Women, Resistance and Revolution (15 page)

In her own life she experienced intense and acute emotional suffering which often paralysed her completely. She wrote to Havelock Ellis in 1885, ‘Life is a battle to be fought quietly, persistently at every moment.’
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She shared the intellectual loneliness, the emotional despair and the nervous diseases and tension common to women of the period, who broke away from convention not only politically but socially and sexually. Unable to identify with the women’s movement in the eighties and nineties, she disliked the timidity, respectability and attachment to Mrs Grundy which she found in ‘women’s rights’. The range of her interests was much wider and more explosive. She wanted to find out exactly why she felt tense before menstruating and noticed she couldn’t work. Eleanor Marx was the only woman she could discuss this with. Then there was the dilemma of her own sexual nature. She had discovered in one relationship with a man that she had a strong streak of masochism. Under Havelock Ellis’s tutelage she explored the existing works on sex psychology. Olive Schreiner insisted too on finding out the actual conditions and feelings of women with vastly different experiences from her own.
She observed and recorded black South African women, London prostitutes and Lancashire mill girls because she wanted to learn from them about their situation.

But amidst her search to discover ‘Woman’ she displayed distaste for her own womanliness. She resented the constraint of her own femininity. She felt herself at war with many of the characteristics of women of her own time. When she was young she longed to be a boy, and the heroine of her novel
From Man to Man
dreams ‘ “How nice it would be to be man”. She fancied she was one, until she felt her body grow strong and hard and shaped like a man’s. She felt the great freedom opened to her; no place shut off from her, the long chain broken, all work possible for her, no law to say this and this is for woman.’
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There was still too great a divide between the assertion of the dignity of women and the hope of human possibility for women and the realization of that dignity in the life women had to lead. ‘Oh, it is awful to be a woman,’ she wrote to Havelock Ellis in 1885, and added, ‘I’ve not been a woman really though I’ve become like one.’
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A denial of some aspect of her femininity was almost inevitably the lot of the ‘free woman’. As she struggled against political, economic and social subordinations she found that her traditional sexual role was irreconcilable with the liberation she demanded at other levels. But sexual unorthodoxy could mean that all other forms of activity were barred to her, and she was still very isolated among women. One response was to curb and control her own sexuality, and to live without having a family. Olive Schreiner’s way was rather a mystical connection to other women with whom she could communicate only through the common experience of pain. There seems no way to transcend, no way beyond masochism as the consciousness of women.

In 1908 she wrote to Frances Smith about her sympathy for the English suffragettes who were being forcibly fed in jail:

My heart feels so tender over a baby girl because of all the anguish which may be before it. I have done all I can to help to free women, but Oh, it is so little. Long ages must pass before we really stand free and look out at a world that is ours as well as man’s.… You know when I was a young girl and a child I felt this awful bitterness in my soul because I was a woman, because there were other women in the world. I felt [like] the wonderful kaffir woman who once was talking to me and said, ‘There may be a God. I do not say there is not; but if there is he is not good – why did he make woman?’
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In her book
Woman and Labour
, published in 1911, she is hopeful that a life of wider activity will end woman’s role as a ‘parasite’. She still emphasizes the difficulty of woman’s liberation, and the very deep nature of her oppression. But she attempts to trace this historically rather than describing it in a timeless mystical way. She connected the historical process of the exclusion of privileged women from labour and their consequent sexual parasitism to class parasitism – the dependence of one class on the labour of another. Her account resembles those of Bebel and Engels. The difference in her approach is not so much in what she said but the way she said it. She illustrates her points with very vivid personal descriptions. For instance, when she is exposing the hypocrisy of upper-class men who oppose their own women entering professions,
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she describes ‘the lofty theorist’ standing ‘before the drawing-room fire in spotless shirt-front and perfectly fitting clothes’, holding forth about women as child-bearers. Immediately a very real ‘lofty theorist’ appears before your eyes. Undoubtedly Olive Schreiner had encountered many like him. Rather mischievously she sends him to bed. There is nothing like bed for reducing a theoretician to human proportions. She observes that when he wakes in the morning he will not say to the ‘elderly house drudge, who rises at dawn while he sleeps to make his tea and clean his boots, “Divine childbearer! Potential mother of the race! Why should you clean my boots or bring up my tea?” ’
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He doesn’t object to an arrangement of society which means that working women labour for him. He is as incapable of seeing a connection between the woman who ages prematurely, ‘the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his shirts or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in the sweater’s den’, and his own pampered object, as the bourgeois man in the 1840s was of connecting the fate of Fleur de Marie to a situation of women. The whole concept of femininity is so manifestly a projection of man’s distorted fantasies. There is nothing unfeminine about women on all fours scrubbing for him. But there is something unfeminine in his eyes about the woman doctor, or even the woman in an office. It is the independence of his own woman working he doesn’t like. It is not women working he objects to, but women working for a decent wage with some leisure.

