Illustration by Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch

“A hundred years ago [Benjamin] Franklin said that six hours a day was enough for anyone to work and if he was right then, two hours a day ought to be enough now.”

Lucy Parsons spoke those words in 1886, shortly before the execution of her husband, Albert. The two had been leaders in the eight-hour-day movement in Chicago, which culminated in a general strike, a rally, and the throwing of a bomb into the crowd in Haymarket Square. Albert Parsons, along with three other “anarchists,” was hanged for the crime, though he’d already left the rally by the time the bomb was thrown. Lucy kept up the fight for the rest of her life, working with anarchists, socialists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party for the cause.

Women like Lucy Parsons were at the heart of the struggle for the shorter work week, an integral part of the labor movement until the end of the Depression, which saw the forty-hour week enshrined in law after the defeat of Hugo Black’s thirty-hour-week bill. As Kathi Weeks writes in “‘Hours for What We Will’: Work, Family and the Movement for Shorter Hours” in Feminist Studies 35, after World War ii, the demand for shorter hours was increasingly associated with women workers, and was mostly sidelined as the forty-hour week became an institution.

“Not only wages — I am thinking here of the ‘female wage’ and the ‘family wage’ — but hours, too, were constructed historically with reference to the family,” Weeks notes. The eight-hour day and five-day week presumed that the worker was a man supported by a woman in the home, and it shaped expectations that his work was important and should be decently paid, while women’s work was not really work at all (even though, as Weeks notes, the gender division of labor was supported by some paid domestic work, done largely by women of color). The postwar labor movement focused on overtime pay and wages, leaving the women’s issue of shorter hours mostly forgotten.

But the power of the eight-hour-day movement was that it didn’t require the worker to love her job, to identify with it for life, and to take pride in it in order to organize for better conditions. The industrial union movement rose up to organize those left out of the craft unions, the so-called “unskilled” workers who recognized that they were not defined by their work and that they wanted to be liberated from it as much as possible. That, in their minds, was what made them worthy of respect, not their skill level or some intrinsic identity.

The fight for shorter hours unified workers across gender and race, class and nationality, skill and ability. It did not require the valorization of “man’s work” or the idealization of women’s natural goodness.

It is a curious fact that in today’s climate of increased work for less pay, some of the highest-profile strikes of the last year have called for more hours. As labor and its supporters cheered the strikers at Walmart and at New York’s fast-food restaurants, it was taken for granted that these part-time workers (some two-thirds of them women) should be calling for more work.

Part-time work and flexible time have been touted as solutions to the problem of “work-family balance,” which is somehow only ever considered to be a woman’s problem. In the postwar era, as Erin Hatton writes in The Temp Economy, temp agencies pushed part-time temp work as a great, flexible option for women who wanted to earn a little extra “pin money.” The temp agencies’ low pay was acceptable because the workers were presumed to be married, not “real workers” who needed a family-supporting wage. Hatton notes that by the 1980s, temp agencies were spreading their model of work, with its low wages and part-time schedules — formerly associated with women — into the rest of the economy, contributing to what Leah Vosko calls a “feminization” of work in the entire economy.

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton shows how Walmart too built its global empire on the backs of part-time women workers, capitalizing on the skills of white Southern housewives who’d never worked for pay before but who saw the customer service work they did at Walmart as an extension of the Christian service values they held dear. Those women didn’t receive a living wage because they were presumed to be married; today, Walmart’s workforce is much more diverse yet still expected to live on barely more than minimum wage.

The end of welfare in the 1990s pushed poor women into low-wage part-time jobs that neither paid them enough to support their families nor provided benefits. Flexibility — considered a good thing when granted to those at the top of the ladder — is now a a demand on workers, like those at Walmart who are scheduled by a computer that predicts staffing levels based on the previous year’s sales, regardless of their needs or family commitments. Single mothers who work low-wage jobs have to hold their entire week open — and waste money on complicated child care arrangements — because they never know whether they’ll be scheduled for five or twenty-five hours. This makes it difficult to hold down two jobs and puts part-timers in a crunch if they have to worry about child care. To gain any hope of a full-time position or access to promotions, workers must be available around the clock — though in practice they rarely get enough hours to pay the bills.

