Socialist Feminists

"Here I am, worried and anxious; there she is, serenity incarnate. How can she appear before me like a human reproach? Like an ironic comment on my own life. How can she never suspect I might be miserable? Unlike myself, she is not protected by a mature, philosophical outlook on existence. Compared to me she is a child. No struggle has tested her strength, no disappointment has yet caused her spirit to waver. But that's it, by God! That's the very reason she is the stronger. She has lost nothing of herself. She has not been devoured by vultures and wolves! She is untouched. She lives life to the full. However feeble the flame within her it is enough to light her way. But as for me, the fire in my heart burns me alive."

"Je n'appelle pas priere un choix et un arrangement de paroles lancees vers le ciel, mais un entretien de la pensee avec l'ideal de lumiere et de perfections infinies."

"It was there he composed these most beautiful of short pages which he modestly entitled the Preludes. They are masterpieces. Several bring to mind visions of deceased monks and the sound of funeral chants; others are melancholy and fragrant; they came to him in times of sun and health, in the clamor of laughing children under he window, the faraway sound of guitars, birdsongs from the moist leaves, in the sight of the small pale roses coming in bloom on the snow. … Still others are of a mournful sadness, and while charming your ear, they break your heart. There is one that came to him through an evening of dismal rain — it casts the soul into a terrible dejection. Maurice and I had left him in good health one morning to go shopping in Palma for things we needed at out "encampment." The rain came in overflowing torrents. We made three leagues in six hours, only to return in the middle of a flood. We got back in absolute dark, shoeless, having been abandoned by our driver to cross unheard of perils. We hurried, knowing how our sick one would worry. Indeed he had, but now was as though congealed in a kind of quiet desperation, and, weeping, he was playing his wonderful Prelude. Seeing us come in, he got up with a cry, then said with a bewildered air and a strange tone, "Ah, I was sure that you were dead." When he recovered his spirits and saw the state we were in, he was ill, picturing the dangers we had been through, but he confessed to me that while waiting for us he had seen it all in a dream, and no longer distinguished the dream from reality, he became calm and drowsy while playing the piano, persuaded that he was dead himself. He saw himself drowned in a lake. Heavy drops of icy water fell in a regular rhythm on his breast, and when I made him listen to the sound of the drops of water indeed falling in rhythm on the roof, he denied having heard it. He was even angry that I should intepret this in terms of imitative sounds. He protested with all his might — and he was right to — against the childishness of such aural imitations. His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. … The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"Three years ago in Saint-Front, an ugly little town that you won't find on any map, something happened that caused quite a stir. It wasn't particularly interesting and few people heard of it, but it had serious consequences. (first lines)"

"Laurence did what all predestined artists do: she suffered through all the misery, all the agony of unrecognized, unappreciated talent. (I)"

"People who live in a calm retreat have a marvelous instinct for imagining storms and disasters in other people's lives, and they secretly rejoice at having avoided them themselves. It is a consolation that must be allowed these people, since pride, too, has its needs, and virtue alone cannot always compensate for long hours of boredom and solitude. (II)"

"It would be a serious mistake to assume that provincial prejudices are difficult to overcome. Whatever people say about this, one can easily win or lose their goodwill by one's presence and behavior. Some say that time is a great healer: in the provinces, it is boredom which brings about change and its justification. Any kind of change in the routine of a small town appears awful at first; but after a while people recognize that it wasn't so terrible, and that, indeed, a thousand curious but timid souls were just waiting for an example to be set, to launch themselves into a career of innovation. (III)"

"...her soul began to blossom and, within her soul, the drama of her life began to unfold. (III)"

