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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Virtually. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the director of Public Programs at yivo, and we're really pleased to have you here with us for Jewish Anarchist Women, 1920-1950 the Politics of Sexuality with Elaine Leiter. So, before we get started, I'll just say a brief word about yivo. YIVO is a very special place for the contemplation and celebration of Jewish history in Jewish culture. We have an archive and a library of over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books which researchers from around the world use for their work. In addition to making those materials available, YIVO celebrates and explores this culture and this history through public programs like this one, classes and exhibitions. So if you enjoy this, I hope you'll join us again for future talks. Today's speaker is Elaine Leiter. Elaine Leiter is a retired dean and professor at Sonoma State University. She's the author of six books, two of which are being used at universities around the country. Her first book, the Gentle Rose Anarchist and Labor Organizer, was published by SUNY Press. She was the author of a number of articles on anarchist feminism in the 1980s. Currently she works in prisons doing restorative justice, facilitating dialogues between victims and those who committed the crimes in California prisons. She's the recipient of a Real Hero Award from the American Red Cross for her work in prisons. She's listed in who's who of American Teachers and who's who in America, and she was a visiting scholar at the U.S. holocaust Memorial Museum. Elaine, thank you so much for joining us today, Eva, and we're all looking
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forward to your talk. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to this. And Jane, if you would share my slides now, please. So I'm pretty excited to be here, I have to say. I was telling Alex earlier, when I did this research in the 1980s, nobody was interested in anarchism. I did my dissertation at Cornell on Rosa Posoda. And then what ended up happening was I had interviewed so many people for that book that I was just awed by the number of women who I met, Jewish women, anarchist women that I went back afterwards. And through the result of these interviews, I was able to write this article, which never got published. So it's cool now that 40 years later, people are interested that this is the COVID of my book and this is the basis upon which I began this research. And I really want to thank the NEH National Endowment for the Humanities in a seminar that I went to in 1996, where I was finally able to put all of this material together. And also when I was teaching at Ithaca College, they gave me a summer research grant. And I really am grateful to Yivo. I was telling Alex earlier how honored I am to present to Yivo because of its fame and wealth of information on Jewish history, and also to Spencer Sunshine, who took all of this information from obscurity and said to Yivo, why don't we talk about an anarchist, Women. This is a poem that was written by one of our women, and I'll be talking about her in a little while. But this is what she said. Stretching and reaching, trying and straining, advancing and struggling, forcing and climbing, arriving and succeeding, laughing and dancing, loving and living next. And what she was really talking about during all of that was how challenging it was for all of these women, including herself, always striving to do better and to make good in the world. The summer that I did this research was 1986. It's pretty old. And the women were between ages 73 and 100 years old. And some of them even refused to allow me to use their names. So you're not going to be seeing their real names, except for one who was three thrilled that I was going to talk about her. One woman even said to me, and this is in true anarchist fashion, I don't want anyone to exploit my identity except myself. And so I have not included her here today. Many of them shared really intimate details of their lives. They had all been anarchists from very early on, but they were very private. They were very political, but they were very private in terms of what was going on in their own homes. Often when they spoke to me, and although I only had eight of them, it was the first time anyone had asked them about their lives. They were always being asked about the movements of which they were a part, but not about their relationships, which I found fascinating as a feminist and an anarchist myself. And they believed that women, and I heard this from a quote, a few, that because women are caretakers of children, they didn't see where there would be equality of the sexes happening at all during their own lifetimes. But they continued to strive and reach. As Wanda said, some of you might not know about anarchism. Certainly we know from newspapers anarchy is chaos, and that we should all be afraid that there's anarchists in the streets. And Portland is awry with anarchy, anarchism and anarchists in black garb. But there is an ideology that in fact informs anarchist activities. And in terms of anarchist Theory there really is the belief that any form of domination inhibits individual freedom and that there should be in any ideal society the abolition of domination and control by anyone, that no one should have control over the other and that each individual knows what's best for themselves. And the belief also within anarchist theory is that hierarchy and authority relationships have to be changed. And it is not just the economics that changes those situation, but interpersonal dynamics which you will hear about with these women. Many of the folks in anarchist who've written anarchist theory argue that people should be able to organize based on need, in small groups and initiate their own actions. And that any form of centralized government of any sort is harmful because it becomes institutionalized and then there's no change. So I'm going to just briefly contextualize these women. One of the premier theorists of anarchist theory was Mikhail Bakunin. These are his dates, this is a photo of him. And I'm not going to say much more about him. I urge you to look him up. His work is fascinating, but he had something to say about the relationships between men and women and the role of women, which is where I'm heading in terms of the politics of sexuality. He felt that he was against patriarchy and that the way that the law subjected women to domination by men. And he thought that equal rights had to become belong to both men and women so that women could be independent and free to forge their own way of life. He really believed in the end of the authoritarian judicial family and the full sexual freedom of women. And by judicial family he meant the laws that were governing women's lives both historically and unto today. Since we're still fighting that kind of fight. Go on, please. There were two other theorists who I studied and think of very crucial in the study of anarchist theory, of course, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Unfortunately, both of them were products of their era and really defended the patriarchal hierarchical families and did not make the connection that if you're going to abolish hierarchies, you have to do it within the family and the male female dynamic as well. I'm not looking to then for any guidance in these. These ideas. Often anarchists are seen as extremists. They often live outside the margins of society because they believe that the means are the ends. You live what you believe, you don't aim for it in the future. And that you have to create your own societies on a daily basis. And that these organizations that you form are leaderless and self directed. Although never specifically feminist. The seeds of anarchism have the seeds of feminism within it because of the idea of complete equality. And anarchist women have long challenged female subordination. For example, Emma Goldman, who many of you are familiar with, attacked the very idea of marriage and wanted to abolish it completely. Anarchists have long believed in complete sexual freedom believing that women and men are erotic and that what they do between themselves is only their concern, not anybody else's. And I'm quoting Margaret Marsh here who wrote a wonderful book about anarchist women who were active from 1870 to 1920. And I picked up the thread and went from 1920 to 1950, so others believed, and the anarchists believed that not the state nor the church should ever be involved in interpersonal relationships. The term often in the time that I'm speaking of was the term free lovers. And the idea is that adults could decide what kind of sexual association that they wanted and that they could decide what it was all about, what they would do between them and how long they wanted to stay together and then they could fluidly move on. Some certainly did not believe in monogamy and in fact Emma Goldman and a few others even at a time when it was illegal, engaged in same sex relationships. So we're already talking about people who were being less part of the mainstream if you will go on please. Next I want to mention Lucy Parsons because she played an important role in anarchist history and also as a woman was pivotal in some of the creation of the ideas and the actions. Parsons said that women's inequality was really a result of capitalism and that if you abolished capitalism then of course you would have complete equality. And she had been born a slave and her working class and racial background made her much more focused on workplace inequality rather than interpersonal dynamic relationship equality. She was one of the creators of the International Workers of the World and she was married to Albert Parsons who in fact was executed because he participated in a riot in the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886 in which people were demonstrating for an eight hour workday. So certainly, and that was a pivotal piece of anarchist history that if some of you are interested, I urge you take a look at. And she actually argued a great deal with Emma Goldman who was much more interested in women's equality in all spheres of life, not just in terms of the workplace. Of course many of you know about Emma and of course I have to cover her, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on her. She was the most notorious anarchist of them all, of course and she advocated against marriage, she gave out birth control Before Margaret Sanger she had numerous lovers and including having a woman lover so this is what Emma said about marriage and I don't need to quote it all Emma Goldman's let's see, what shall I say about this? Most of all she felt that marriage was the most tyrannical of all relationships there's suffering in the world there's suffering, she says in all ways physical and mental slavery but marriage institution there is can you not hear me? I heard did we lose sound?
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We had lost you for a second but you seem to be back now
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Let me say something this comes from Margaret Marsh again she said that anarchist women who she studied argued for something that was called sexual varieties which means a whole lot of variety sexually non exclusive sexual relationships Women who could be self supporting women who would share childrearing women who would live in cooperative homes so that some could go to work and some would take care of children and children would be raised collectively and communally Some argued that heterosexual couples should never live together because of the treatment of women within couples Some wanted to argue and did argue even in between 1870 and 1920 that homosexuality should be a legitimate sexual alternative look how long we had to wait for it finally to become more acceptable so this is a picture of the book by Margaret Marsh who I'd been quoting I used it as a staple in my research especially as I went out to talk to the women I'm about to tell you about Let me tell you something about the people that I've studied First of all, they looked as if they were in typical marriages but they looked, they were often in the main. They were the main breadwinners in their own families while their husbands were out or the men in their lives were politically active none of the women that I interviewed were in homosexual relationships although one or two of them did have affairs during their primary relationships Some of them never married at all because they were afraid of the institution of. Of marriage they lived together for long periods of time in what would now be considered forget the word that we have today but all of them raised children communally at one point and they educated their children in alternative schools and I'll tell you something about those they were vegetarians because they really believed and understood about the problems related to meat and farming and understood very early to control their bodies and take care of their bodies by being vegetarian Almost all of the ones that I interviewed were born Jewish but they were not religiously Jewish they were secularly Jewish all of the Jews in my study had been Raised Orthodox all of them were born in Europe and they were raised in families that were very traditional with the young men being educated and the young women not being educated and it left for all of them a bad taste in their mouth however, they did not give up their ethnic identities at all they called themselves Jewish just like the Italian anarchists call themselves Italian but it was a secular and politicized Jewishness they grew up with the ideas of doing good in the world and tzedakah and justice they did work in the world in terms of chesed loving kindness but they wouldn't have called it that they called it anarchism although the interplay between some of the Jewish values that many of us have grown up with are really part of the anarchist ideology as well so for them it was a smooth transition to being Jewish but being anarchists Some of them this was a story that I knew from earlier during Emma Goldman's time some of them would have Yom Kippur balls in which they would serve ham sandwiches to be as iconoclastic as they possibly could but they knew to have something on Yom Kippur and they were marking it in some way to thumb their noses at the traditional values but still marking the day I want to say something about Rose Posotta this is her at the sewing machine Pesota was the vice president, one of the vice presidents of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and a very well known labor activist she in fact had numerous relationships with very political anarchist men, labor organizing men her first lover, Kushnev was deported When Emma Goldman was deported for political activity one husband was very close Albert Martin was very close to Sacco and Vanzetti and in fact there's a bit of a story about him that he didn't want to be deported so when the ship pulled out of New York harbor, he jumped ship, swam back and assumed a new identity and there's nothing written in Posota's papers that said that she ever saw him again and I really never know what happened to him after that I tried to trace him Rose had trouble being an anarchist as well as a vice president it was being in a hierarchy and she saw the power inequalities Dubinsky, David Dubinsky was the president of the ILG at the time she was the only woman at the time and really had trouble because although she was very well loved as a labor organizer, her problem was with the board, with the board of directors because it was male dominated and she was an independent, articulate woman so finally she Left the board of the ILGWU and returned to her sewing machine, which was very unusual. And this, by the way, was before, just before the Holocaust. And then she after the Holocaust, she went to Europe and did what she could to try to help survivors of the Holocaust. So she was always identified strongly as a Jewish woman, but mostly as an anarchist, among Marxists, among socialists, and argued with them vociferously and was marginalized as a result of her political activity. I'd like to say something about what, what these women were living within. Many of these women were living within a period from 1920 to 1950 of conformity. During that time, a suburban lifestyle became part of the norm. And family and entertainment were in suburban homes. And in fact, Arlene Skolnick describes the dream of the suburbs during the 1950s was the idea of a happy family life. And many of these women rebelled against the idea of the conformity of this era. The idea of the typical American was created during the 1950s primarily because of the Red Scare. That led people to conform because they were afraid of being called communists. And so many tried to appear as American as possible. And so I grew up in the 1950s, and I'm sure some of you did. There was real conformity around clothing and food and language and belief systems. Some of the women that I interviewed grew up after the Red Scare and were now challenging the norms that Americans were encouraged to follow. They were living on the margins of mainstream America. Although they might have been working in typical institutions, their lifestyles were not following the norm. So these women were iconoclastic, they were rebellious, who were tough, they were argumentative. I'm going to tell you a little story in a while about some of these women and how they operated on a daily basis. So some of these women were. Most of these women in fact were very active. But they were wives and mothers while still being very political. But they were not active in what we would call public making women's issues public agenda. They weren't working on birth control or women's rights. They were. The women that I interviewed were working class that were very trying to make a living while being politically active. So they didn't form political associations with non anarchist women. They lived in their own little communities. Some of them lived in the ILG housing on the Lower east side of Manhattan. Others went to upstate New York to form communal living situations. But they were a little eccentric and ruggedly idiosyncratic. They were quirky, the women that I interviewed, and quite rebellious always. I remember. Well, I'll tell That story after what next? How did they differ from other activist women? Many conventional women were active in public health or social work. These women stayed very active fighting against Franco after the Spanish Civil War. They were active in labor organizing. They didn't do social work or public health work. They were in factories or they were in the offices trying to support their own families. And so they weren't aligned with various more public types of women's issues of the time. They also believed that freedom had to. That women should be granted freedom because they were human beings deserving of equality. They didn't believe that the time that women there was a belief that women should be equal because of their maternal and womanly qualities, which at the time was the most popular argument for why women should be equal. Because