Weeks notes that certain jobs are constructed as part-time because they are generally done by women. “Work time, including ‘full-time,’ ‘part-time,’ and ‘overtime,’ is a gendered construct,” she argues, “established and maintained through recourse to a heteronormative family ideal centered around a traditional gender division of labor.” And in For Love And Money, Candace Howes, Carrie Leana, and Kristin Smith point out that part-time work reduces job attachment — each additional hour per week increases a worker’s odds of remaining in the workforce by 2 percent.

The structure of benefits, too, is built around a heteronormative model, assuming that a full- time male worker gets health insurance through his job and that a part-timer doesn’t need such things. There is no definition, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, of what a “part-time” worker actually is.

So we see workers striking for more hours as well as better pay, rather than demanding that they be paid a living wage for those few hours. The eight-hour movement, it should be remembered, demanded eight hours’ work for ten hours’ pay; a lessening of working time without a corresponding decrease in wages. Both men and women who worked too much embraced this demand. Today, we see workers demanding full-time employment in order to be taken seriously as much as to make more money.

“Women’s work,” Lisa Ruchti notes in her study of hospital nursing Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines, is a term used by sociologists to indicate the correlation between the jobs that women do and the jobs that pay less and offer fewer opportunities to advance. “Feminist economists,” she notes, “have argued that part of the reason women’s work does not pay well is that it emphasizes tasks women ‘should’ do naturally.” She further notes that it is useful to distinguish work historically done by women from work that is gendered feminine.

We see examples of this emphasis in Moreton’s work on Walmart, in the way the women working as clerks were presumed to be naturally good at helping customers, while men were presumed to be natural managers and quickly promoted. (Liza Featherstone documents the groundbreaking lawsuit by Walmart women in her book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Women’s Rights at Walmart.)

Ruchti points out that women have historically been idealized as “naturally (i.e., biologically) more domestic, submissive, pious, and pure than men,” and that nursing and teaching were held out to them as careers that allowed them to exercise their natural talents. Dana Goldstein has written about how the romanticization of women’s natural goodness was used to mask the real reason that women teachers were sought when the US public school system was founded: they’d work for lower wages.

Howes, Leana, and Smith note that studies of pay by occupation found that “interactive service jobs,” which include care and sales jobs, come with a pay penalty even when controlling for education levels, unionization rates, cognitive and physical skill, and the amount of women doing the job. Feminine work, as Ruchti calls it, is valued less.

It is a surprise to see Walmart workers striking at all; Moreton notes that the way the company played up its “values” made women hesitant to complain about their employer. Paula England, Nancy Folbre and Leana point out (also in For Love And Money) that workers who identify with their company’s mission earn less. This is even more obvious in the caring professions, where workers are directly responsible for the well-being and health or education of others — and where, more than in sales jobs, the work is identified with women’s “natural” skill and place.

“The notion that care work should be provided for love rather than money has often served to legitimate gender inequality,” argue England, Folbre, and Leana. Women are the ones expected to do the caring — raising children, helping elderly parents, and perhaps supporting both at the same time. Work norms have been shaped by this belief, pushing women into jobs that uphold gender stereotypes. Folbre’s research suggests that patriarchal institutions force women to “overspecialize in care provision,” and Ruchti found that conventional definitions of femininity tend to obscure the fact that care is work by defining it as an intrinsic characteristic of women.

“Good” nurses and other caregivers are the ones who do the work for altruistic motives. “Bad” caregivers are motivated by money. This romanticized view of care workers deflects attention from the low wages and long hours that caregivers work, and serves to justify those low wages.

The care industries are experiencing a surge in growth: Howes, Leana, and Smith write that home healthcare and services for the elderly and people with disabilities are now the industries with the fastest and second-fastest rates of growth of employment in the US. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2010 Population Survey, work in the paid care sector was 24 percent of all employment.

