peacocks and lilies

What Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History. A version of this essay was posted at The New Agenda Blog earlier today.

The progression of rights for American women is a story of unlikely alliances. The Seneca Falls Women’s Right’s Convention of 1848, which kicked off the First Wave, was itself the result of the unlikely alliance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (a young newlywed on her honeymoon) and Lucretia Mott (a 47 year old Quaker teacher) in a most unlikely place for these New England women: London, England. The 19th Amendment passed because of the alliance of Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, who had actually publicly opposed each other before coming together to work both public and private channels. Such is the case with one of the most important areas of progress for women: reproductive rights. The story of Margaret Sanger is a familiar one to many American women (largely because of the work Planned Parenthood has done to pay tribute to her legacy), but few are aware of her work with Emma Goldman, or their run-ins with the arch villain of the story, Anthony Comstock.

Goldman and Sanger Meet

Because of the inferior opportunities afforded to women throughout history, finding a woman with the kind of public charisma Emma Goldman held is quite rare. Even more remarkable is that she came up from a dispossessed group without any power and was still able to affect the kind of change she did. Goldman was born to Russian Jewish parents in 1869 and immigrated to America with her sister at the age of 15. She always worked, usually in factories and sweatshops in and around New York City. By the time she was 20 she was drawing large crowds on the streets of New York as a spokeswoman agitating for a broad labor movement. She grew increasingly radicalized as she aged.

Emma Goldman speaking on unemployment before a large crowd of New Yorkers.

Early in her activist career, after a stint as a kind of social worker in the slums of New York, she began advocating for birth control. Her ideas on gender politics had long been developing, resulting in the “juicy” tidbits of information about her that historians like to include: she advocated free love and anarchy. And she lived those values, living with several lovers after her short, failed marriage, and generally refusing to recognize unjust authority unless she had to. She was arrested many times and eventually deported. She and Margaret Sanger met after Sanger and her husband, William, moved to New York in 1910.

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