationalist approaches to gender, sexuality and feminism (e.g. Ferguson, 2011; Rogness and Foust, 2011; Shantz, 2004). These scholars make many of the connections I was hoping to in my original conference paper. They link a post-postmodernist feminist style and embodiment with Goldman’s refusal of convention, they suggest that sexual and gender politics need to be at the heart of a renewed political commitment to anti-capitalism, they seek to link border-patrolling with the control over women’s bodies, and flag the relationship between intersubjective meanings of gender and neoliberal economics. My own abandoned abstract similarly signals a desire to reanimate Goldman for a contemporary post-feminist politics with a history. As I bury myself in the archive, I make copious notes on how we might take up Goldman to think through the ways in which cultural and economic spheres cannot be intellectually or politically separated, and the ways in which women’s refusals to embrace sexual freedom point to the ongoing precarity of economic gains for women. Over and over again I come back to Goldman’s stress on the quality part of equality as the only way of moving towards an expansive emancipatory agenda that does not recentre capitalist interests even as it seeks to displace them.

Whatever one thinks of the politics of reclamation, Goldman’s political epistemology does of course lend itself to these various approaches, since she seeks to place women’s emancipation at the very heart of revolutionary endeavour. For Goldman, the position of ‘woman’ is key in sustaining political repression, and thus her emancipation is fundamental to how social transformation must be achieved. Not only does she occupy the distinct position of mediator between public and private (see Haaland, 1993), for Goldman woman’s ability to free herself from external forces, to move beyond superficial femininity, is fundamental for all radical change (Goldman, 1897). No fan of suffrage, Goldman urged women to dare to seek ‘emancipation from emancipation’, and to reject assumptions about women’s innate superiority to men (1906a, 1914, 1917). Goldman made important links in her work between women’s suffering within marriage and the role of reproduction in fuelling militarist capitalism (1908a, 1915), worked with socialists and labour organizers, supported prostitutes and homosexuals at a time when many other anarchists did not (Kissack, 2008), and strongly believed that living differently was part of the necessary political preparation for a new dawn (Goldman, 1909, 1911). In reading Goldman, writers, including me, find traces of a frenzied life dedicated to promoting and living change, a ‘feisty-edgy Emma … for a new generation’ (Falk, 2007: 43).

In considering the above strands, I want to interrogate a little further their celebratory modes, pushing on the tendency of ‘fans’ to import ideas they like and discount those they deem less useful. Thus post-anarchism takes up modern anarchism as a precursor in a straightforward progress narrative, the equation for which might perhaps be rendered as anarchism plus poststructuralism (minus essentialism) equals very smart contemporary theory and politics indeed. Poststructuralism is overwhelmingly the corrective force. Similarly, when theorists claim Goldman for a queer, transnational sexual politics it is once more regrettable but understandable essentialism and heterosexism that are bracketed off. And in taking Goldman up for an anti-nationalist or internationalist politics, her own rather vexed and superficial relationship to American race politics tends to be framed primarily as anomalous, renarrated through her attention to Jewishness and migration, or simply ignored. ⁴ Her flaws remain with her; her strengths become ours.

I have long been of a view that we cannot simply go back in time and reclaim our preferred figures without exploring what work they are doing for us in the present, what that move prevents us from seeing in relation to our own self-styling as heroines rather than anti-heroines (Hemmings, 2005, 2011). More and more as I think this through, however, I am confronted by the knowledge that what I want from Goldman cannot be answered in pragmatic political terms. The historiographic approaches I have tended to favour that focus on the ‘teller of tales’ as fully implicated in her narrations (Burton, 2005; Spivak, 1999), take us a long way. They help us engage with the writing subject as a desiring subject likely to recognize certain things and not others in the past that she harnesses to make a particular case in the present. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, particularly if the case itself is rendered transparent, but in thinking through what I, and others, want from Goldman, I have been struck by how the burden of that work of accountability rests paradoxically enough with the one caught in its bright lights.

