Emma Goldman and Birth Control: Anarchism in Her “Open Letter to the Press” 

Alexandra Eliot

In February of 1916, Emma Goldman observed the “popular clamor for knowledge” regarding birth control, an issue she described as being supported by “men and women throughout Europe and America.”1 The theory of contraception was “backed by science, sociology, and economic necessity,” Goldman wrote.2 And yet, The Comstock Act, a law passed by Congress in 1873, included a ban on contraceptives and the distribution of information about birth control, which it defined as “obscene and illicit material.”3 In her letter, Goldman took the language used in the Comstock Act and turned it on the press, describing their treatment of birth control as “hideous and ridiculous.”4 She was equally unflinching and ironic in her assessment of the police whose “vulgar” behavior “would outrage the most hardened criminal.”5 Their actions, she implied, affected the lives of “masses of workers and professional people” alike who could not “meet the demands of numerous children.”6  “When a law has outgrown time and necessity, it must go and the only way to get rid of the law, is to awaken the public to the fact that it has outlived its purposes,” Goldman boldly stated.7  In birth control, she saw an opportunity -- to preach the tenants of anarchism to the masses via a transcendent issue around which experts and laymen, men and women, rich and poor, could all unite. 

More widespread enthusiasm for birth control emerged out of a specific time and place -- the Bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1910s. Mere decades earlier, it was behavior observed on the streets of New York City that caused Anthony Comstock, the devout Christian man for whom the Comstock Act was named, to bring before Congress the anti-obscenity bill that outlawed the distribution of information on contraception.8 Jacob Riis would later call those same streets, the streets of Greenwich Village, the “foul core of New York’s slums” in How the Other Half Lives.9 Once inhabited by Manhattan’s elite, this area was, by the early 1850s, associated with “scandal and sensuality” and was home to “concert halls, saloons, gambling houses, and dens of prostitution.”10 The presence of those unsavory places and the characters who inhabited them kept rent prices low, which in turn attracted people looking for cheap housing. 

Those people looking for cheap housing were artists, writers, political activists and thinkers, and other types of people from all sorts of backgrounds. They came together to form a bohemian community in which both Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, another very prominent birth control advocate, were important characters. The bohemians valued political ambition and engagement, personal agency, and above all else, free speech. Free speech was built into the culture of the neighborhood; cafes and bars were akin to the Greek agora, and ideas on topics ranging from “poetry to birth control to the situation of the garment workers” were discussed.11 Because, not only did the bohemians value their own free speech, they valued the free speech of all people, and they “developed a view of themselves as a select group uniquely equipped to speak to and for the poor and voiceless.”12 Coupled with a high threshold for radicalism, the free discussion of hot-button issues created an environment in which lines were sometimes necessarily drawn between proponents of different issues or schools of thought. 

This was eventually the case with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. While Sanger was focused solely on the issue of birth control and thus the Comstock Act, Goldman felt that eliminating that one law would not solve an ailing society’s problems as she perceived them13. In order to begin to solve those problems, of which contraception was merely one, it would be necessary to radically reconfigure government itself. Goldman categorized birth control as an anarchist issue on the grounds that it highlighted the inescapable nature of government’s intrusion into, and abuse of, the lives of its citizens -- namely, the practices of the police force.

Published only days after her arrest, Goldman wrote in the letter that “everything else in society advances except the Police Department”14 and suggested multiple times that the behavior of the police was disingenuous. Goldman lectured for years on birth control, both in New York and elsewhere, and at “almost every meeting, plain clothes men were present taking copious notes.”15 She also felt that the timing of her arrest showed disingenuousness on the part of the police. She gave lectures on birth control on both February 4th and February 6th.  But, it wasn’t until five days later (when the police came to a lecture on a “subject which had no bearing at all on birth control”) that she was arrested and taken to the Clinton Street Jail, where she was held until her “bondsman released [her] on five hundred dollars bail.”16 Had the police department been truly concerned that Goldman posed a significant threat to the safety of the public, they would have acted very differently -- perhaps by arresting her more promptly or sending uniformed officers to her lectures to keep the peace. Goldman deemed this activity suspicious because it added up to suggest an ulterior motive -- to turn Goldman into a spectacle and, thereby, rob her of the power of ownership over her own narrative.  Thus, it weakened the narrative of the entire birth control movement.   

Citing her own experiences, Goldman believed that the press was complicit in carrying out the motives of the police and the abuses of the government.  In the first paragraph of the letter, which was directly addressed to the press, Goldman expressed the hope that despite the “prejudice against anarchism” that the issue of birth control would be given “fair play.”17 In the past, Goldman suggested she, and the cause for which she was a symbol, had been “misrepresented in the press.” This stood in stark contrast to the unwavering honesty and transparency with which Goldman herself operated.18 She freely admitted to being an “exponent” of anarchism, to having “lectured on birth control for years,” as well as having lectured on Atheism. So willing was she to stand up for her beliefs that a “summons would have been enough” cause for her to appear in court.19 Goldman was routinely straightforward and honest, and she desired the same level of decorum from the men in positions of power. It was in the economic and political interest of both of those institutions of power, the police and the press, to silence Emma Goldman. This letter was Goldman’s attempt to reclaim her narrative and state her intention: “I am planning a campaign of publicity through a large meeting in Carnegie Hall and through every other channel that will reach the American public to the fact that while I am not anxious to go to jail, I should yet be glad to do so, if thereby I can add my might to the importance of birth control and the wiping off our antiquated law upon the statute.” The letter continued on to predict that “no amount of persecution or petty chicanery” could halt the sweep of birth control as a movement.20 And while she herself did not really see the movement through to the end, Goldman’s prediction was correct nonetheless. Margaret Sanger made it her singular mission to challenge the Comstock Act.  As a result, the law was changed -- first in 1916 to allow for the therapeutic use of birth control, and again in 1936 to allow physicians to distribute both information and actual contraceptive devices.21 Ultimately, Goldman would never have been able to settle for mere changes in the Comstock Law the way that Sanger did. Goldman’s desire for transparency, uninhibited free speech, and sweeping social change far outweighed her desire to solve the single issue of birth control.