they were mothers and they were nurturing. These women didn't see it that way. Because of being complete human beings, they had a right to be equal with men, not just because they were nurturers. Many anarchist women didn't compromise their ideals. They argued against the flaws of the mainstream and remained purely ideological, not willing to compromise with pragmatists. So there really was this sense of, we're going to remain dedicated anarchists even if it's not going to happen in our own lifetime. We are going to carry this ideology forward. Even if we're marginalized, even if we're seen as loonies, it doesn't matter, because we really believe completely in the freedom and independence for all people and the lack of hierarchy anywhere. And that made them ideologically pure and not very pragmatic in some cases. The women that I interviewed were very active in what we now would call direct action. They took physical action about workplace conditions that they provide that they found oppressive. I'll tell you a little story about one of the women that I interviewed, Clara Larson, who, when she was a young woman, was organizing for the ilgwu and she would be on the picket line and the police would be arresting folks in front of a sewing shop, dressmaker shop, and they would line up and arrest them, take them off in the paddy wagon. And then the next line of demonstrators and is the next line of demonstrators would actually come in and be arrested. So Clara walks, gets into the police station and up on the wall a bunch of photos of Most Wanted. And there is Clara, her maiden name was Rothburg. There's a picture of her on the wall and none of the cops noticed that it was her. And she says to her friend, give a kik. Take a look, take a look. And she says, Quietly, that's me. She gave her name wrongly. She gave another name. She was allowed to leave soon thereafter, went back out and demonstrated and continued to lie about her name whenever she was demonstrating. So creative, but very involved in strikes and sit ins and demonstrations. As I told you the story of Clara, as she described being arrested. Most of the folks that I studied were nonviolent. Although they supported violent insurrection when it was necessary. They themselves might be clubbed or beaten. They didn't fight back. They were pacifist in some ways, but they did believe in violent insurrection in terms of supporting the Russian Revolution until they found out what was going on there. They believed in the Spanish Civil War, but they themselves were nonviolent. Some of their husbands, in fact, and partners went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. But some of them, most the women, of course, stayed home and held the family together. And it could be what you would call the new Jewish womanhood. Susan Blenn spoke of it, which is where they were active, but raising families and being more libertarian, if you will, more open minded as they move into activism of the 20th century. They raised their families and they worked and they had sex with whomever they wanted. So that was part of the way that they were iconoclastic and creative in their sense of identity. So let me tell you about a few of the women I interviewed, Juanita, when she was 86 years old. And unfortunately, my tapes have disappeared during all the moves that I've made since the 1980s. So I only have some notes from my discussions with these folks. She'd come to the United States from Russia at the age of 26 in 1925. And she had been quite religious. Her family lost everything in the Russian Revolution. And she met her husband, who had been born in Russia and had gone to the United States and gone back to Russia to fight in the revolution. And that's when she met him. But the Bolsheviks purged the anarchists in what was a battle of ideologies that became physical, killing many people. And so they left for the United States. Soon after coming to the United States, she wanted to go to school, especially because she had been raised so religiously without any education back in Russia, and eventually actually got her bachelor's and her master's in child development. But her husband insisted that she quit school when she was getting her bachelor's degree. So she asked for trial separation and left him. And they had been in California, so she moved to New York to get away from him. She divorced the first husband when she moved. After she moved to New York. And again she met another anarchist. And they lived together for quite a while because she wasn't sure she wanted to get married again, given what had happened. Ultimately, they were married for 41 years. She was, in fact, a social worker at the Bureau of Child Welfare, but didn't do her activism there. She did it much more out on the streets in terms of demonstrations and other political activity. But she was the primary breadwinner, having had two children and working full time. And she expected her husband to share the responsibilities of home caring and childcare because she did believe in complete equality and didn't do just the housework. He called himself the head of the household. So it was interesting, as she described this to me. She said she was careful not to challenge his identity, but insisted that he helped work around the house. But when it came to working with the children, she felt it was necessary to hire somebody to take care of them. So there was some sort of a conflict there in terms of the head of the household, but her wanting equality. She worked for all of her life in his political activity and was very involved in the Sacco and Benzetti defense. And she helped raise money for Holocaust victims in the United States. And actually worked hard also on helping Russian fraternal organizations raise money for escaped slave laborers from the Russian camps. So she stayed very involved and interested in Russian politics. She wrote for Russian newspapers in the United States States. And her poetry actually became very well known in various circles. And she was a vegetarian for her entire life. She was involved in naturopathy. Can never say that. And really believed in living a healthy alternative lifestyle. And in fact, her greatest regret was that she raised a petty bourgeois bureaucrat as a son. And she said that to me, interestingly, as with tears in her eyes, that she was ashamed for having raised a son who became a businessman and then went into becoming in the mainstream. And she said that