Though she can point out the contradiction in the way bourgeois man sees the two worlds of women, Olive Schreiner is incapable of indicating the common interest of the two kinds of women, worker and parasite. Nor is it clear how labour is going to be transformed for all women. She drifts off at this point towards the end of the book into a visionary flight of the imagination of the garden of Eden. It was the real weakness in her approach that her capacity for insight can be used to cover up the weaknesses in her ability to analyse and work out alternatives.

In 1889 Emma Goldman with a small bag and a sewing machine landed in New York City from Russia. A few years later ‘Red Emma’ had been transformed by the press until she became in popular imagination the anarchist bogy. Occasionally the image of another Emma came through. A writer in the
St Louis Mirror
in 1908 wrote about her revolution: ‘The dream is the reality to which we move … universal peace and beauty, Emma Goldman, the daughter of the dream.’
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Her
Anarchism and Other Essays
was published in New York in 1910. In several of the essays she discusses questions relating to the liberation of women. Her criticisms of the feminist movement were similar to those of Olive Schreiner. She disliked not only the narrowness of their ideas of change, but she also disapproved of their lack of understanding of labour movement struggles. She rejected too their dismissal of sexuality, the tendency to connect emancipation with celibacy. She did not have much sympathy with a concept of liberation with meant the emancipated woman had to be a ‘compulsory vestal’.
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Instead she wanted an emancipation which ‘should make it possible for women to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves for assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression, all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.’
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Such a commitment to women’s liberation was obviously closely bound up with her anarchism. She draws on many influences, including Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, Ibsen, but the emphases in her thinking on the question of women are integrated within her general political ideas. In the anarchist movement at the time, even more than among the socialists, there was a very strong tendency to try to live out the ideals of the future society within the existing world. For a
woman this was doubly difficult. Emma Goldman mentions the problems the free woman faced in relation to men. ‘The average man with his self-sufficiency, his ridiculously superior airs of patronage towards the female sex is an impossibility.… Equally impossible for her is the man who can see in her nothing more than her mentality and her genius, and who fails to awaken her woman nature.’
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She faced both these herself. Part of this attempt to live now as you imagined everyone would live in the future was a process of cultural creation. In criticizing the ‘women’s rights’ movement she wrote, ‘They thought that all that was needed was independence from external tyrannies. The internal tyrants, far more harmful to life and growth – ethical and social conventions – were left to take care of themselves; and they have taken care of themselves.’
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While this was a valuable insight and a useful corrective to a simply institutional idea of change, there are moments when she is so concerned to assert the personal subjective features of liberation that she loses all contact with the interaction between partial reforms, like the vote, the actual and immediate circumstances and the developing consciousness of women. Liberation becomes simply a personal act of will. She pursues a similar theme to Carpenter’s. The free woman has to assert and declare herself. But she puts it more extremely. She demanded that the emancipated woman should assert herself as ‘a personality, and not as a sex commodity’.
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She must refuse to bear children unless she wants them. She must also refuse to be a servant to God, the state, society, the husband, the family, etc. She must disregard ‘public opinion and public condemnation’. This was a lot to ask in 1910. A few turbulent, courageous spirits like herself might achieve it, but most women had too great a stake in some form of social acceptability to follow. Emma Goldman expected all women to share her ability to throw herself totally into exposed situations, and was too zealous a puritan to understand that some people can hold ideas and still not be willing to live their lives through them as she did. The daughters of the dream were biding their time. They talked about the vote, not about Emma Goldman’s liberation – or Olive Schreiner’s or Karl Marx’s.

None the less Marxism and the revolutionary movement which developed towards the end of the nineteenth century had a fundamental effect on the terms of the debate about the connection between women’s liberation and the socialist revolution. From this
framework directly arose the discussions in the Soviet Union in the twenties.
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And in subsequent revolutionary movements, in places and contexts remote from the circumstances and experiences of nineteenth-century revolutionary thought, women have been and still are returning to that past. It is necessary to keep a balance between connecting with a tradition and seeing the inadequacies of that tradition. An apparant certainty is imposed as dogma which makes us feel secure. We ignore the chinks and crevices which don’t fit, but through which light comes. We must always examine the chinks and crevices and look into the light.

We are left with questions. From what basis and in what manner can women act together as a group which can be the agency of revolutionary change? Where is there a necessity to act from the logic of women’s own socio-historical situation? In what sense can women be regarded as a group with interests in common? What are the particular experiences of oppression peculiar to women? Are there such experiences? If so how can these be expressed in terms of revolutionary struggle? In what way does the conception of a communist society imply the liberation of women? How far do existing socialist societies approximate to this? What is the manner in which women can participate fully in a revolutionary movement? And ultimately can the essentially personal and emotional understanding of pain be translated into political action, or is the tragic vision the only consolation for the daughters of the dream?

Emma Goldman thought equal rights were ‘just and fair’ but that the most ‘vital right is the right to love and be loved’.
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But the revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment.

It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.

CHAPTER 5

Bread and Roses