Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

Some women, white married middle- and upper-class women, had always had access to these materials.īut in the mid-nineteenth century, as poor rural people, immigrants, Black people, and many unmarried women flocked to cities, such materials were marketed to them also: “Everywhere one looked…contraceptive information, ads, and other materials were visible.” The industrialization and mass migrations of the postbellum years brought many more married and unmarried women into contact with the commercialization of contraception and the freedom from patriarchal control that it allows. Though in Omer and Iris’ America-the America of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-the distribution of birth control materials and information was criminalized, this hadn’t always been the case.

But then, in the 1920s and ’30s, as her writing and thinking matures, Iris is the one family member, besides my great-grandfather Omer himself, who directly reveals the kinds of distortions kinship with and belonging to a white property-owning family in America can foster. Hers is the voice that most clearly articulates the passions of motherhood and daughterhood, that most poignantly expresses what kinship means, what belonging is. It was only when I began to read Iris’ letters in earnest that I found myself yearning for these relatives I had never met. And Iris was close to her father, as I am close to mine.

Her “ideal church,” she tells her father Omer Kem, would be “a community gathering place where everybody is welcome and a free exchange of ideas is allowed.” Like her, I grow food (a comparatively tiny amount). More than to any of the other women I discovered in my family archive, I am drawn to my great-aunt Iris.

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman