The Anarchist-Feminist Response to the "Woman Question" in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

century America was often regarded not as a set of coherent beliefs and demands but as the rather nebulous and disconcerting Woman Question. The very phrase evokes a sense of uncertainty, an inability to describe precisely the nature or motives animating the demands for sexual equality. The question was indeed both vexing and puzzling, not only for contemporaries but also for scholars attempting to cope with the complex phenomenon of nineteenth century feminism-a phenomenon which cannot be subsumed, as it was so conveniently after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, in the demand for woman suffrage. In an effort to explore the whole range of concerns embodied in the ''woman question, historians in the last decade have been examining the political perspectives and the attitudes of those women whose concerns differed markedly from the legal and political interests which by the early 188Os had come to characterize the organized women's rights movement. Among those other women were the anarchist-feminists, who launched a stinging attack on prevailing cultural mores and social norms-an attack which rested on an ideology significantly at variance from the precepts that had come to dominate mainstream feminism. Interestingly, very little scholarly attention has been focused on anarchist women, with the exception of Emma Goldman, who was not fully representative of them. Despite their differences, some common theoretical territory united all feminists in nineteenth-century America. They believed that American society had institutionalized certain inequities for women, inequities which required remedy. As Kathryn Kish Sklar noted in her biography of Catharine Beecher, feminists agreed that women had a right to participate