Politics & Power Quote by Emma Goldman

That line lands like a slap because it refuses the feel-good script of early 20th-century suffrage: give women the ballot, and politics gets morally disinfected. Goldman’s intent is polemical, not defeatist. She’s not sneering at women’s capacity; she’s puncturing the sentimental argument that women are inherently purer and will therefore redeem a system built to serve power.

The subtext is a critique of “virtue politics” as branding. By framing women as natural cleaners of public life, suffrage rhetoric smuggled in the very gender cage it claimed to unlock: women as guardians of morality, men as the grubby operators. Goldman, an anarchist who distrusted the state itself, sees that as a trap. If politics is structurally corrupt, adding new voters doesn’t alchemize the machinery; it just expands the roster of people expected to consent to it.

Context matters. Goldman was writing and speaking in an era when the vote was treated as the master key to emancipation, often coupled with temperance and respectability campaigns that promised social uplift through better citizens rather than better conditions. Her jab is aimed at that reformist faith: the idea that legitimacy flows from participation, and that participation is the same as power.

Why it works is the provocation: “no hope even” is deliberately excessive, a rhetorical overreach meant to shock readers out of complacency. Goldman forces a harder question than “Should women vote?”: what, exactly, does voting do when the options are pre-selected by money, policing, and empire?