"Those who inspire in us the greatest affection are not always those for whom we have the highest regard. Tenderness does not require admiration and enthusiasm: it is based on a feeling of equality which makes us seek out in a friend a peer, a man subject to our own passions, our own weaknesses. Veneration demands a different sort of affection than that continuously openhearted intimacy we call friendship. I would have a very poor opinion of a man who could not love what he admired; I would have an even worse opinion of a man who could love only what he admired. This applies merely to friendship. Love is a different creature entirely: it lives only on enthusiasm, and all that injures its feverish delicacy blights and withers it. But the sweetest of all human emotions, the one that is nourished by calamities and mistakes as well as by greatness and heroic acts, the one that spans every stage of life, that begins to develop in us from our very first sensation of being, and that endures as long as we do, the one that parallels and actually lengthens our life, that is reborn from its ashes and that reties itself as tightly and just as firmly after being broken; that emotion, alas! is not love, as you well know, but friendship. (beginning of Chapter 1)"

"Without our even realizing it, literature performs its miracles. It revives the poetry of former days; and, putting to rest in the past all that had been for intellectuals of the past the object of just criticisms, it brings to us, like a forgotten perfume, the unrecognized riches of a taste that is no longer open to discussion, since it no longer reigns arbitrarily. Art, although it poses as egotistical ("art for art's sake"), creates progressive philosophy without realizing it. It makes its peace with the mistakes and shortcomings of the past, to preserve, as in a museum, the monuments of its conquest. (chapter 18)"

"[He] was a good man but no where near as good a philosopher. His mind was lofty, rather than broad; that is to say that he had more capacity for enthusiasm than for investigation. There was only room in that ardent brain for one idea, and that was the idea of revolution. (Chapter 21)"

"the French common people, particularly in the major cities, are considered to have infinite wit. I question the epithet. Wit only exists when one is purified by a taste that the people cannot have, this taste itself being the result of certain vices of civilization which are not those of the people. So the people have no wit, from my point of view. They have more than that: they have poetry, they have genius. With them, form is nothing. They don't waste their minds hunting for it; they take it as it comes to them. But their thoughts are full of grandeur and power, because they rest on the principle of eternal justice, disregarded by societies and preserved in their hearts. When this principle sees the light of day, no matter how it is expressed, it startles and strikes like the lightning of divine truth. (chapter 11)"

""Up till now," I said to myself, "there's been something too personal about his ambition, which portrayed the future in the light of egotism. Now that he's in love, his soul will open to ideas that are more ample, truer, more generous. Devotion will reveal itself to him, and with devotion, the need and the courage to work." (chapter 13)"

"The sorrows of love, the torment of remorse, even the worries of destitution hadn't seriously unsettled him; but the deep wound sustained by his vanity was more than enough to punish him. Unfortunately, it was not enough to correct him. (Chapter 32)"

"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man, Self-called George Sand! whose soul, amid the lions Of thy tumultuous senses, moans defiance And answers roar for roar, as spirits can: I would some mild miraculous thunder ran Above the applauded circus, in appliance Of thine own nobler nature's strength and science, Drawing two pinions, white as wings of swan, From thy strong shoulders, to amaze the place With holier light! that thou to woman's claim And man's, mightst join beside the angel's grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame Till child and maiden pressed to thine embrace To kiss upon thy lips a stainless fame"

"Why call George Sand a wild woman in the publicity for her books? I protest the use of such an inaccurate epithet for such a cultivated and intelligent woman"

"If the author of the romantic creed was Rousseau, its popularizer and vulgarizer was George Sand."

"Sand is in my opinion, without doubt, the finest prose writer in any modern language—at least. As passionate as Rousseau, & far more picturesque. No writer perhaps ever possessed so fine an eye for nature or could convey the results with such picturesque precision."

"She was a woman of almost unprecedented intelligence and talent – a name that has gone down in history, a name that is destined not to be forgotten and not to disappear from European humanity... from my very first reading at the age of sixteen I was amazed by the strangeness of the contradiction between what was written and said about her and what I myself could see in fact. In actual fact, many, or at least some, of her heroines represented a type of such sublime moral purity as could not be imagined without a most thorough moral scrutiny within the poet’s own soul; without the acceptance of one’s full responsibility; without an understanding and a recognition of the most sublime beauty and mercy, patience, and justice."