Desiring Emma

That question of accountability and desire in historical dynamics leads me, of course, to psychoanalysis and history. I will move shortly to suggest some general reasons why psychoanalysis may be helpful for thinking through subjective attachments and the historical process, but for the moment I want to stick with why it lends itself so strongly to an encounter with Goldman in particular (and no doubt other reclaimed figures). In framing our desires for her political and intellectual relevance in the present, in passionately wanting Goldman to do particular work for us now, we write that relationship in an intense emotional language. Interest in Goldman seems never to be neutral, the desire for her represented through joy or horror, enthusiasm or betrayal, as our heroine always threatens to become our anti-heroine. Authors are variously ‘thrilled’, ‘admiring’, inspired or delighted, describe her as a ‘superwoman’, are ‘irritated’ by her ‘manipulativeness’, castigate her for her self-righteousness, or dismiss her for being a ‘hysteric’, overly ‘caustic’ and ‘aggressive’ (see in particular Herzog, 2007; Kensinger, 2007; Shulman, 2007 [1982]; Solomon, 1988; Wexler, 1992). I myself enjoy claiming Goldman as the heroine of a history of feminist ambivalence rather than certainty immensely, and am dismissive of the ways in which other feminists try to mould her in their own image (as though ambivalence were not related to my own aims, indeed). But on discovering just how close some of my favourite phrases of Goldman’s are to those penned by key women contemporaries, usually without acknowledgement on her part, I find myself crushed, as once I was delighted.

Wexler’s work in ‘The anxiety of biography’ (1992) is a particularly helpful attempt to work through the meanings of her attachment to Goldman. Variously enchanted and disappointed by Goldman, Wexler tracks her desire in terms of her familial relationships and her attempt to substitute Goldman for her own mother, who she represents as passive and compliant: the opposite of Goldman. ⁵ In strong terms, Wexler insists that ‘EG … has taken up permanent residence in my life as part of a feminist network ‘of the imagination … an/Other/Mother’ with whom I continue to argue and identify’ (1992: 49). ⁶ Wexler’s desire is hyper-visible in this piece and yet strangely pre-empts analysis: it has an assurance of its own emotional register. Thus, Wexler represents her relationship with Goldman as one of a straightforward substitution of her heroine for her mother, as entirely resonant with her own history of Jewish ambivalence, and as a relationship that could eventually be fully understood, if not resolved. Such an investigation may do some interesting work of course, but if Goldman simply remains a ‘m/other’ then we are more rather than less likely to settle into our familiar generational roles (with all their hopes and disappointments). Instead, I want to read with theorists such as Joan Scott (2012) and Jacqueline Rose (1996) to follow tracks of what escapes historical (and political) knowability, rather than what confirms it.

This desire to interrupt what is known, through psychoanalytic reading and reflection, is a shared one. Feminist scholars have engaged consistently with psychoanalysis, precisely in order to foreground the importance of emotion and intersubjectivity in the challenging of objectivist perspectives (Chodorow, 1989; Mitchell, 1974; Stacey, 2013), and to puzzle over the question of unknowability (Felman, 1977; Khanna, 2012; Wiegman, 2012). In my reading in the terrain of psychoanalysis and history thus far, three areas that emerge from this rich literature have struck me as particularly productive. The first is the importance of conceiving history as a dense site of fantasy, a dynamic relationship between writer and historical figure, one that is subject to projection and transference, and raises ethical questions about accountability. As Leo Spitzer notes in his recent work with Marianne Hirsch, we need to ‘take into account … the apprehension and misapprehension of events – [that] complicates and restores a measure of contingency to history’ (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2013: 192). It is no surprise, then, that the differences between critics’ lives and Goldman’s life often become scrambled. But to push still further, one might say that what I have been describing is not simply transference of the present onto the past, but transference of a fantasy present onto a past one has designs on. What one knows about the present is always partial, related to what one remembers about the past and what one wants the future to look like. As Adam Phillips insists: ‘memories always have a future in mind’ (2005: 35). For postcolonial psychoanalytic scholars, there is then a battle in the present over which future will dominate, which is always to say, which past (Gilroy, 2004; Khanna, 2003). Thus to imagine a seamless move from past to present, whether in feminist mode or otherwise, is always to privilege some knowledges in the present over others, and to risk ignoring the violence that inheres in making real those fantasies (Rose, 1996). In our desire to rescue the present as well as the past through Goldman, as I have been tracking, we import ideas and theories that we hope will finally resolve the complicated problems of difference and inequality we live in; a more accountable position may be to sit with those difficulties a while.

