Anarcha-feminism

Cover of La Voz de la Mujer, pioneering Argentinian anarcha-feminist publication

In Argentina, Virginia Bolten is responsible for the publication of a newspaper called La Voz de la Mujer (English: The Woman's Voice), which was published nine times in Rosario between 8 January 1896 and 1 January 1897 and was briefly revived in 1901. A similar paper with the same name was reportedly published later in Montevideo, which suggests that Bolten may also have founded and edited it after her deportation.[11] La Voz de la Mujer described itself as "dedicated to the advancement of Communist Anarchism". Its central theme was the multiple natures of women's oppression. An editorial asserted: "We believe that in present-day society, nothing and nobody has a more wretched situation than unfortunate women". They said that women were doubly oppressed by both bourgeois society and men. Its beliefs can be seen from its attack on marriage and upon male power over women. Its contributors, like anarchist feminists elsewhere, developed a concept of oppression that focused on gender. They saw marriage as a bourgeois institution which restricted women's freedom, including their sexual freedom. Marriages entered into without love, fidelity maintained through fear rather than desire and oppression of women by men they hated were all seen as symptomatic of the coercion implied by the marriage contract. It was this alienation of the individual's will that the anarchist feminists deplored and sought to remedy, initially through free love and then more thoroughly through social revolution.[12]

Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre was an American anarchist writer and feminist. She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state, marriage and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement. Although initially drawn to individualist anarchism, she evolved through mutualism to an anarchism without adjectives.

De Cleyre was a colleague of Emma Goldman, with whom she respectfully disagreed with on many issues. Many of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth in 1914.

In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery, de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies and child socialization practices that create unnatural gender roles. The title of the essay refers not to traffic in women for purposes of prostitution, although that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage laws that allow men to rape their wives without consequences. Such laws make "every married woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes her master's name, her master's bread, her master's commands, and serves her master's passions".[18]

Emma Goldman

Although hostile to first-wave feminism and its suffragist goals, Emma Goldman advocated passionately for the rights of women and is today heralded as a founder of anarcha-feminism. In 1897, she wrote: "I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood".[19] In 1906, Goldman wrote a piece entitled "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation"[20] in which she argued that traditional suffragists and first-wave feminists were achieving only a superficial good for women by pursuing the vote and a movement from the home sphere. She also writes that in the ideal world women would be free to pursue their own destinies, yet "emancipation of woman, as interpreted and practically applied today, has failed to reach that great end".[21] She pointed to the "so-called independence"[22] of the modern woman whose true nature—her love and mother instincts—were rebuked and stifled by the suffragist and early feminist movements. Goldman's arguments in this text are arguably much more in line with the ideals of modern third-wave feminism than with the feminism of her time, especially given her emphasis on allowing women to pursue marriage and motherhood if they so desired. In Goldman's eyes, the early twentieth century idea of the emancipated woman had a "tragic effect upon the inner life of woman"[23] by restricting her from fully fulfilling her nature and having a well-rounded life with a companion in marriage.

A nurse by training, Goldman was an early advocate for educating women about birth control. Like many contemporary feminists, she saw abortion as a tragic consequence of social conditions and birth control as a positive alternative. Goldman was also an advocate of free love and a strong critic of marriage. She saw early feminists as confined in their scope and bounded by social forces of Puritanism and capitalism. She wrote: "We are in need of unhampered growth out of old traditions and habits. The movement for women's emancipation has so far made but the first step in that direction".[24][25] When Margaret Sanger, an advocate of access to birth control, coined the term "birth control" and disseminated information about various methods in the June 1914 issue of her magazine The Woman Rebel, she received aggressive support from Goldman. Sanger was arrested in August under the Comstock laws, which prohibited the dissemination of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles",[26] including information relating to birth control. Although they later split from Sanger over charges of insufficient support, Goldman and Reitman distributed copies of Sanger's pamphlet Family Limitation (along with a similar essay of Reitman's). In 1915, Goldman conducted a nationwide speaking tour in part to raise awareness about contraception options. Although the nation's attitude toward the topic seemed to be liberalizing, Goldman was arrested in February 1916 and charged with violation of the Comstock Law. Refusing to pay a $100 fine, she spent two weeks in a prison workhouse, which she saw as an "opportunity" to reconnect with those rejected by society.[27]