Yet increased demand hasn’t driven up wages. Instead, real wages fell for home care workers between 1999 and 2007, and despite the Obama administration’s push for new rules that would guarantee home care workers minimum wage and overtime pay, as of this writing, those rules have not been finalized. Meanwhile, K-12 teachers, who remain mostly women and are expected, as Goldstein notes, to be naturally caring, have borne the brunt of states’ austerity policies, facing layoffs, pay freezes, and anti-union attacks.

Nancy Harvey, who runs a daycare center in Oakland, California, told me in an interview that child care providers are also exempt from minimum wage requirements. The state agencies that pay for subsidized child care sometimes wind up as much as two months late with pay. She and other care providers keep the children regardless of whether they are paid. “Most of us don’t have any kind of health care, we don’t have retirement, we don’t have medical, dental, vision. With the subsidized program we are entitled to ten paid holidays a year. That means if you’ve been in the business for five years, if you’ve been in the business for forty-five years, you get ten days,” Harvey says. “We don’t have a voice at the table. We have people making decisions that have no concept of what it’s like to walk in our shoes.”

Child care and adult care providers are written off as “babysitters” and “companions” who don’t need wage protections; a report from the National Domestic Workers Alliance last year detailed rampant abuses of live-in nannies and domestic workers, yet California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. These workers are on the low end of the spectrum when it comes to pay and respect, even among other care workers. K-12 teachers and nurses are professionals who make professional salaries, need specialized education, and often have union contracts. Child care and adult care providers, by contrast, have more in common with the rest of the low-wage workforce. They often work part-time and not year-round, have fewer protections, and are more likely to be immigrants and people of color.

Ruchti notes that researchers have found discrimination within nursing and care work against women of color, who are seen as less professional and even more “naturally” caring than their white coworkers. This adds to the lack of respect for the less professionalized end of the field — or, as Ruchti says, “[W]hen care work is legitimized through professionalization it is not as accessible to women of color.”

Harvey stresses that she is not just a babysitter; she spends her own money on educational materials and toys for children between the ages of three months and three years. “We’re early childhood educators, and not babysitters,” she says. No one would question, she points out, whether a doctor deserves vacation time or a sick day. “I think it is how people view the profession. Physicians are valued.”

While bosses, administrators, and politicians expect and tout the natural “caring” that women who work in care fields provide, Harvey points out that it adds to their exploitation. “Kindness is taken for weakness,” she says.

The strike is labor’s weapon of last resort: the ultimate refusal of work, the shutdown of production. But what does it mean to strike when “production” isn’t the production of widgets, cars, or even food, but care for children, the ill or disabled, or the elderly?

The strikes in the last year by workers at Walmart and fast-food establishments weren’t intended to shut down operations; they were intended to shake up the bosses, establish solidarity, and build power among the workers. Similarly, not all care workers can shut down operations — a hospital goes on when its nurses strike, and replacement workers are called in. Child care and home care workers prepare their clients as best they can and help them make other arrangements. The Brooklyn Rail reported that when home health aides organized with SEIU 1199 struck in 2004, one woman’s client asked her for a stack of union cards to give out to substitute workers.

Longtime organizer Stephen Lerner and law student striker Emilie Joly, in separate interviews, both stressed the value of the strike as a freedom from work, creating time for busy workers to organize, rally, and speak to the press. It’s not just about shutting down production, in other words, but about laying claim to one’s own time.

In 1974, Mariarosa Dalla Costa argued that no strike had ever been a general strike because women’s work in the home was still being done. For a real general strike to be possible, women would have to be able to walk away from unwaged work, she argued. Yet we still have trouble walking away from waged “women’s work.” The women of the Wages for Housework movement argued that women had to be able to refuse the work that was considered a part of their essential femininity to show, as Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming said, that “we are not that work.” What more concrete refusal of work is there than a strike?