anarchist politics was the very fiber of her soul and herself. It was what and who she was. She might have been Jewish, but she was an anarchist first and foremost at a time when anarchism was a vibrant but small organization group of people. The next person that I would like to talk about is Betsy. Again, I'm not using their full names because they were very private in their identities. I'm not sure what they were afraid of because it was many years after their activity, but I honor their requests. She, too was raised Orthodox in Kiev in 1891. Born there to a family of rabbis yet. And she came to the 19 to the US in 1912 with a 20 year old sister. And this is where she learned how to be more cosmopolitan and pardon me for the typo and unorthodox. Her grandmother had been very much a New Yorker and had come many years earlier to the United States. And so she had been a businesswoman, she'd been a tradeswoman and she was very cosmopolitan and assimilated into New York culture. But Betsy went to work in the garment industry and stayed until she was 79 years old. She moved to Chicago only a couple of years after she came to the US and she started to hang out with anarchists and communists and socialists where she found them at a Russian restaurant. And as a result she was taken with the ideology of anarchism because she saw that governments were corrupting forces and she knew that there would be no equality and no chance of real societal transformation. So she believed in anarchism. She started to work with the Frei Arbiterstrema, which is the free voice of labor. And it was the longest running anarchist newspaper in the country, written in Yiddish. And she was very good friends with Arn Thorne, the last editor. I was honored to have met Arne Thorne late in his life as I was doing my research on Rose Posota. And he was still brilliant and charismatic and charming. When Betsy was very young she went to hear Emma Goldman and was transfixed by the vibrance and the intelligence of this charismatic anarchist leader. And so she married an anarchist and had three daughters. She joined an anarchist cooperative but she always felt like an outsider. When she was not in anarchist circles she considered herself marginalized. She worked full time in the garment industry and was an organizer for the ilg. And in fact in this relationship her husband stayed home with the children and she was able to work and write and become pretty well known in anarchist circles. Next her children actually joined the Vanguard Group which was an organization that was founded by Sam Dolgough, a very well known anarchist organizer, labor activist, IWW member. And they published a newspaper throughout the 1930s to expose English and American English speakers to anarchist ideas. And Betsy also wrote for them and met and went everywhere to introduce anarchism on a political stage, invite people to become anarchists. It was the only English language news anarchist newspaper and ended in 1939, but really provided a legacy for younger anarchists to understand the ideology. Now the community that she belonged to was called the Mohegan Colony which was founded in 1923 as an intentional community on Lake Mohegan in Westchester. And anarchists pooled their money to build a Community based on their principles was part of the Modern School movement. And it was here that they really tried to create a way of living that would emulate their ideology. It was an attempt, utopian attempt, to provide an egalitarian way of life, of raising a family. So they raised their children together, and it was really a hotbed of radical ideology and thinking. They had their own school, and there were over 300 families that lived at the height of it. I recently looked it up, and it just turns out now that it's a regular community around Lake Mohegan with no more anarchist or political ideologies. So her children went to the Modern School, which was, by the way, an early 20th century, 20th century model century model founded by Francisco Ferrer in Spain. And it really believed in rational, secular education that taught self worth, self reliance and the study of science. Unfortunately, her children resented living like this, since Betsy was gone a great deal of the time as an organizer for the ilg. And her children also became quite conservative and monogamous because of seeing what they considered to be the promiscuity of their parents. This is what Betsy said about her children. She did feel, because of her lifestyle and her politics, like an outsider. And as a result, she really did leave what she considered an unorthodox life. She had many affairs during her lifetime and eventually got divorced from the husband of her, the father of her children, and lived with an Italian anarchist, but continued to have affairs with Sam Dolgough. And she really saw herself as a pioneer, as an atheist, an anarchist, an iconoclast, and very proud of always living her alternative lifestyle. These I want to tell you about Clara. Clara was probably my most colorful and became a mentor and friend to me. She lived in ILG housing in Lower Manhattan when I met her. She'd been born in the Ukraine. She'd been one of 15 children, and her father was a rabbi. So she was given no education at all. She came to the United States in 1913 at the age of 13, coming through in steerage. And her brother, who had been in the United States earlier, was supposed to meet her at the ship, but he failed to show up. From what she said, he thought it was coming at another time. And so there she was at the age of 30, 13 and alone. And some rich woman saw her and took her into her home until the brother was found and Clara was able to go off with the family. This is the only picture that I have of any of these women. Unfortunately, this is Clara towards the end of her life. So by her late teens. She'd found her way to the clothing industry and was singled out for her intelligence and her articulateness. She was quite charismatic. She went to a labor school and worked. Went to a labor school in Arkansas on a union scholarship. And the labor schools were the places where uneducated labor organizers were brought, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes sometimes for a whole summer, where they would be educated about labor organizing, about history, about how to do public speaking, about how to make plans and invite many different kinds of people so that they could go out and organize in the