Goldman was also an outspoken critic of prejudice against homosexuals. Her belief that social liberation should extend to gay men and lesbians was virtually unheard of at the time, even among anarchists.[28] As Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, "she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public".[29] In numerous speeches and letters, she defended the right of gay men and lesbians to love as they pleased and condemned the fear and stigma associated with homosexuality. As Goldman wrote in a letter to Hirschfeld: "It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life".[29]

Milly Witkop was a Ukrainian-born Jewish anarcho-syndicalist, feminist writer and activist. She was the common-law wife of Rudolf Rocker. In November 1918, Witkop and Rocker moved to Berlin; Rocker had been invited by Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG) chairman Fritz Kater to join him in building up what would become the Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD), an anarcho-syndicalist trade union.[30] Both Rocker and Witkop became members of the FAUD.[31] After its founding in early 1919, a discussion about the role of girls and women in the union started. The male-dominated organization had at first ignored gender issues, but soon women started founding their own unions, which were organized parallel to the regular unions, but still formed part of the FAUD. Witkop was one of the leading founders of the Women's Union in Berlin in 1920. On October 15, 1921, the women's unions held a national congress in Düsseldorf and the Syndicalist Women's Union (SFB) was founded on a national level. Shortly thereafter, Witkop drafted Was will der Syndikalistische Frauenbund? (What Does the Syndicalist Women's Union Want?) as a platform for the SFB. From 1921, the Frauenbund was published as a supplement to the FAUD organ Der Syndikalist, Witkop was one of its primary writers.[31]

Witkop reasoned that proletarian women were exploited not only by capitalism like male workers, but also by their male counterparts. She contended therefore that women must actively fight for their rights, much like workers must fight capitalism for theirs. She also insisted on the necessity of women taking part in class struggle and that housewives could use boycotts to support this struggle. From this, she concluded the necessity of an autonomous women's organization in the FAUD. Witkop also held that domestic work should be deemed equally valuable to wage labor.[32]

Lucía Sánchez Saornil, leader of Mujeres Libres in 1933

Anarcha-feminists milicia during the Spanish Revolution of 1936

Mujeres Libres (English: Free Women) was an anarchist women's organization in Spain that aimed to empower working class women. It was founded in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada and Amparo Poch y Gascón and had approximately 30,000 members. The organization was based on the idea of a "double struggle" for women's liberation and social revolution and argued that the two objectives were equally important and should be pursued in parallel. In order to gain mutual support, they created networks of women anarchists. Flying day-care centres were set up in efforts to involve more women in union activities.[33]

The organization also produced propaganda through radio, traveling libraries and propaganda tours in order to promote their cause. Organizers and activists traveled through rural parts of Spain to set up rural collectives and support for women.[34] To prepare women for leadership roles in the anarchist movement, they organized schools, women-only social groups and a women-only newspaper to help women gain self-esteem and confidence in their abilities and network with one another to develop their political consciousness. Many of the female workers in Spain were illiterate and the Mujeres Libres sought to educate them through literacy programs, technically oriented classes and social studies classes. Schools were also created for train nurses to help injured in emergency medical clinics.[34] Medical classes also provided women with information on sexual health and pre and post-natal care.[34] The Mujeres Libres also created a woman run magazine to keep all of its members informed. The first monthly issue of Mujeres Libres was published on May 20, 1936 (ack 100). However, the magazine only had 14 issues and the last issue was still being printed when the Spanish Civil War battlefront reached Barcelona, and no copies survived. The magazine addressed working class women and focused on "awakening the female conscience toward libertarian ideas".[35]

