Sunday, October 30, 2005

Woman...naturally bigoted and relentless

Woman, essentially a purist, is naturally bigoted and relentless in her effort to make others as good as she thinks they ought to be... woman's narrow and purist attitude toward life makes her a greater danger to liberty wherever she has political power.
Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 3rd rev. ed., ch. 9 (1917).

"The rich woman who has a maid to raise her child can't expect to get the right viewpoint of life," she wrote in Miners Magazine. "If they would raise their own babies, their hearts would open and their feelings would become human. And the effect on the child is just as bad. A nurse can't give her mother's love to somebody else's child."

Mother Jones detested the middle-class reformers who sought to transfer household functions to the market or the state. She suspected that capitalists were scheming to force women into the paid labor force and children into daycare; the prospect did not please her: "The human being is the only animal which is neglected in its babyhood. The brute mother suckles and preserves her young at the cost of her own life, if need be. The human mother hires another, poorer woman for the job."
Mother Jones, anti-feminist

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