Striking at a factory or Walmart is one thing — it’s very clear who the target is. Striking, when you’re a care aide or a daycare provider or teacher, is a different process. The boss is not necessarily there every day when you go to work. The care recipients, patients, and students are not antagonists. They usually do not set wages for the workers, though they are the ones most immediately affected by a strike.

Yet it is necessary, sometimes, for care workers to strike, because without a demonstration of power from workers, conditions rarely change. Without a demonstration of what happens when women stop working, women’s work will never be properly valued.

Jen Johnson is a high school teacher in Chicago, an area vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. Their union began laying the groundwork for its historic strike months in advance, she told me in a recent interview, with an initial focus on putting education issues on the community’s radar.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel put the teachers on notice shortly after his election. “He made it very clear that the teachers’ union was public enemy number one,” Johnson said. While Emanuel pushed to make the strike about wages, and even normally progressive pundits wrung their hands and lamented for the children, the union had already put forth its message. Teachers wanted better schools, air conditioned classrooms, and smaller class sizes — not Cadillac benefits and 1% wages.

The same rhetoric was thrown at home care workers who struck in New York in 2004, and nurses who strike are frequently shamed for abandoning their patients. “It’s unfortunate and disappointing that the union called this disruptive strike, especially during the holidays, when only the sickest of the sick are in the hospital,” a spokesperson for the Sutter hospital chain in California said — as the chain turned around and locked the nurses out for five days.

The education reform movement calls for merit pay for “good” teachers and swift firing for “bad” ones, encouraging individual self-interest among teachers. Yet when they dare to strike, that same ideology is used against them. We get the ironic spectacle of capitalists shaming unionized women workers for being insufficiently communitarian. The people doing “women’s work” are simultaneously not important enough and far too important to strike.

“Traditional femininity, and, by extension, nursing, are defined as pleasing others,” Ruchti points out. “Care — whether an act or idea — is about pleasing others.” In the rest of the capitalist workforce, workers are encouraged to be selfish, to push for their own advancement. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has written a whole book telling women to demand more as individuals. But when care workers take collective action to demand better working conditions, they are shamed as selfish. “You should be taking care of the community!” pundits and politicians scold. “How dare you want better for yourself?”

England, Folbre, and Leana note that emotional attachments to students, patients, or charges often discourage workers from demanding higher wages or better conditions for themselves if they think they will hurt others — while owners and managers, who do not come into contact with care recipients as often, cut costs and squeeze ever more productivity out of workers. New York State Nurses Association vice president Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez commented in an interview that the lack of preparation for Hurricane Sandy was related to the broader neoliberal reorganization of work in the hospital. “They don’t want to pay people for what they call NPT — non-productive time,” she said, which means that training programs are out the window, and patients suffer. Meanwhile, nurses, who often include lower nurse-to-patient ratios in their bargaining, are called selfish.

Molly Knefel, writing about the New York school bus drivers’ strike, notes that pundits and bosses who claim to care often do just the opposite: “How we treat those who care for certain children reflects how we value those children.”

And Harvey asks: “We say we value education, but do we really? Do we value the people that give us the education, the teachers, the providers? When we look at it on paper, no, we don’t.”

In Chicago, the teachers beat Emanuel (and the pundits’ pearl-clutching) by out-planning him.

“The community had a better sense than normal that we weren’t just striking over a pay raise, we were striking because we wanted to call attention to serious inequality in our schools. It struck a chord with people,” Johnson says.

The union had added an organizing department shortly after its takeover by CORE, a more militant caucus discussed previously in these pages. They expected members to stay informed, to be media-trained, and to give feedback on their contract. They created a research department, which came up with a report titled “The Schools Chicago Students Deserve,” calling for smaller classes, increasing wraparound services, and better response to social and educational needs. They formed a bargaining team of more than thirty members to go to negotiation sessions, so that classroom teachers were there at the table as experts.

Johnson notes that when teachers framed themselves as educational experts in their communities, it made it harder for Emanuel to claim they didn’t care. They made care a visible part of their labor, and it showed — 67 percent of CPS parents supported the teachers’ strike. Johnson points out that very few children were sent across picket lines to the in-school programs put together by the city while the teachers were out.