A second emerging interest linked to the question of fantasy in historical enquiry concerns temporality. In psychoanalytic work, the present is always bound up with what is remembered, half-remembered or forgotten in a series of loops or folds. As suggested, the relationship between a subject and the(-ir) past is never simply linear, never a question of straightforward origin brought forward. Importantly, this understanding of the proximity between present and the past allows for creative reconfiguration: we may inhabit more than one role – mother, daughter, neither – and are not simply doomed to repeat cycles of repetition or origin stories (Jacobus, 1995). To consider history through memory’s turns rather than reclamation’s grasp as I hope to, then, is to foreground an understanding of the present as always containing multiple histories – visible and invisible – and our relationship to these histories as characterized by ambivalence (Berlant, 2007). To link fantasy and temporality for a moment, as Rose does so beautifully, ‘fantasy is also a way of re-elaborating and therefore of partly recognizing the memory which is struggling, against the psychic odds, to be heard’ (1996: 5). What we obscure is, in this sense, surely as interesting for a feminist politics engaging Goldman as what we are delighted with. Indeed, is it perhaps only through attention to what is obscured that the fantasy-as-reality we cleave to might be revealed and even disrupted?

And so I am brought to my third area of current interest sparked by psychoanalytic approaches to history: the unconscious, the unknowable that nevertheless seeks to be known, speaking to us in narrative slips, dreams, or ‘when two people forget themselves in each other’s presence’ (Phillips, 1996: 31). Is what we obscure in our relationship to the past the unconscious of feminist theory, here? Presumably not, since to seek to articulate its features would be a paradoxical mission indeed. But nevertheless, psychoanalytic attention to what hovers at the boundary between the known and the unknown in psychic as well as social life helps me to concentrate less on what we think we know about the present, but instead on what we seem to want to forget. I very much appreciate both Jacqueline Rose’s (1998) and Shoshana Felman’s (1977) framing of the unconscious in scholarly work as a question of method, of reading for ambivalence and creative tension between the said and unsaid, in ‘the moments when writing slips its moorings’ (Rose, 1998: 128), such that otherwise precluded connections can be made. For Scott, in turn, the relationship that emerges between the historian and her subject can be read through disjuncture or incommensurability, through the ‘often chaotic interactions of past and present in the psyche’ (2012: 67). Following Michel de Certeau, Scott notes that the unconscious cannot be accessed directly, but perhaps through the uncanny: ‘that which historians know but must deny’ (2012: 67).

What do I know but deny in my fantasy relationship to Goldman as I mediate past and present? What do feminist and other scholars know but deny about Goldman in order to bring her forward as an appropriate heroine in the shaping of their own imagined future? Or less abstractly, what can I say about what I may be trying to forget, but which continues to insist, keeps on interrupting the neat narratives of self, theory and politics I have a vested interest in settling in with? Let me return to one of the two moments of discomfort I began the article with: being caught laughing. Here, my pleasurable affect came from dubious origins, from an ill-received appreciation of Goldman’s viciousness towards women that produced shame in the moment of its being witnessed. So what is it about Goldman’s judgements of women that I know I need to distance myself from?

‘Woman’s inhumanity to man’

