Emma Goldman and the Rhetoric of Free Love: Critiquing Whiteness through a Positive Model of Desire

• In Event: Rhetorical Practice and the Politics of Gender

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Goldman’s rhetoric of free love and repudiation of marriage is constituted by an argument characterized by desire, which productively challenged/es our social and academic notions of femininity. To these ends, Goldman’s rhetoric sheds light on the lived experience of immigrant women while demonstrating an alternative solution for women’s liberation: free love.

Author

• Kate Zittlow Rogness, St. John's University