Weeks warns of the dangers of sanctifying “women’s work” and the assumptions about women’s natural place and biological tendencies that comes with it, but what the Chicago teachers did, what nurses and home care aides do, is make their work visible. By stepping away from it, even briefly, they dissociate themselves from it and remind us that it is not work done simply out of love. By including demands that benefit the community, they make visible the value of their caring as well as their expertise.

Of course, all of this is extra work that comes on top of the grueling work that teachers, nurses, and child care and home care workers are already doing. Which brings us back to the beginning, more or less: to the need for a rekindled movement for shorter hours, a movement that will challenge our fixed ideas about what is work and who should do it, about the organization of domestic, reproductive, and care work.

In Weeks’ words, “The demand would be for more time not only to inhabit the spaces where we now find a life outside of waged work but also to create spaces in which to constitute new subjectivities, new work and nonwork ethics, and new practices of care and sociality.”

(Jeremy Zilar / Flickr)

New York’s inequality is not a secret to anyone who walks its streets, let alone struggles to pay its rents. Our billionaire mayor seemed to be out to prove a point this week, acting like a petulant child when public opinion pushed him to cancel the New York City Marathon this weekend, while people still have no power, food, and in too many cases lost everything in floods or fires.

For those of us who’ve spent the last few years covering the struggles of everyday people against the financial and corporate giants who’ve consolidated wealth to unheard-of levels, this week has been an exercise in “Where the hell have you been?” After Hurricane Katrina, which I watched from hundreds of miles away, people declared over and over “It’s like a third world country.”

Those of us who’d lived in and loved that city didn’t need a storm to tell us what it was like.

The comparisons to Katrina have been everywhere, of course, but for me they hit home when, safe in my Crown Heights apartment that never even lost power, I saw friends and acquaintances who’d been involved with Occupy Wall Street tweeting their relief activities under the hashtag #OccupySandy. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched them tweet their setup of a hub in Red Hook, of Common Ground, of Malik Rahim, of New Orleans’ mutual aid after the storm, and how leftists and radicals (Rahim, a former Black Panther, learned about community care from the Panthers’ free food and tutoring programs) step quietly into the spaces that are left vacant by the wrecking crew that’s laid waste to social welfare programs and the churches and charities that Republicans keep telling us will step up to provide care.

Julieta Salgado, a Brooklyn College student and organizer, told me that it started with a text message from a handful of folks working with the Free University, Tuesday after the storm had passed. That group wound up at the Red Hook Initiative, and from there fanned out into the streets of wealthy, dry Carroll Gardens seeking donations. “We just walked from door to door and every single person responded, no one turned us down,” Salgado said. “People were thanking us for coming. I think we gave an entryway to some folks who didn’t know how to help.”

There’s a particular opportunity for mutual aid in the void in the aftermath of disaster, particularly in a neoliberal state whose safety net has been shredded, where the state simply isn’t there and people step up to take care of each other (not “themselves” as our libertarian friends would have it, and not the rich handing out charity as Mitt Romney wants you to believe, but communities in solidarity). The idea of mutual aid was at the foundation of Occupy as much as the much-debated horizontalism and the opposition to the banks.

Just after Thomas Frank declared Occupy dead, killed by its own fascination with process and language, I walked into St. Jacobi Church in Sunset Park Friday and saw so many familiar faces from Zuccotti, not sitting around debating how to talk about the revolution, but doing hard, necessary, practical work to feed and clothe and support swathes of the city reeling from the Superstorm. The obituaries of Occupy had never seemed so completely wrong; not on May Day or September 17^th when the streets again rang with protest.

The church basement was filled with volunteers standing around tables, some preparing food, some sorting donations and putting together boxes, like the Kitchen and Comfort stations from the best days at the park. All would be fed. All would be clothed. Except instead of waiting for those in need to arrive, curious, at the park and make their way past the cardboard protest signs to the heart of the occupation, these volunteers now were loading cars filled with precious gasoline to drive to Coney Island, to the Rockaways, to anywhere that people weren’t being cared for.

