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Updated: May 27, 2025
Deep sympathy and compassion for suffering humanity, and an inexorable honesty toward herself, are the leading traits of Emma Goldman. No person, whether friend or foe, shall presume to control her goal or dictate her mode of life. She would perish rather than sacrifice her convictions, or the right of self-ownership of soul and body.
We may leave the group whose actions we do not approve of, we may stand alone as individuals, we may follow exclusively the law of our nature; but the moment we proceed to measures of defence, to actions implying limitation or discipline, to actions which encroach upon the self-ownership of others, the whole state of things is altered.
If then the State is legitimate as an agreement to defend one's self-ownership against all attacks, there are sufficient reasons for creating such an organisation and placing the exercise of the forces mentioned in its hands, instead of keeping them in our hands as individuals.... I fully admit that the right of exercising force in self-defence belongs to the individual and is transferred by him to the State; but the moral pressure on the individual to transfer this right is overwhelming.
Abolitionists, on the contrary, trace back man's inalienable self-ownership to enactments of the Divine Legislator, and to the bright morning of time, when he came forth from the hand of his Maker, "crowned with glory and honor," invested with self-control, and with dominion over the brute and inanimate creation.
The object of Anarchy is self-government, but we exceed the sphere of self-government as soon as we stretch out our hand to exercise force. The error which pure Anarchists commit lies in the fact that they apply the ideas of self-government, self-ownership, or freedom to force. Between actions of freedom and actions involving force a line must necessarily be drawn, which separates them for ever.
It also happens that in all cases where force has to be exercised against persons outside their own group as well as in it, some organisation must exist between the groups a State in order to determine the conditions under which force can be exercised.... For these reasons I consider pure Anarchy an impossibility; it rests upon a misunderstanding, and is founded upon the mingling of two things which are by nature entirely different.... Anarchy is the rule of an individual over himself; but the actions of an individual in self-defence, however just they may be, are not founded entirely upon self-ownership, but are of a mixed nature, since they include rule over one's self and over others.
He maintained the entire equality of the race, the inherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fair participation in the enactment of the laws by which they are governed. He saw clearly that slavery, as it existed in the South and on his own plantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine.
Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever revealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to self-ownership.
I saw I was making only a first small payment on the heavy price for the right to say, no, for the right to be free to break with any man or any enterprise that menaced my self-ownership. That right I felt I must keep, whatever its cost. Some men can, or think they can, lend their self-ownership and take it back at convenience; I knew I was not of them and let none of them judge me.
The marriage was no liberation from the Puritan dreariness of American life; indeed, it was rather aggravated by the loss of self-ownership. The characters of the young people differed too widely. A separation soon followed, and Emma Goldman went to New Haven, Conn. There she found employment in a factory, and her husband disappeared from her horizon.
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