Lucy Parsons - Conflict With Emma Goldman

Conflict With Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons represented different generations of anarchism. This resulted in ideological and personal conflict. Carolyn Ashbaugh has explained their disagreements in depth:

Lucy Parsons' feminism, which analyzed women's oppression as a function of capitalism, was founded on working class values. Emma Goldman’s feminism took on an abstract character of freedom for women in all things, in all times, and in all places; her feminism became separate from its working class origins. Goldman represented the feminism being advocated in the anarchist movement of the 1890s . The intellectual anarchists questioned Lucy Parsons about her attitudes on the women's question.

In 1908, after Captain Mahoney (of the New York City Police Department) crashed one of Goldman’s lectures in Chicago, newspaper headlines read that every popular anarchist had been present for the spectacle, “with the single exception of Lucy Parsons, with whom Emma Goldman is not on the best of terms.” Goldman reciprocated Parsons’s absence by endorsing Frank Harris' book The Bomb, which was a largely fictional account of the Haymarket Affair and its martyrs road to death. (Parsons had published The Famous Speeches of the Haymarket Martyrs, a non-fictional, first-hand recounting of the Haymarket martyrs' final speeches in court.)

Parsons was solely dedicated to working class liberation, condemning Goldman for “addressing large middle-class audiences”; Goldman accused Parsons of riding upon the cape of her husband’s martyrdom. “o doubt,” Candace Falk wrote (Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman), “there was an undercurrent of competitiveness between the two women. Emma generally preferred center stage.” Goldman planned on preserving her place in the spotlight as an American anarchist laureate by shoving risqué sexual and kinship discourse into “the center of a perennial debate among anarchists about the relative importance of such personal issues”.

In The Firebrand, she wrote, “Mr. Rotter attempts to dig up the hideous ‘Variety’ grub and bind it to the beautiful unfolding blossom of labor's emancipation from wage-slavery and call them one and the same. Variety in sex relations and economic freedom have nothing in common.” Goldman responded:

The success of the meeting was unfortunately weakened by Lucy Parsons who, instead of condemning the unjustified Comstock attacks and arrest of anarchists… took a stand against the editor of the Firebrand, Addis, because he tolerated articles about free love… Apart from the fact that anarchism not only teaches freedom from the economic and political areas, but also in social and sexual life, L. Parsons has the least cause to object to treatises on free love… I spoke after Parsons and had a hard time changing the unpleasant mood that her remarks elicited, and I also succeeded in gaining the sympathy and the material support of the people present…

Parsons responded: "The line will be drawn sharply at personalities as we know these enlighten no one and do infinitely more harm than good."

Goldman, in her autobiography, Living My Life, briefly mentioned the presence of "Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of our martyred Albert Parsons", at a Chicago labor convention, noting that she "took an active part in the proceedings". Goldman later would acknowledge Albert Parsons for becoming a socialist and anarchist, proceeding to praise him for having "married a young mulatto"; there was no further mention of Lucy Parsons.