“It’s amazing how organized we are, it’s amazing how much so many people involved with the social movement have learned about themselves, about each other, about all of how, how to put these values into practice,” Michael Premo, one of the Occupy organizers in Sunset Park, told me.

In Red Hook earlier I’d seen lines around the block for food, diapers, blankets, flashlights, water, as the Red Hook Initiative/Occupy Sandy effort had expanded to more buildings, separated its hot food distribution from the place to get supplies to take home. The public housing all around us was still powerless and cold, but there were so many volunteers that they didn’t know what to do with us all. Salgado showed back up the next day and saw two people whose doors she’d knocked on the night before, there to help.

For those of us who had power and Internet access, of course, the political emails kept coming, of course, because Sandy had the temerity to hit the East Coast right before a bloated hellstorm of an election. I tweeted about some of the ones that seemed in the poorest taste; who sends an email with the subject “close call” in the days after a hurricane if you’re not talking about the storm?

I got at least one apology when I pointed out that perhaps what Staten Island needs at the moment is not Democratic doorknockers, but volunteers to help clear the wreckage and feed and clothe people who have just lost everything, but what seemed entirely lost is the long tradition of service provision as political organizing.

Just ask the community groups who jumped into action for Sandy, the organizers who make their (meager) living providing services to people facing foreclosure, to immigrant workers fighting wage theft, to neighborhoods trying to keep out the corporate-backed charter schools. At 1pm I dropped off two bags of clothing at the New York Communities for Change offices in downtown Brooklyn, walking past gas cans filled last night in Connecticut by volunteers to make sure the cars kept going out to the Rockaways, to Long Island; at 11pm I said goodnight to an organizer going back to sleep in his office to start again tomorrow.

Because political organizing and mutual aid go hand in hand, or they should. Because the early labor movement wasn’t just about organizing on the job but organizing in your neighborhood. Because the folks still trying to build an anticapitalist movement in this country know that you can’t organize with shell-shocked people until their basic needs have been met.

Of course, Common Ground was infiltrated, because solidarity is suspect; you can bet that if these pesky Occupy activists keep feeding and supporting and organizing in communities, someone will be out to break that up too. But for now, Salgado said, “The joke is so on Bloomberg. The people he spent $60 million trying to destroy, we’re the first people on the ground.”

Rebecca Solnit wrote so eloquently of the communities that arise in disaster, and Occupy was a response to a disaster itself, a slow-moving financial hurricane that destroyed homes as surely as the storm. So it shouldn’t be surprising that after Sandy moved through, the first people to jump into action were the same ones who had made things run in the park. The movement may have suffered from the lack of focus after the encampments were taken, but Sandy provided that focus and immediate needs to be provided for.

“We scaled up in like 24 hours, it’s really a testament to, with one clear focused vision, how these specific set of values were able to really get organized,” Premo said. The old networks were moving within a couple of hours.

Goldman Sachs tweeted at me after I made a late-night whiskey-fueled joke about marching on the bank’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, illuminated through generator power while the surrounding buildings were dark. The PR flack responsible for the Twitter feed wanted to be sure I knew that Goldman had practiced its own form of mutual aid, opening up a charging station for neighborhood residents to plug in their phones and other devices.

Lovely. The absolute least that the mega-investment-bank could do, I’m certain, after taxpayers coughed up $10 billion in bailout funds and New York subsidized $25 million more in job creation credits and handed the bank $1.65 billion in low-interest, tax-exempt Liberty Bonds, saving them an estimated $250 million in interest and financing for staying in New York and building that fancy new generator-powered headquarters. Oh, and after taxpayer-funded police arrested many of the very same protesters who are at this moment practicing real mutual aid out in Brooklyn and in Chinatown to keep them from dirtying the bank’s reputation.