"She had the gift of most clearly intuiting (if I may be permitted such a fancy word) a happier future awaiting humanity. All her life she believed strongly and magnanimously in the realization of those ideals precisely because she had the capacity to raise up the ideal in her own soul. The preservation of this faith to the end is usually the lot of all elevated souls, all true lovers of humanity."

"There were plenty of women writing, different kinds of women, you know...How come they did it?...How brave George Sand was!...The miracle is what women have done in this world. It’s miraculous that they did the work they did on such a high level. Where did they do it? And wearing the clothes they were wearing?"

"What time the gifted lady took Away from paper, pen, and book, She spent in amorous dalliance (They do those things so well in France)."

"Jane Harrison, the great classical anthropologist, wrote in 1914 in a letter to her friend Gilbert Murray: "By the by, about "Women," it has bothered me often-why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex-why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?... Is it mere convention and propriety, or something deeper?"...One answer to Jane Harrison's question has to be that historically men and women have played very different parts in each others' lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter's model and the poet's muse, but also as comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant, and copyist of manuscripts, man has played a quite different role for the female artist. Henry James repeats an incident which the writer Prosper Mérimée described, of how, while he was living with George Sand, "he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red madras round her head, making bravely, with her own hands the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardor and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence, and her industry a reproof-the result of all which was a lively irritation and an early rupture." The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the misnaming and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival."

"No part of George Sand's Memoirs is more interesting than the description of the development of her own genius. To remember the dreams and confusions of childhood, never to lose the recollections of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the gifts of the poetic character."

"I have to confess that when I began translating Horace, I was not aware of George Sand's many gifts as a novelist. Of course I admired her outlandish behavior, that cigar-smoking woman who bushwhacked her way through the nineteenth century, wearing men's clothes when she went out hunting or when she attended the Paris theater. I enjoyed the stories of her amorous adventures, how she became the lover of famous composers, revolutionaries, writers, and actors, not all of them male. All of that is part of George Sand. But I discovered in reading this book that George Sand the historical figure is only a small corner of the picture. Sand...had a style and vocabulary that were the admiration of her literary colleagues, a wide-ranging knowledge of politics and religion, and a wonderfully catty wit, all of which she used ably in her work. Horace is one of the best examples of these skills in her oeuvre. One of Sand's most winning qualities as a novelist, though, is her empathy for her characters, an empathy that leaps over barriers of gender, class, and age."

"Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"At this (IWW) convention I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, who had been executed 20 years before in the yard of the Cook County Jail in the heart of Chicago. While he was hanged she was held a prisoner in the Clark Street Station House, not far from where we were then meeting... I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: "Clear our names!" and she made this her lifelong mission."

"One of the first Chicanas to come into contact with the suffragist movements in the 1880s was Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, a Chicana socialist labor organizer...Although many social workers like Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, and socialists like Emma Goldman advocated the rights of immigrants and working women, in most instances during the 1890 to 1910 period their advocacy had little or no effect on the suffragist movement's attitude toward minority or working-class women"

"In the 1880's socialist and labor organizer Lucy Gonzales Parsons was actively organizing women workers in Chicago. Her very presence and activity as a leader in the labor movement for thirty years propelled both the feminist and labor causes."

"Think clearly and act quickly, or you are lost. Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less."

"To the governing class the anarchists say: "Gentlemen, we ask no privilege, we propose no restriction; nor, on the other hand, will we permit it. We have no new shackles to propose, we seek emancipation from shackles. We ask no legislative sanction, for co-operation asks only for a free field and no favors; neither will we permit their interference.("?) It asserts that in freedom of the social unit lies the freedom of the social state. It asserts that in freedom to possess and utilize soil lie social happiness and progress and the death of rent. It asserts that order can only exist where liberty prevails, and that progress leads and never follows order. It asserts, finally, that this emancipation will inaugurate liberty, equality, fraternity. That the existing industrial system has outgrown its usefulness, if it ever had any is I believe admitted by all who have given serious thought to this phase of social conditions."