union with various ethnic groups, not just Jews. But later in life, they would organize with Puerto Rican and Dominican workers in the dress shops. So there was a real attempt to be very inclusive in the labor movement. And Clara was invited to be one of those organizers. She became a very prolific and charismatic public speaker and worked for the ILG for 50 years. And in retirement did friendly visiting for the union. She was jailed many times and was really very proud of being one of the first women prisoners in the New York Women's House of Detention. And I already told you the story of her being arrested and seeing her photo on the wall. She met a Danish sailor who she wanted to marry because she wanted to give him citizenship, had met him at an anarchist center, and he stayed a seaman and came home sporadically. And in fact, unfortunately, her family sat Shiva for her when she married the Dane. But she couldn't marry this Danish soldier sailor. I'm sorry. Because she'd been arrested so many times. And so David Dubinsky, he had to intervene on her behalf. And because she was so involved in being active and going on demonstrations and being arrested that she couldn't go on her own honeymoon. And so she sent her best friend instead. And she likes to tell. Liked to tell this story. As I said, they had a Shiva service for her. And she was married to this man for 41 years until he died with long periods of separation while he was at sea. They lived for a while at the Mohegan, and he was a member of the International Workers of the World and was an organizer on ships. And ultimately, when he left sailing, he was an organizer as a house painter and rather creatively. When he finally retired, they bought a car and toured the United States for a year and a half, visiting anarchists all around the country. She wrote for the Road to Freedom, which was an anarchist journal, as well as the Freiharba Deschtima. And wherever anarchist activities could be found, there was Clara Rothberg Larson. So this is just a copy of One of the road to freedoms from the 1930s. And this is a copy of the Freiharb de Stiemer, which was the Yiddish anarchist journal that I mentioned to you that was in existence until 1977. And it was a fabulous newspaper that covered labor literature and radical opinion and Clara was able to write for that as well. So Clara worked on the Sacco and Benzetti defense and very proudly told me that she was one of the very few people who millions, not millions, thousands went to their funeral, but she was allowed into the crematorium after the execution. She spent much time with Emma Goldman at other people's homes. And in fact, she told me one story. Yes, the industrial workers. She spent much time with Emma Goldman and told me a story about Emma Goldman in which Emma was quite the prima donna. And when Emma came into a home, she would insist on using the main bedroom wherever the couple, usually couples, housed her. And she would take their bedroom and then she. And she expected to have roses on the podium when she did her speaking. So I had a little window into some of the interpersonal dynamics of Emma Goldman beyond the public Persona that some of us have certainly studied and read about. Clara was noteworthy in sending a number of her friends were in exile. She made a point whenever she had any money and she lived pretty simply to send money whenever she could to her friends who had been in exile because of their politics. And Clara was invited to represent Russian immigrants at the opening of Emma of Ellis Island. And this is a little story that kind of tells you about who Clara Larson was. She was wheeled in to the opening of the Ellis Island Museum and the whole Statue of Liberty being redone. And Dan Quayle was the vice president at the time and he was representing the government. And he came up to her in a rather patronizing manner, put his hand on her shoulder and said to her, clara, it's just an honor to meet you. I'm really very pleased, et cetera. And she looked up at him raising her fist, and she's a little woman sitting in a wheelchair raising her fist and she says, gayevec Go away from me. You're a goddamn Republican and I want nothing to do with you. Go away. Go away. That was a typical indication of who Clara was and who these women themselves were. So in conclusion, and gives us time for some talking, all of the women that I'm telling you about were very dedicated to their ideology and their actions. They came to the movement as youth. They remained there for the rest of their lives. They lived their values both politically and in their personal relationships, they believed in ideas of freedom and equality, and they lived it with their lovers, their friends, their family, and their colleagues. They often were isolated and didn't form close relationships with other women in the movement because they were focused on making a living. They didn't adhere to the expectations of women of their era, nor as Jewish women particularly. And often they were flawed in their contradictions in their actions. But nonetheless, I have to say I was truly honored to be able to tell some of their stories. They were colorful. They were idiosyncratic. They lived to the concept that we in the 70s said the personal is political. They foresaw the ideas of the women's movement that came a generation of later. They kept the ideology alive for the next generation of anarchists. They represented a sense of freedom, independence at a time of conformity and repression. And I have to say, I was truly honored to have met them and to be able to tell their stories. So if you want to be in touch with me, I'm Elaine Leader. I have a website, elainelader.com and I also have an email at sonoma so leadernoma. Edu, And I would love to communicate because I put this research away for over 30 years, and it's coming out of the dustbin of history, and I'm thrilled to be able to talk about it again. So I want to thank you, Alex, and we're ready for the questions and answers.
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A
Thank you so much, Elaine. This was a wonderful lecture. We have lots of questions as well. Okay, so going back to the beginning, one viewer asks, the poem by Wanda, the self portrait poem, was that originally written in English or Yiddish?
- [48:57]
B
English. And it's Juanita. And she was bilingual and very quickly picked up English. And that's what she handed me in a typewritten poem, which I.
