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  • Tongue of Fire: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question by Donna M. Kowal
  • Kate Zittlow Rogness
Tongue of Fire: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question. By Donna M. Kowal. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016; pp. v + 201. $75.00 cloth; $22.95 paper.

During the 2016 presidential election, women congregated at the grave of Susan B. Anthony to honor her activism as they celebrated the historical event: voting for the first woman to represent a major political party in a presidential election. What is often forgotten, however, is that Anthony was arrested for voting in an election that included the first woman to run for president, free lover and women’s rights advocate Victoria Woodhull. The prevalent narrative of women’s rights in the United States tends to foreground women like Anthony, who reflect a more mainstream women’s rights movement. While the gains achieved by Anthony and her colleagues are noteworthy, the activism of free lovers and feminist anarchists, like Woodhull and Emma Goldman, may be of particular interest to contemporary feminist activists and academics alike. As Donna M. Kowal adroitly points out in the introduction of her book, Tongue of Fire: Emma Goldman, Public Womanhood, and the Sex Question, “As problems such as pay equity, pregnancy discrimination, marriage equality, and access to contraception, abortion, and sex education continue to get argued out in the public arena, Goldman’s sexual politics has enduring relevance to twenty-first century gender struggles” (xi). The study of folks like Goldman lends insight into the rich and varied history of contemporary struggles.

Kowal’s book explores how Goldman’s “public advocacy contributed to a shift (or, more precisely, a return) of power over women’s bodies from the masculine medical and political establishments to women and a shift from the construction of women as objects of men’s sexual desire to women as agents of sexual pleasure” (xiv). To do this, Kowal considers a range of sociopolitical forces to situate Goldman’s advocacy as an anarchist-feminist [End Page 555] within the broader anarchist movement, in the context of immigration, labor rights, women’s rights, and sexuality. By using counterpublic studies as a theoretical lens, Kowal emphasizes intersectionality in her analysis and presents the reader with a nuanced analysis of Goldman as a complicated and contradictory advocate of sexual freedom.

Kowal begins chapter 1 by examining “how a collective of female anarchists at the turn of the century interrogated the sex question” (3). She balances her focus on the individual efforts of five anarchist-feminists—Kate Cooper Austin, Voltairine de Cleyre, Florence Finch Kelley, Lucy Parsons, and Emma Goldman—with that of the collective characteristics of the anarchist-feminist counterpublic. As Kowal explains, the “philosophical ideals and rhetorical practices” of anarchist women “were not uniformly shared” and “lead to the formation of a radical counterpublic that was situated in opposition to not only the public, as an extension of the state, but reformers and radicals who were not willing to go as far in attacking the root causes of oppression” (4). In so doing, Kowal demonstrates that, while Goldman’s activism is noteworthy, she must be understood within the context of her comrades.

In chapter 2, Kowal expands on Goldman’s advocacy of free love. By grounding her discussion in counterpublic studies once again, Kowal demonstrates how gender and sexuality cannot be neatly categorized (or characterized) as public or private; rather, they require an attention to the way the public sphere is a “fluid social geography of gender and sexuality” (123). Goldman emphasized the oppressive sociopolitical forces in both the public and private sphere by centering her advocacy on sexual freedom. For Goldman, free love did not mean “unrestrained promiscuity”; rather, it meant “the freedom to love without artificial constraints,” like the state, religion, or public opinion (37). As further demonstrated by Kowal, Goldman did not “limit normal sexual intimacy to heterosexual relationships” (49). Kowal concludes this chapter by identifying Goldman as a foundation for the cultural shift in sexuality that unfolded in the 1920s, amplified by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949, reflected in the groundbreaking guide to sexual health, Our Bodies, Ourselves...

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