4: Essay excerpt, Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” 1911.

4: Essay excerpt, Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love,” 1911.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an influential anarchist, political activist, and writer who lectured and wrote about freedom of speech, anti-capitalism, atheism, anti-militarism, birth control, women’s rights, and free love. In her essay “Marriage and Love,” Goldman rejects marriage as an institution that limits love and confines women to servility to their husbands.

Suggested Activity: Ask students to read the passage and then compare it to one of C.’s speeches in chapter 39 of Miriam Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl. To what extent is C. borrowing from this free love ideology to make his arguments, and to what extent does he veer from it? Why would C., so clearly a misogynist figure, espouse an ideology so similar to that of a famed feminist? Is there humor in his doing so, and if so, who is the butt of the joke? Ask your students if they can think of contemporary examples in which ideologies are borrowed or subverted as they move between cultural or political groups.

Source: Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love” (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911), 7, https://archive.org/details/marriageandlove00goldgoog/page/n8/mode/2up.