- [49:09]
A
Wonderful. And another viewer had asked, is there anywhere that they can check out her poetry, or is this more of a kind of private thing?
- [49:16]
B
It's a private thing. None of it was published. When I Googled her, she never even came up, unfortunately.
- [49:24]
A
One viewer asks, can you help me sort out the relationship between anarchism and collective political movements, especially on the left? Is the left right spectrum relevant?
- [49:34]
B
Oh, God, that's a whole lecture. You want to know the anarchism and collective.
- [49:40]
A
What political movements, like, how does anarchism fit in with other movements, particularly on the left?
- [49:46]
B
Okay. I would say it's the left of the left. And in fact, that's the title of one of the books about anarchism. It's to the Left of Marxism. It's to the left of any other form of socialism. Certainly socialism, I see them on a continuum. And anarchism, you would say, is probably at the most extreme left of all of this. And certainly we could have a whole. I have done lectures on what are all the terms and what do they all mean? And they are all so complex in different parts of history, they use it differently. And so that would need a whole workshop to be able to parse out. But I appreciate the question.
- [50:28]
A
Another viewer similarly asked or noted that the description of some of these women sounded similar to communist women of the same generation that they had read about. Is this a connection that you could discuss briefly?
- [50:43]
B
To be honest with you, I didn't study the Marxist women. I've only studied the anarchists. And I would say that for iconoclastic, rebellious women of that era, that was probably similar kinds of behavior. And in fact, sometimes it might be interesting to. To do a comparison. I have to say I left this research quite a while ago, moved on to many other things and have not followed it. I have to say how grateful I am now that young anarchist women, anarchist feminists, have picked up the baton because I left it in the 80s and 90s and moved on to my prison rights work.
- [51:24]
A
Someone else had asked, why didn't you publish on this at the time?
- [51:29]
B
Nobody gave a damn, to be honest with you. Howard Ehrlich in the Journal of Social Anarchism might have published it, but I just didn't go that route. I was an editor of that journal and I didn't feel like I should be pushing my own work. I'm certainly happy to publish it now. I've got most of it written and would love to. If anybody's interested, that's a call to
- [51:52]
A
any of you out there with publications. This is ready for press.
- [51:56]
B
I could do some editing.
- [51:58]
A
Another viewer asked or is very curious who Emma Goldman's woman lover was. Is that information that is out there?
- [52:05]
B
It is, and it's readily available. And to be honest with you, I'd have to go back to the work of Alex Wexler and Candace Falk to look it up. But it's in their biographies. All of them. Cover.
- [52:18]
A
Okay, wonderful.
- [52:19]
B
It's common knowledge.
- [52:20]
A
Great citation. So another viewer asks, you mentioned that all the women you spoke to were secular. But this viewer is curious if in your research you heard about any Orthodox Jews who identified as anarchist during this time period.
- [52:34]
B
No. Thank you. By the way, it was in Candace Falk's book as well as. Yeah, no, all of these women had become atheists actually and but Jewish one can be an atheist and a Jew, although some people would argue otherwise. And I never saw somebody in the chat right now has Anarchist Orthodox as a record recommended, but I don't know of it to be honest.
- [53:01]
A
I will add that Yivo had a conference on Yiddish anarchism in 2019 and there was a talk on this topic. So if you're curious, I just put in the chat box a link to the YouTube. That whole conference is online. It's a very fascinating conference and as I said, there's a whole talk on this exact question.
- [53:17]
B
So fabulous. Thank you. I'm going to go back to it.
- [53:20]
A
Another viewer asks, in this age, before birth control pills, how did these women deal with birth control and with pregnancy and childbearing?
- [53:29]
B
Birth control was in fact available, although illegal. And so many of the women did it, used it, some of them had abortions, again illegal, but they were on the fringes of society and they found their ways and they also did have children.
- [53:47]
A
Another viewer notes that and you touched on this a bit, but that the anarchism didn't seem to be equally relevant to both sexes as some of the their partners were not, didn't share the full as all the kind of gender aspects of their anarchist beliefs. Is that generally true in your experience for that era?
- [54:06]
B
Yes. And certainly contemporary anarchist men are being smacked upside the head to confront their patriarchal ideologies or attitudes or behaviors. But during that time it was not clearly articulated. They were not considered feminists. It was not in the lingo of that era, although they certainly might have been acting as if, and certainly I would say Clara and Rhodes were, but you would never have called them that. And they did live in traditional marriages in some cases. So this was pre feminism was as I call them, the transitional generation. And I felt like I was the bridge to the anarchist feminists. And then now the newest generation has taken up the Badhan Kajal.
- [54:57]
A
Speaking of which, another question says, how would you describe the long term impact of these women that you studied?
