Emma Goldman: “Marriage and Love”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In her life as a political activist, Emma Goldman earned a well-deserved reputation as an advocate for women's emancipation. As an anarchist, however, she argued that women must assert more direct control over their lives rather than depend upon such bourgeois reforms as suffrage bestowed by an exploitive capitalist state. At the core of women's emancipation, according to Goldman, were the issues of marriage and love. Goldman associates the power of love with the liberating nature of anarchism, while the institution of marriage represents the coercive powers of the state seeking to enslave women by making them the property of a husband. Thus, the oppressive institution of marriage is a product of capitalist exploitation. Asserting that love and marriage are antagonistic, Goldman argues that marriage is primarily an economic arrangement in which women provide sexual favors in exchange for the husband's labor and financial support of the family. Marriage, in fact, becomes an insurance policy fostering female dependency.

Still, Goldman insists that owing to the puritanical restraints of American culture, women are rendered ignorant of the sexual role that they are expected to perform. In her embrace of female sexuality free from the restraints of marriage, Goldman was criticized for what respectable middle-class types often termed “free love.” But Goldman argues that far greater tragedy and disappointment await young women who surrender their dreams of love to the mundane concerns of economic security.

Goldman scoffs at the idea that marriage is required to protect children, observing that child labor and abuse, along with orphanages, provide ample evidence that capitalist marriage fails to protect the interests of children. Instead, Goldman proclaims that women should be free to have fewer children and not be dictated to by church and state, seeking more sources of labor for the exploitation of capitalist society. Goldman concludes that women should be liberated from the tyranny of marriage and be free to pursue love, which she insists is the only hope for the world. In her personal life, Goldman sought independence from male domination through the liberating power of love and anarchism; however, she was often disappointed in her personal relationships.