"So many able writers have shown that the unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to the power derived from government. We cannot help but believe that were every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than now."

"The utter impossibility of awarding to each and exact return for the amount of labor performed will render absolute communism a necessity sooner or later. The land and all it contains, without which labor cannot be exerted, belong to no one man, but to all alike. The inventions and discoveries of the past are the common inheritance of the coming generations; and when a man takes the tree that nature furnished free, and fashions it into a useful article, or a machine perfected and bequeathed to him by many past generations, who is to determine what proportion is his and his alone? Primitive man would have been a week fashioning a rude resemblance to the article with his clumsy tools, where the modern worker has occupied an hour. The finished article is of far more real value than the rude one made long ago, and yet the primitive man toiled the longest and hardest. Who can determine with exact justice what is each one's due? There must come a time when we will cease trying. The earth is so bountiful, so generous; man's brain is so active, his hands so restless, that wealth will spring like magic, ready for the use of the world's inhabitants. We will become as much ashamed to quarrel over its possession as we are now to squabble over the food spread before us on a loaded table. "But all this," the objector urges, "is very beautiful in the far off future, when we become angels. It would not do now to abolish governments and legal restraints; people are not prepared for it.""

"If, in the present chaotic and shameful struggle for existence, when organized society offers a premium on greed, cruelty, and deceit, men can be found who stand aloof and almost alone in their determination to work for good rather than gold, who suffer want and persecution rather than desert principle, who can bravely walk to the scaffold for the good they can do humanity, what may we expect from men when freed from the grinding necessity of selling the better part of themselves for bread? The terrible conditions under which labor is performed, the awful alternative if one does not prostitute talent and morals in the service of mammon; and the power acquired with the wealth obtained by ever so unjust means, combined to make the conception of free and voluntary labor almost an impossible one. And yet, there are examples of this principle even now. In a well bred family each person has certain duties, which are performed cheerfully, and are not measured out and paid for according to some pre-determined standard; when the united members sit down to the well-filled table, the stronger do not scramble to get the most, while the weakest do without, or gather greedily around them more food than they can possibly consume. Each patiently and politely awaits his turn to be served, and leaves what he does not want; he is certain that when again hungry plenty of good food will be provided. This principle can be extended to include all society, when people are civilized enough to wish it."

"Some higher incentive must, and will, supersede the greed for gold. The involuntary aspiration born in man to make the most of one's self, to be loved and appreciated by one's fellow-beings, to "make the world better for having lived in it," will urge him on the nobler deeds than ever the sordid and selfish incentive of material gain has done."

"The grandest works of the past were never performed for the sake of money. Who can measure the worth of a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo or Beethoven in dollars and cents?"

"We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate."

"What we anarchists contend for is a larger opportunity to develop the units in society, that mankind may possess the right as a sound being to develop that which is broadest, noblest, highest and best, unhandicapped by any centralized authority, where he shall have to wait for his permits to be signed, sealed, approved and handed down to him before he can engage in the active pursuits of life with his fellow being. We know that after all, as we grow more enlightened under this larger liberty, we will grow to care less and less for that exact distribution of material wealth, which, in our greed-nurtured senses, seems now so impossible to think upon carelessly. The man and woman of loftier intellects, in the present, think not so much of the riches to be gained by their efforts as of the good they can do for their fellow creatures. There is an innate spring of healthy action in every human being who has not been crushed and pinched by poverty and drudgery from before his birth, that impels him onward and upward. He cannot be idle, if he would; it is as natural for him to develop, expand, and use the powers within him when no repressed, as it is for the rose to bloom in the sunlight and fling its fragrance on the passing breeze."

