"The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul"
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Progress, Goldman insists, is not a gentle climb but a ledger of injuries - a record kept by the state, the mob, and polite society, all of them disciplining the people who refuse to “know their place.” The sentence is engineered to yank “progress” out of the museum and back into the street. Blood is the cost, not the metaphorical garnish. By framing history as something “written” in bodies, she exposes how official narratives sanitize struggle while quietly benefiting from it.
Her specific examples do more than signal solidarity; they lay out a theory of power. “The black man’s right to his body” is a brutal shorthand for slavery’s afterlife: lynching, forced labor, policing, and the everyday theft of autonomy. It’s an argument that racial domination is fundamentally corporeal. Then she pivots: “woman’s right to her soul.” That phrase expands the battleground from legal status to interior life - sexuality, belief, ambition, the authority to define oneself. Goldman’s move is strategic: if oppression controls the body for some and the “soul” for others, liberation has to be total, not merely legislative.
The subtext is a challenge to respectable reform. “Unpopular cause” isn’t an accident; it’s a warning that moral consensus is usually late, and that majorities often arrive only after radicals absorb the blows. As an anarchist speaking in an era of labor crackdowns, anti-Black terror, and suffrage battles, Goldman is also defending dissent itself: the people history later calls heroes are, in real time, treated as threats.
Her specific examples do more than signal solidarity; they lay out a theory of power. “The black man’s right to his body” is a brutal shorthand for slavery’s afterlife: lynching, forced labor, policing, and the everyday theft of autonomy. It’s an argument that racial domination is fundamentally corporeal. Then she pivots: “woman’s right to her soul.” That phrase expands the battleground from legal status to interior life - sexuality, belief, ambition, the authority to define oneself. Goldman’s move is strategic: if oppression controls the body for some and the “soul” for others, liberation has to be total, not merely legislative.
The subtext is a challenge to respectable reform. “Unpopular cause” isn’t an accident; it’s a warning that moral consensus is usually late, and that majorities often arrive only after radicals absorb the blows. As an anarchist speaking in an era of labor crackdowns, anti-Black terror, and suffrage battles, Goldman is also defending dissent itself: the people history later calls heroes are, in real time, treated as threats.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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