“Mutual Aid Among Ourselves”: Kinship and Comradeship in Anarchist Discourse

• In Event: Gender and Genre Shifts in American Jewish Culture

Abstract

How was mutual aid theorized in Yiddish anarchist movements? How did these theories of mutual aid relate to the actual social practices of Jewish women? In Mutual Aid (1902), the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin mustered anthropological, historical, and zoological data to argue against Social Darwinism. In a passage studying women’s self-organization, Kropotkin describes the “alliance of mothers” found in Whitechapel, a Jewish neighborhood in London’s East End: “This habit [of mutual aid] is general. It is mentioned by all those who have lived among the poor. In a thousand small ways the mothers support each other and bestow their care upon children that are not their own. Some training—good or bad, let them decide it for themselves—is required in a lady of the richer classes to render her able to pass by a shivering and hungry child in the street without noticing it. But the mothers of the poorer classes have not that training. They cannot stand the sight of a hungry child; they must feed it, and so they do. […] ‘The mine’ and ‘thine’ is much less sharply observed among the poor than among the rich. Shoes, dress, hats, and so on,—what may be wanted on the spot — are continually borrowed from each other, also all sorts of household things.”

This paper traces discourses and customs of mutual aid in Jewish radical communities from 1890 to World War I in the US and UK, attending closely to the gendering of such work. Drawing from an archive of memoirs, Yiddish reportage and editorials, children's media, and popular song and poetry, I consider the relation between care, domesticity, and anarchist kinship practices. This project is also informed by Saidiya Hartman’s recent work on Black women’s mutual aid practices in Harlem and Philadelphia, who notes that "far-reaching notions of what could be were the fruit of centuries of mutual aid, which was organized in stealth and paraded in public view."

Author

• Anna Elena Torres, University of Chicago