ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways Goldman expresses, in her autobiography, Living My Life, deep ambivalence over motherhood, despite her complete renunciation of the social roles of wife and mother. Like Addams, she chose not to become a biological mother, but instead claimed to turn her maternal “instinct” into her work as the anarchist “Mother of the Masses.” However, in her depictions of herself as a mother in the text—which emerge in her childhood, in her romantic relationships with men, and in her anarchism—she continually shows her ambivalence toward motherhood and essentialist principles. The conversion narrative also functions as a predominant rhetorical strategy, shaping the autobiographical identity with a distinctive “before” and “after” the ideological transformation. Even though Goldman was Jewish, she uses the conversion narrative to scaffold the complex and overdetermined gendered rhetorical strategies that she uses in the construction of her identity. The complex rhetorical strategies in Goldman’s autobiography raise important questions about essentialism in the early twentieth century, in particular as she argues that women can reshape men through the boys they raise, and that by extension they can reshape the sociopolitical structure that oppresses them.