"Men are to a great extent creatures of habit, and grow to love associations; under reasonably good conditions, he would remain where he commences, if he wished to, and, if he did not, who has any natural right to force him into relations distasteful to him? Under the present order of affairs, persons do unite with societies and remain good, disinterested members for life, where the right to retire is always conceded."

"People have become so used to seeing the evidences of authority on every hand that most of them honestly believe that they would go utterly to the bad if it were not for the policeman's club or the soldier's bayonet. But the anarchist says, "Remove these evidence of brute force, and let man feel the revivifying influences of self responsibility and self control, and see how we will respond to these better influences.""

"We judge from experience that man is a gregarious animal, and instinctively affiliates with his kind co-operates, unites in groups, works to better advantage, combined with his fellow men than when alone. This would point to the formation of co-operative communities, of which our present trades-unions are embryonic patterns."

"How ill we go on like human beings eating and sleeping, working and loving, exchanging and dealing, without government? So used have we become to "organized authority" in every department of life that ordinarily we cannot conceive of the most common-place avocations being carried on without their interference and "protection." But anarchism is not compelled to outline a complete organization of a free society. To do so with any assumption of authority would be to place another barrier in the way of coming generations. The best thought of today may become the useless vagary of tomorrow, and to crystallize it into a creed is to make it unwieldy."

"And what of the glowing beyond that is so bright that those who grind the faces of the poor say it is a dream? It is no dream, it is the real, stripped of brain-distortions materialized into thrones and scaffolds, mitres and guns. It is nature acting on her own interior laws as in all her other associations. It is a return to first principles; for were not the land, the water, the light, all free before governments took shape and form? In this free state we will again forget to think of these things as "property." It is real, for we, as a race, are growing up to it. The idea of less restriction and more liberty, and a confiding trust that nature is equal to her work, is permeating all modern thought. From the dark year-not so long gone by-when it was generally believed that man's soul was totally depraved and every human impulse bad; when every action, every thought and every emotion was controlled and restricted; when the human frame, diseased, was bled, dosed, suffocated and kept as far from nature's remedies as possible; when the mind was seized upon and distorted before it had time to evolve a natural thought-from those days to these years the progress of this idea has been swift and steady. It is becoming more and more apparent that in every way we are "governed best where we are governed least.""

"We perceive, there are actual, material barriers blockading the way. These must be removed. If we could hope they would melt away, or be voted o prayed into nothingness, we would be content to wait and vote and pray. But they are like great frowning rocks towering between us and a land of freedom, while the dark chasms of a hard-fought past yawn behind us. Crumbling they may be with their own weight and the decay of time, but to quietly stand under until they fall is to be buried in the crash. There is something to be done in a case like this-the rocks must be removed. Passivity while slavery is stealing over us is a crime. For the moment we must forget that was are anarchists-when the work is accomplished we may forget that we were revolutionists-hence most anarchists believe the coming change can only come through a revolution, because the possessing class will not allow a peaceful change to take place; still we are willing to work for peace at any price, except at the price of liberty."

"Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. We look away from government for relief, because we know that force (legalized) invades the personal liberty of man, seizes upon the natural elements and intervenes between man and natural laws; from this exercise of force through governments flows nearly all the misery, poverty, crime and confusion existing in society."

"The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word "Liberty"; yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, "Freedom." Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas — principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other "issues" there is always a limit; some imaginary boundary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth. But anarchism is the usher of science — the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development."

"To my mind, the struggle for liberty is too great and the few steps we have gained have been won at too great a sacrifice, for the great mass of the people of this 20th century to consent to turn over to any political party the management of our social and industrial affairs. For all who are at all familiar with history know that men will abuse power when they possess it, for these and other reasons, I, after careful study, and not through sentiment, turned from a sincere, earnest, political Socialist to the non-political phase of Socialism, Anarchism, because in its philosophy I believe I can find the proper conditions for the fullest development of the individual units in society, which can never be the case under government restrictions."

"My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society."