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Marriage and Love

1914

Emma Goldman

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Marriage and Love

Emma Goldman

1914

Gender & Sexuality Studies

Emma Goldman's piercing 1914 polemic dismantle the myth that marriage and love are natural companions. She argues that marriage is, at its core, an economic contract, one that has historically trapped women in dependency while granting men a socially sanctioned owner. Goldman traces how legal marriage transforms what should be free affection into obligation, resentment, and often cruelty. She writes with fierce clarity that the institution doesn't preserve love; it murders it slowly, replacing passion with property relations. Goldman's radical solution isn't the absence of commitment, but its opposite: relationships rooted in genuine choice, mutual respect, and the freedom to leave. She champions 'free love' not as libertinism, but as the only honest foundation for lasting connection. A century old, this essay still burns. It speaks to anyone who has wondered why the word 'marriage' so often sounds like a cage.

Project Gutenberg

A critical essay written in the early 20th century. This work extensively explores the distinctions between the institut...

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The story told me by the bakers of their election experiences had the quality of our own Wild West during its pioneer da...

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“There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.””

— Emma Goldman

“ON THE night of December 21, 1919, together with two hundred and forty-eight other political prisoners, I was deported from America. Although it was generally known we were to be deported, few really believed that the United States would so completely deny her past as an asylum for political refugees, some of whom had lived and worked in America for more than thirty years.””

— Emma Goldman

“The Communist dogma that the end justifies all means was also doing much harm. It had thrown the door wide open to the worst human passions, and discredited the ideals of the Revolution. The””

— Emma Goldman

“To-night I am to be shot because I had once acquired an education.””

— Emma Goldman

“But as to free speech,” he remarked, “that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period. We””

— Emma Goldman

“The field had to be “cleared of disturbing elements,” and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.””

— Emma Goldman

“A rock on which the highest hopes are shattered. Life thwarts the best intentions and breaks the finest spirits,” she said.””

— Emma Goldman

“This orthodox Marxian view leaves an important factor out of consideration-a factor perhaps more vital to the possibility and success of a social revolution than-even the industrial element. That is the psychology of the masses at a given period. Why is there, for instance, no social revolution in the United States, France, or even in Germany? Surely these countries have reached the industrial development set by Marx as the culminating stage. The truth is that industrial development and sharp social contrasts are of themselves by no means sufficient to give birth to a new society or to call forth a social revolution. The necessary social consciousness, the required mass psychology is missing in such countries as the United States and the others mentioned. That explains why no social revolution has taken place there.””

— Emma Goldman

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Goldman, Emma. Marriage and Love. Lex, lex-books.com/book/marriage-and-love-3ecf0654-181e-4909-8aa1-8b8de0ceca6b.
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