For Goldman, women’s particular social position marks them as dependent, vulnerable, duplicitous subjects. In line with many of her anarchist contemporaries, this means that women are ill equipped for revolutionary activity and their passivity and misery often prevents men participating in labour activity as well. As Sharif Gemie notes: ‘The anarchist critique of “femininity” centred on women’s artificiality, their too faithful imitation of dominant norms of civilization, their too close integration into the authority relations of their society’ (1996: 435). Solidarity, the argument goes, is harder for women because the conditions of their oppression render them passive, greedy and narcissistic, while men’s conditions present fuller opportunities for group identification. As one might expect, such critique slips easily into misogyny. Take this rather striking quotation Elizabeth Hutchison cites from an early twentieth-century Chilean anarchist: ‘ “You [women] have played and you will always play the role in life of a lemon, which after it is squeezed is dashed violently in the garbage. Your history is very sad and disgraceful” ’ (2001: 519). Goldman not only shares many of these views of women’s role, she shares the vitriol. The social ills she laments make of woman a disagreeably petty and obsessive creature, who nags or attacks men, is overly vain or lets herself go, is ‘dependent in her decisions, cowardly in her judgment; a weight and a bore’ (1911: 10). She is more inclined to superficiality and consumerism, caring ‘only for showy clothes and frivolity’ (New York Sun, 1901: 5), substituting real visions with ‘dreams of shopping tours and bargain counters’ (1911: 10). Goldman is sometimes shockingly unpleasant to suffragists, describing ‘emancipated woman’ as ‘pathetic … lonely … and starved for male affection’ (1970a [1931]: 371), and her woman activist comrades as miserably plain (e.g. 1932: 29–33). She does not think that women are naturally superior to men or possess gentler traits; indeed the modern woman is rather ‘ferocious in her hate … persistently bent on conquest’ (1917: 79), but where men behave badly Goldman does not always call them to account, frequently blaming women, particularly mothers, for their flaws (e.g. 1970b [1931]: 556).

It makes sense of course that Goldman pays directed and sustained attention to women’s superficialities, given that her aim is to shake bourgeois women out of their contentment with gilded cages, and to encourage poor women not to risk all for the false promises of consumerism, marriage security and giving birth to sons. And while her own rhetoric frequently mirrors that of her less sympathetic anarchist comrades, there are important differences in Goldman’s analysis. For Goldman, women are not confined to these traits, they are not natural or inevitable, and so her chiding is based in frustration at women’s complacency, at settling for so little, rather than because this is how women are and always will be. By the 1920s indeed, Goldman had begun to appreciate changes women had made in their lives, and began to compare them more favourably to men – they had become more ‘virile … alive, active’ while men – post Second World War – had ‘lost their grip on life’ (1926).

Yet still, there is something about Goldman’s viciousness that cannot be read back as merely circumstantial and that attaches to women’s character by dint of its force and repetition. Goldman is much clearer on where women are duplicitous than on where change might occur, for example (Solomon, 1988), and the sheer pleasure she takes in her subject – women’s dependency, greed and stupidity – means that this has considerably more liveliness than her suggestions for alternatives, despite her focus on sexual freedom as a route to emancipation. Goldman is not the first heroine for contemporary feminists that is this nasty, of course: Simone de Beauvoir’s acid critiques and Mary Wollstonecraft’s diatribes on the ills of femininity immediately come to mind. Sally Alexander remarks of Wollstonecraft, for example, that ‘she castigated the coquetry of women of the leisured classes, condemned their feeble development of reason and virtue, their excess of sensibility, their false modesty’ (1984: 128). ⁷ Importantly, while this concern with challenging femininity is central to feminism, its excesses (those of femininity and of its critique) are always at risk of making a misogynist of the writer. Partly, of course, this is because femininity does stick to women.

Perhaps it this risk – of a descent into misogyny – that means I feel ‘caught’ in my pleasure at Goldman’s viciousness to women, at her witty excavations of the horrors of femininity. I am connected to Goldman in the archive through our sharing of repeated unkind jokes at (usually bourgeois) women’s expense, and feel considerable shame when this is witnessed. It is my woman hating I am caught out in, evidenced through that pleasure even more than through the viciousness itself. I know as a good contemporary feminist theorist that this nastiness must be replaced by a socially constructed view of women that sees all difficulties in femininity as located and transformable; inclusion and support for women must accompany a refusal to be separated from other women by the patriarchal moves that prize masculinity and its modes. Interestingly, and in line with my argument here, feminist writing engaging Goldman’s unpleasantness debates this in terms of whether we can continue to consider her a feminist despite her aggression, usually concluding that we can, because this misplaced misogyny is variously understandable at the time, a sign of her all-too-human failings, or something we can bracket off while still learning from other insights (Falk, 2003: 70–72; Kensinger, 2007: 269–272; Shulman, 2007 [1982]). Indeed, one reading of my pleasure in the archive here is that it allows me to enjoy Goldman’s vitriol while firmly locating it as ‘someone else’s’, a product of a different time and place, someone else’s unpleasantness that I can enjoy but that is not mine. Of course, this displacement also allows me to imagine myself other than the ‘usually bourgeois’ woman that is the object of Goldman’s scorn. I can experience the affect without the accountability for the critique that gives rise to the vitriol. And when giving talks related to this article, sympathetic chortles from the audiences suggest that it is not only me that derives pleasure in Goldman’s viciousness, nor that I am the only one uneasy at this realization.