Looking at the photo that Laura Flanders tweeted of Goldman’s glow at the end of a dark street, I kept hearing Kanye West’s voice in my head, “No one man should have all that power.” Except, of course, no one bank should have all that power, and that’s figurative as well as literal. How many floors, Flanders asked at The Nation, did the bank really need to illuminate to prove its point to its neighbors? We don’t need you. We have our own generators, our own power, and enough money to wait out the storm’s aftermath.

Except, of course, that they do need us.

Far more than we need them. Out in Red Hook, in Sunset Park, as we left, cars were departing, volunteers were leaving and more coming to replace them, familiar faces running in with news of possible staging locations in other parts of the city. The rhythm was different than the park, the sense of urgency more acute, the reports pouring in of neighborhoods desperately in need of support. But the work was the same, if the motivation different. Meet people’s needs, help them solve their problems.

Blackouts provided just a temporary respite from the daily hustle of late-capitalist NYC, but in that space there was room for something else.

“The cops are still doing what we expected them to do, Bloomberg is still doing what we expected him to do, and we’re still doing what we expected us to do — but no one else did,” Salgado said.

On Thursday J. brought me Vivian Gornick’s biography of Emma Goldman because he is a little bit the Sasha to my Emma (in a good way, I promise) and I spent the weekend reading it on subways and protecting it from rain and hail while running around the city working. Which is an appropriate way to read about Emma Goldman, all breathless and busy in a whirl of activity, finishing the last pages in a park on Sunday before going to look in on Melissa’s cat.

I am writing this to the tune of the Sisters of Mercy’s “Under the Gun”, with the fabulous Terri Nunn (of Berlin fame) belting “Are you living for love?” over and over, and while in one way that’s utterly appropriate for writing about Emma in another way, well, no.

Because Gornick is mostly interested in psychoanalyzing Goldman’s love life, and while I’m as salaciously inclined as any girl and I love my gossip and I’d be an utter liar if I didn’t say that I enjoyed the tidbits from Goldman and Ben Reitman’s love letters as much as anything in this book, I’m also sick and bloody tired of reading people reading radical women’s love lives as indicators of their politics.

Bhaskar Sunkara’s review of the book for The New Inquiry sums up this problem pretty clearly:

Gornick’s underlying narrative is clear: Goldman’s anarchism was utopian, but in the pursuit of this lofty ideal our protagonist defended free speech, an all-American brand of individualism. Instead of examining a political life, we get a trite celebration of the “good fight” and some parlor gossip. It is, in a sense, the perfect biography for a neoliberal age that can’t help but smirk at genuine commitment.

Goldman’s contribution to the Left might have been a willingness to talk about sex and sexuality as seriously as she talked about class, poverty, and war, but she was pushed into the same trap that women who discuss sex still get caught in–the one where people assume that talking about sex is sexual, and that it then colors everything you do. While Goldman’s belief in free love was part of her anarchism (and at various times it was used against her by selfish lovers who pushed her to be a proper free-lover and let them fuck whomever they wanted, giving her guilt for being jealous that echoes the double bind we feel now, we feminist women who happen to wind up sad sometimes about men), it was not in fact the sum total of her politics nor in many cases the driving force behind it that Gornick wants to claim it as.

But should we be surprised? We live in a world these days where mainstream feminism has split off from any sort of class politics and then makes angry demands for solidarity without offering any of its own. We expect women to embody their politics, while men create and define theirs. If Emma Goldman cared about sex, freedom in the bedroom as well as out of it, that must be where her class analysis sprang from, right? But even if it was, that doesn’t mean we can understand class politics from analyzing her sex life.

We tend to read women radicals’ love lives as indicators of their politics or as contradictions thereof–as Cristina Nehring so eloquently pointed out in A Vindication of Love. Frida Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera is a “flaw” that we have to get past in order to appreciate her as the defanged feminist icon she’s become. But we would not have Kahlo’s art without her anguish, and while this makes us feel intimate with her, as we look at paintings where she quite literally pulled her insidesout for us to see, we don’t actually know her. We don’t actually care that she was hurting, in fact we’re complicit in her hurting because we enjoy her art. Yet we criticize her for staying with or forgiving Rivera, because women after all don’t know their own minds or hearts, right?