Saornil (left) and Goldman (center) in Spain during the 1930s

Lucía Sánchez Saornil (December 13, 1895 – June 2, 1970), was a Spanish poet, militant anarchist and feminist. She is best known as one of the founders of Mujeres Libres. She served in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (SIA). By 1919, she had been published in a variety of journals, including Los Quijotes, Tableros, Plural, Manantial and La Gaceta Literaria. Working under a male pen name, she was able to explore lesbian themes[36] at a time when homosexuality was criminalized and subject to censorship and punishment. Writing in anarchist publications such as Earth and Freedom, the White Magazine and Workers' Solidarity, Lucía outlined her perspective as a feminist. Although quiet on the subject of birth control, she attacked the essentialism of gender roles in Spanish society. In this way, Lucía established herself as one of the most radical of voices among anarchist women, rejecting the ideal of female domesticity which remained largely unquestioned. In a series of articles for Workers' Solidarity, she boldly refuted Gregorio Marañón's identification of motherhood as the nucleus of female identity.[37]

Sketch of Ernestina Cravello which appeared in the Evansville Courier on 5 August 1900 with the headline "Queen of Anarchists a Girl of Twenty"

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paterson, New Jersey was a major center of the anarchist movement. Most of the anarchists in the area were Italian migrants who worked in the mills and women played an important role in the movement.[38]

Northern Italian migrants Maria Roda, Ernestina Cravello and Ninfa Baronio founded Paterson's Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna (Women's Emancipation Group) in 1897. The group gave lectures, wrote for the anarchist press, and published pamphlets. They also formed the Club Femminile de Musica e di Canto (Women's Music and Song Club) and the Teatro Sociale (Social Theater). The Teatro performed plays which challenged Catholic sexual morality[39] and called for the emancipation of women. Their plays stood in marked contrast to other radical works in which women were depicted as victims in need of rescuing by male revolutionaries.[40] They often traveled to perform their plays, and connected with other Italian anarchist women in Hoboken, Brooklyn, Manhattan and New London, Connecticut. The Paterson group met regularly for about seven years and inspired other women to form similar groups.[41] Their Southern Italian contemporaries included Elvira Catello in East Harlem, who ran a popular theater group and a radical bookstore;[42] Maria Raffuzzi in Manhattan, who co-founded Il Gruppo di Propaganda Femminile (Women's Propaganda Group) in 1901;[43] and Maria Barbieri, an anarchist orator who helped organize the silk workers in Paterson.[44]

Anarchist Italian women such as Maria Roda flouted convention and Catholic teaching by rejecting traditional marriage in favor of "free unions". In practice, these unions often turned out to be lifelong and monogamous, with the division of labor falling along traditional lines. The anarchist writer Ersilia Cavedagni believed that "the woman is and will always be the educator of the family, that which has and will always have the most direct and the most important influence on the children".[45]

A prominent example for this gives the founding of the Frauenzentrum Westberlin in 1973: “We simply skipped the step of a theoretical platform, which was a must in other groups. Even before this meeting there was a consensus, so that we didn’t need a lot of discussion, because all of us had the same experience with left-wing groups behind us.”[47]

It was the women of the Undogmatische Linke, “the Sponti women (from spontaneous) who (re-)founded the feminist movement. For that reason it is worth taking a closer look at anarchist theory and tradition,” notes Cristina Perincioli and explains: “In the 1970s, the ‘68er movement split into many factions of a Leninist, revisionist or Maoist bent, each following their various dogmas. The membership numbers of the non-dogmatic left, in contrast, remained tiny, less than 1 percent of the overall Left. We had no dogmas, no pioneering thinkers and no leaders. How were we supposed to find out what would make political sense now? Which objectives were worth pursuing? How should we proceed? Among the dogmatists, all these questions were handled by a small leadership circle or even dictated by the GDR (German Democratic Republic) or China. We non-dogmatics sought inspiration elsewhere. For instance, we read the works of Frantz Fanon, the publications of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense the memoirs of the Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman, and maintained contacts with French and Italian autonomous groups.“[48] The West German women's centers - cradle of all those feminist projects[49] in the 1970s – were so inventive and productive because: “Every group at the Berlin women’s center was autonomous and could choose whatever field they wished to work in. The plenary never tried to regiment the groups. Any group or individual could propose actions or new groups, and they were welcome to realize their ideas as long as they could find enough people to help them. There was thus no thematic let alone political “line” that determined whether an enterprise was right and permissible. Not having to follow a line also had the advantage of flexibility.” (..) “We constantly and collectively developed the women’s center’s self-understanding. We therefore do not have a self-understanding on paper, but are learning together“ states the Berlin women's center's info in 1973 [50]