But I think my unease when caught laughing also references something else that is less easily addressed, and that a focus on what I want to deny may help me explore. Why, one might ask, do I experience pleasure in her vitriol in the first place such that my series of moves is necessary at all? Might it perhaps resonate with something I know between the lines of a story contemporary feminism tells about itself, something about the necessity of harsh judgement as well as inclusion to the transformation of gender relations? While all sorts of stories are told about gender and progress, including that ‘development’ itself can be read directly off women’s improved economic and political location, I know (as Goldman knew) that economic or political improvements and real equality are not necessarily the same thing. And I know that women’s attachments to dubious advantages are hard to shake off precisely to the extent that they inhere in femininity itself. Perhaps, monstrous though it is, my connection to Goldman through being caught laughing reveals something important for contemporary feminism: a kind of knowledge that critique of femininity is actually not just a question of the social framing of women, but a problem of feminist judgement that is problematically foreclosed in the present. Does my laughter point to a fundamental ambivalence at the heart of any feminist project, a kind of instability in feminist subjectivity itself perhaps, that is predicated on an acknowledgement of femininity as both deeply flawed and transformable, but also on the subject’s likely position as both critic and object of that critique?

Conclusion

I want to close by asking after that other affective moment that kept coming back to me: my enthusiasm (and embarrassment) in reflecting Goldman’s ever-effusive insistence that the world can and will be a better place. That insistence reflects her belief that human nature is essentially good, and human beings – given half a non-capitalist chance – will connect with others in generous ways, will prioritize the social good, not their own self-interest, as women and men do now (1906b, 1908b). Certainly we know as contemporary feminists that humanism is not something easy to claim, or indeed enjoy, again (like judgement) for excellent reasons. Humanism and its frequent correlate – essentialism – have provided the dubious basis for political violence throughout the twentieth century, through characterizations of women and minorities as naturally less intellectually able, more rooted in the body, and men and people of certain ‘races’ and not others as being better able to provide rational leadership, scientific and biological improvement, and so on. Within feminism, the biological essentialism that so often underpins humanist progress narratives has been rightly critiqued along similar lines, and is something that one would never at this point claim as a salient part of one’s work: one accuses others of essentialism or is so accused.

Is Goldman’s belief in human nature, as the post-anarchist and transnational feminist claimings of Goldman attest, something that must – and should – be left behind, then? Should we cleanse her of the historical ‘sin of essentialism’, draining her thought through that poststructuralist sieve? Or, might we instead focus on Goldman’s anti-nationalism, her internationalism, rather than on her absolute belief in human nature, or indeed, her support for an emerging eugenics movement, blindness to racial politics, or quasi-spiritual belief in the transformative experience of motherhood? Let us bring Goldman forward in our own image and revivify a Goldman who would, surely, not be so essentialist if she were around now! In the process perhaps we can save not just the present, but the past as well. But what about Goldman’s insistent enthusiasm? Do we have to leave that behind too? And how indeed are we to go about separating her faith in human nature from her other philosophies? As I am sure is clear, I am increasingly convinced not only that one cannot separate out so simply the parts one likes from the parts one does not when reading through a historical figure, but also that my own enthusiasm in reading her enthusiasm would make such a move duplicitous. If it is Goldman’s ‘spirit’ – by turns vitriolic and affirmative – that draws us to Goldman contemporarily, that reminds me of my own creativity and energy (much less hard fought for), what kind of violence do we do when we sideline these engagements, or write them off as in need of a straightforward correction? Is generosity as well as vitriol part of what we deny when we forget the myriad histories of an always-conflicted feminism?