Aside from these activities (and the evading of our overzealous police
in times of stress) she has worked as a trained nurse and midwife; she
conducted a kind of radical salon in New York, frequented by such people
as John Swinton and Benjamin Tucker; she traveled abroad to study social
conditions; she has become conversant with such modern writings as those
of Hauptmann, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Zola, and Thomas Hardy. It is stated
that the "Rev. Mr. Parkhurst, during the Lexow investigation, did his
utmost to induce her to join the Vigilance Committee in order to fight
Tammany Hall." She was the manager of Paul Orlenoff and Mme. Nazimova.
She was a friend of Ernest Crosby. Her library, it is said, would be
taken for that of a university extension lecturer on literature.

It will thus be seen that Emma Goldman is of a type familiar enough in
America, and conceded a popular respect. She has a legitimate social
function--that of holding before our eyes the ideal of freedom. She is
licensed to taunt us with our moral cowardice, to plant in our souls the
nettles of remorse at having acquiesced so tamely in the brutal artifice
of present day society.

I submit the following passage from her writings ("Anarchism and Other
Essays") as at once showing her difference from other radicals and
exhibiting the nature of her appeal to her public:

"The misfortune of woman is not that she is unable to do the work of a
man, but that she is wasting her life force to outdo him, with a
tradition of centuries which has left her physically incapable of
keeping pace with him. Oh, I know some have succeeded, but at what cost,
at what terrific cost! The import is not the kind of work woman does,
but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage
or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that
will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her
independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting
herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by
refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children
unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State,
society, the husband, the family, etc.; by making her life simpler, but
deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance
of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of
public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ba