As I wrote about A Vindication of Love: “Ladies, if the failures in my love life mean that I’ve failed feminism, well, feminism is screwed.”

More to the point, if we are talking about Goldman’s sexual politics, let’s think about something that should be basic to any doctrine of free love: the end of a relationship doesn’t mean failure. In Goldman’s own words, which Gornick quotes but doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to:

Anguish over the loss of love or a non-reciprocated love among people who are capable of high and fine thoughts will never make a person coarse. Those who are sensitive and fine have only to ask themselves whether they can tolerate any obligatory relation, and an emphatic no would be the reply.

In other words: hurting over a lost love happens, it’s natural, it doesn’t make you a worse person. The end of an affair hurts. But true failure would be trying to compel a relationship that is past its time to stay through some idea of obligation.

And so through this lens, Goldman’s relationships, that Gornick either pities or mocks her for, and always chides her for not having learned from as if she was the only one in them, are not failures, but experiences. Lovers who fade out of one’s life or flame out, who shift to being friends, who sleep with others, who make you scream with jealousy and shake with fear and tremble with anticipation, all of those are people worth having.

It strikes me as particularly strange that Gornick, who in other places mounts a passionate defense of love–in “The End of the Novel of Love” she argues ”Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.”

Even in this book she argues that we used to value love culturally more than we do now. Yet her at times snide comments about Goldman’s life–she literally writes “Wha-a-at?” like a high schooler writing an email about a friend in response to Goldman’s affair at age 65 with a younger (blind) man–feel less like a deep reading of Goldman’s attempts to live out her free-love ideal and more like catty pleasure in being better at something than the revolutionary icon.

I should be grateful for this book, though, as it made me feel deeply for Goldman and brought me a bit of clarity about my own life as well. The failures that Gornick holds Goldman responsible for–never finding her perfect lover, the person who could both respect and support her work, agree with her ideal of freedom, challenge her, and give her spectacular orgasms–are failures that many feminist radical women, myself included, still feel deeply today, a hundred years after Goldman first took to a stage to call for free love. It’s hard enough in 2012 to find a partner who doesn’t want to tame the mouthy political woman, shut her up, shove her back in a box. Am I, too, a failure because I don’t have a long-term partner? I don’t feel like one.

Patriarchy didn’t disappear because Goldman called for its destruction–and people remain flawed, fucked up, sometimes beautifully so and sometimes damaged beyond repair. The revolution didn’t not happen because Goldman didn’t find a life partner; the revolution didn’t happen because most people weren’t radical anarchists.

I don’t think Goldman herself would have minded the discussion of her love life–after all, it’s not twenty pages into her autobiography before she’s writing of discovering masturbation–but let’s do ourselves a favor and stop reducing women to their bodies, their sexuality, their love lives. There’s something deeply misogynist about that kind of thinking. Taken to extremes, it’s what Rush Limbaugh did when he declared open season on Sandra Fluke’s personal sex life because she dared speak about birth control in public. It’s presuming that because someone speaks politically about personal topics, we should get access to their personal lives.

And let’s for a moment remember that it almost never happens to men, even when they literally get caught with their pants down. Eliot Spitzer may have lost his job over his sex life, but no one assumes that his sexuality colors his analysis of Wall Street.

Yet Gornick feels perfectly comfortable reducing a woman’s lifelong political career to something where “Felt is the operative word.” The same way women musicians are confessional songwriters rather than crafters of narrative, the way it’s called LITERATURE when male writers write of their sexual exploits.

I want to argue instead that there is nothing wrong with feeling, feeling passionately, intensely, the highs and the lows, and also that the mysterious and beautiful thing about feelings is that no one else knows exactly what they are to us. That feelings and thoughts are different, and a woman who spent her life on the public stage and left a long record of what she did think deserves some engagement with those thoughts as well as those feelings.