- [55:04]
B
Oh, that's a really good question, I'm afraid. Unfortunately they were not well known. Even in the 6 the 70s and 80s it was the Marxist feminists who had the visibility. The anarchist feminists were under the radar, if you will. And that's true. Even unto today the anarchists are still marginalized and vilified. And the worst thing one can say about someone is oh my God, they're a goddamn anarchist without knowing what that all means. And that really disturbs Me, because there is a deep and rich history and ideology that ought to be explored, not just the circle A. There's more behind it.
- [55:49]
A
Fascinating. A few viewers asked about the relationship of these ideas to what was going on in Israel, Palestine. On the one hand, one viewer points out that some of what you're describing is very reminiscent of the kibbutz movement. And another viewer asks, what did the women that you talked about, that you interviewed, did they have feelings about Zionism pre and post the Holocaust?
- [56:13]
B
That's an interesting question. They really did believe that Jews should have a homeland. However, they were egalitarian. And so the belief of what was being done to people who were living there at the time was problematic. However, during these early periods around the founding of Israel, there was a lot of patriotism and strong Jewish feeling. And so many of them organized and tried to help Holocaust survivors get to Israel or get to the United States. There wasn't that same kind of. There was a politicized atmosphere, but not as destructive as it is now.
- [56:57]
A
Fascinating. Another viewer asks, what is the difference between equality and anarchy in the women that you interviewed? It seems like these women are just feminists in the way of equality and standing up for the rights of workers. Is that an accurate assessment?
- [57:13]
B
Not just workers, they. That would be true, say, for the Lucy Parsons, but they believed it in all elements of relationships with one's children, with one's co workers, in whatever industry one is working in, interpersonal relationships, in abolishing government, which is part of the ideology. What is that line? I quite like it. Building a new society in the vacant lots of the old. And that was the belief system. And so it's more than just. First of all, they were not feminists. They wouldn't have called themselves that because it was pre contemporary feminism. But they were into equality at all levels of hierarchy, not just the work in the workplace, although that was much of their organizing.
- [58:04]
A
One viewer asks, could you remind all of us of the. The nature of the importance of the significance of a Sacco and Vanzetti case? For those that are less familiar with that, oh dear.
- [58:13]
B
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and convicted and executed for a burglary in Massachusetts. And it really became a class war between the upper class who wanted them killed. There was a person who was killed during that burglary and poor people, working class people who believed that they were innocent. And it was in the 1920s. It was a very big deal. It was in the newspaper all the time and there were demonstrations and the upper class in Massachusetts Were they were in collusion in the conviction. And very interestingly, by the way, I have to tell you, I was friends with Paul Avrich, A B R I C H, who's the anarchist historian who died, unfortunately, who wrote a wonderful book about Sacco and Benzetti. And he said in that book and told me that in fact Vanzetti was guilty of having participated in this burglary, but Sacco was not. And they were executed and it was quite horrific. And to this day I've been to their archives in Boston and there's still this visceral response. And yes, I would urge you to read Paul Average's book because it gets down into all of it. And I was honored when Rose Posota, after she died, I went to her sister's house and there was an archives that was in the garage and it had a picture of Emma Goldman that was original and a pen that was carved by Benzetti out of ivory. The sister gave it to me and I gave the Emma Goldman photo to Candace Falk at the McGoldman Papers and I gave the pen to the Boston Public Library where it is now in the archives. And every anarchist that you talk to from that era will talk about how it was as big as was just a very huge case publicly and was a turning point and was a way for anarchism to develop a bad name too as part of that move. It always had a bad name and that was like a nail in the coffin. And I urge you to read the book. I have not done it justice.
- [60:39]
A
There are so many amazing questions. I'm sorry, we don't have time to get to all of them. So we're just going to take one final question for now. But everyone, thank you so much for joining us. And you can check out the Yiddish Anarchism Conference as I mentioned on YouTube, for further Jewish anarchism exploration. And you can stay in touch with Elaine. We put her details in the chat. So final question. To what extent did these women speak Yiddish and what did the Yiddish speaking milieu mean to them?
- [61:08]
B
They all spoke Yiddish and it was just the common language. They lived it. It was vibrant. They went to plate organizations and events that were all in Yiddish. Their organizing was in Yiddish. If they were working with Jewish workers, the Italians went out and organized with the Italian workers in various industries. It wasn't just the garment industry. So it was a time of vibrant Yiddish culture. And I have to say I'm thrilled to see the resurgence and revitalization of Yiddish again. There's so much that is important and deep and rich in the culture.
- [61:45]
A
Elaine, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [61:48]
B
Thank you, Alex. Very pleased to have been here. It was a pleasure.