No "Denial of Life and Joy"

Today I want to celebrate the ideas of Emma Goldman. One of the leading anarchist and feminist thinkers of her time, Goldman was a tireless advocate for sexual freedom, pioneering the cause of birth control and free love. Although she never actually made the statement about the emptiness of a dance-less revolution that is famously attributed to her, she did express the following in her autobiography Living My Life:

"At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

"I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. 'I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things.' Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal." [Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]

For more on Emma Goldman's pioneering philosophy of sexual freedom see her landmark essays "The Hypocrisy of Puritanism," "The Traffic in Women," and "Marriage and Love."