Autonomous feminists of the women's centers viewed the West German state with deep distrust. To apply for state funds was unthinkable (apart for a women's shelter). In the 1970s the search for terrorists would affect any young person active in whatever groups. Over years women's centers were searched by Police as well as cars and homes of many feminists.[51] The West Berlin women's center went on a week-long hunger strike in 1973 in support of the women strike in prison and rallied repeatedly at the women's jail in Lehrter Straße. From this jail Inge Viett escaped in 1973 and 1976.

In the West Berlin anarchist newspaper Agit 883 a “Women’s Liberation Front” proclaimed in 1969 combatively that “it will raise silently out of the darkness, strike and disappear again”, and criticized the women who “brag about jumping onto a party express without realizing that the old jalopy has to be electrified first before it can drive. They’ve chosen security over the struggle.“[52]

Many women joined the Red Army Fraction and the anarchist militant 2 June Movement. Neither of these terrorist groups showed feminist concerns. However, in the 1980s the women's group Rote Zora split from the Revolutionäre Zellen, legitimized militance with feminist theory and attacked among others Siemens, Nixdorf and research institutes of bio and genetic engineering. A dispute between three German militants in Der Spiegel summarizes the gender perspective.[53]

Young anarcha-feminists at an anti-globalization protest quote Emma Goldman

An important aspect of anarcha-feminism is its opposition to traditional concepts of family, education and gender roles.[54] The institution of marriage is one of the most widely opposed.[55] De Cleyre argued that marriage stifled individual growth[56] and Goldman argued that it "is primarily an economic arrangement... [woman] pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life".[57] Anarcha-feminists have also argued for non-hierarchical family and educational structures and had a prominent role in the creation of the Modern School in New York City, based on the ideas of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia.[58]

"The Fine Art of Labeling: The Convergence of Anarchism, Feminism, and Bisexuality", by Lucy Friedland and Liz Highleyman, is a piece in Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out (1991), an anthology edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka'ahumanu which is one of the seminal books[59][60] in the history of the modern bisexual rights movement.[61]

Contemporary anarcha-feminism has been noted for its heavy influence on ecofeminism: "Ecofeminists rightly note that except for anarcha-feminist, no feminist perspective has recognized the importance of healing the nature/culture division".[62] Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include Maria Mies, Peggy Kornegger, L. Susan Brown, the eco-feminist Starhawk and the post-left anarchist and anarcho-primitivist Lilith.[63]

In the pamphlet Anarchism - the Feminist Connection (1975), Kornegger uses three major principles to define anarchism:

1. "Belief in the abolition of authority, hierarchy, government."
2. "Belief in both individuality and collectivity."
3. "Belief in both spontaneity and organization."[64]

She uses the example of an anarchist tradition in Spain leading to spontaneous appropriation of factories and land during the Spanish Civil War to highlight the possibility of collective revolutionary change, and the failure of the 1968 French strike to highlight the problems of inadequate preparation and left-wing authoritarianism. Kornegger links the necessity of a specifically feminist anarchist revolution not only to the subjection of women by male anarchists, but also to the necessity of replacing hierarchical "subject/object" relationships with "subject-to-subject" relationships.[64]

In the past decades, two films have been produced about anarcha-feminism. Libertarias is a historical drama made in 1996 about the Spanish anarcha-feminist organization Mujeres Libres. In 2010, the Argentinian film Ni dios, ni patrón, ni marido was released which is centered on the story of anarcha-feminist Virginia Bolten and her publishing of the newspaper La Voz de la Mujer (English: The Woman's Voice).[65][66]