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Περί γάμου και έρωτα
Κάποια μέρα, στο μέλλον, άντρες και γυναίκες θα ξεσηκωθούν, θα κατακτήσουν τη βουνοκορφή, θα σμίξουν ρωμαλέοι, δυνατοί και ελεύθεροι, έτοιμοι να δεχτούν, να μοιραστούν και να απολαύσουν τις χρυσαφένιες αχτίδες του έρωτα. Ποια ιδέα, ποια φαντασία, ποια φαντασίωση, ποια ποιητική ιδιοφυΐα μπορεί να προβλέψει, έστω κατά προσέγγιση, τις προοπτικές μιας τέτοιας δύναμης στη ζωή των ανδρών και των γυναικών; Αν ο κόσμος πρόκειται κάποτε να γεννήσει την αληθινή συντροφικότητα και μοναδικότητα, όχι ο γάμος, αλλά η αγάπη θα είναι ο γεννήτορας. (Από την παρουσίαση στο οπισθόφυλλο του βιβλίου)
32 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1910
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963 people want to read
About the author
Emma Goldman
362 books1,038 followersEmma Goldman was a feminist anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.
Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the US in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she joined the burgeoning anarchist movement.Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands.
She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition to the Soviet use of violence and the repression of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution.Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
July 10, 2017
“Thus Dante's motto over Inferno applies with equal force to marriage. "Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.” ― Emma Goldman
December 16, 2019
quote: Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.
February 5, 2018
Excellent short read. Its sharp wit and cutting rationale have given me much to think about as I sit uncertain in the midst of my own engagement. Living in an age in which marriage and the pursuit of patriarchal ceremony is celebrated even as it culminates the death of woman as free agent, I might think one hundred years hadn't passed since the publication of this essay. Feminist progress is indeed better measured in geologic time.
July 4, 2017
We have not yet outgrown the theologic myth that woman has no soul, that she is a mere appendix to man, made out of his rib just for the convenience of the gentleman who was so strong that he was afraid of his own shadow.
Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsible for her inferiority.
Vai, absolut superb.
Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsible for her inferiority.
Vai, absolut superb.
October 13, 2012
Goldman's feminist views on love and the marriage institution, also expressed in her book Anarchism and other essays...
January 7, 2022
4 1/4 stars
March 12, 2021
Hello Maddie and Lena
April 28, 2017
Since everyone I know keeps talking of the 'right' marriageable age these days as I attend wedding ceremonies almost every other week, it seemed relevant to read a book titled, Marriage and Love by Emma Goldman, a well-known feminist from late 19th century written in 1911. I felt initially it read like an angry woman rant but gradually as I progressed through the text, the core ideas about the vain connection we as society link between marriage and love, became crystal clear.
This is one of those few books with utterly honest, upbeat and lucid revelations about the necessity of marriage in a woman's life a hundred years ago and which are quite comparable to today's times. Is it tragic then that we can still relate women's position in a marriage with the same brutal reality today as Goldman did back then? Sadly and unfortunately, the answer is yes. I loved her writing. This is one of the most significant books I've read so far on women, written by a feminist.
This is one of those few books with utterly honest, upbeat and lucid revelations about the necessity of marriage in a woman's life a hundred years ago and which are quite comparable to today's times. Is it tragic then that we can still relate women's position in a marriage with the same brutal reality today as Goldman did back then? Sadly and unfortunately, the answer is yes. I loved her writing. This is one of the most significant books I've read so far on women, written by a feminist.
January 29, 2008
This book is available from the Kersplebedeb Literature Rack. You can
July 29, 2016
Though I'd like to get married one day, I 100% agree with Goldman's notions.
*It's only 200 characters so I don't consider this one of my 75 books for the year but I do want to add it here since I did read the essay.
*It's only 200 characters so I don't consider this one of my 75 books for the year but I do want to add it here since I did read the essay.
June 1, 2016
A angry anarchist and atheist harangues against marriage mostly without giving much explanation for her sermonizing. She paints a grim picture of suffering children as if they all came from failed marriages.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2007
More brilliant, still relevant essays by Red Emma.
October 9, 2015
Beautiful and elegant, but so awkward to read if you're married, with kids.
Read
January 27, 2014Fantastic.
February 23, 2014
An honest look at one of the world's oldest institutions Marriage and how it differs from Love - an emotion that can't be captured in confines of something as vain as a marriage...
September 2, 2016
An elegant indictment of matrimony.
August 31, 2016
Emma Goldman argues—quite well, I might add—how marriage has nothing to do with love. The prose is beautiful, and the tone striking. Definitely worth a read.
June 6, 2016
Its the grim truth, which even the society in which I currently live in, will not accept.
November 3, 2025
It feels a little like cheating to include a 20-page essay as a ‘book’, but it is an important essay and it’s not like I haven’t read plenty of ‘actual’ books, this year and in general. (Also – who the fuck is even tracking MY reviews?)
To me this is a little like reading Keynes in the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money advocating for zero percent interest rates, living in the fallout zone of two decades of zero percent interest rates in the twenty-first century. Because I agree; marriage and love aren’t synonymous, and the concept of unshackling women from economic dependency on men is perfect in theory but not in practice. Zero percent interest rates means wildly leveraging imaginary financial products instead of investing in on-the-ground industry and employment. Some women gaining a semblance of equity with men has left us generally just lonely and frustrated by the men not keeping up. Maybe it’s just that, one hundred years later, we still haven’t pushed this envelope far enough. But in Goldman’s future, yes, women have children alone, and attain financial security alone, and neither of those things ‘requires’ a husband any longer. And yet: it’s still the thing women are told to want from birth, it’s still held up as the pinnacle of life achievement for women, and life just feels really fucking lonely when you price yourself out of the husband market.
FACTS:
‘At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it.’
‘If, however, woman's premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, "until death doth part." Moreover, the marriage insurance condemns her to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social. Man, too, pays his toll, but as his sphere is wider, marriage does not limit him as much as woman. He feels his chains more in an economic sense.’
‘Can there be anything more humiliating, more degrading than a life-long proximity between two strangers? No need for the woman to know anything of the man, save his income. As to the knowledge of the woman—what is there to know except that she has a pleasing appearance?’
‘Perchance the poor quality of the material whence woman comes is responsible for her inferiority. At any rate, woman has no soul—what is there to know about her? Besides, the less soul a woman has the greater her asset as a wife, the more readily will she absorb herself in her husband. It is this slavish acquiescence to man's superiority that has kept the marriage institution seemingly intact for so long a period. Now that woman is coming into her own, now that she is actually growing aware of herself as a being outside of the master's grace, the sacred institution of marriage is gradually being undermined, and no amount of sentimental lamentation can stay it.’
The remainder of the twentieth century did fail to slay this beast, alas. Twenty-first is not shaping up well (TRADWIVES?!)
‘The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children?’
Well, don’t worry, because TRADWIVES.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 20, 2018
,,(..)it is infinitely harder to organize women than men. "Why should I join a union? I am going to get married, to have a home." Has she not been taught from infancy to look upon that as her ultimate calling? She learns soon enough that the home, though not so large a prison as the factory, has more solid doors and bars. It has a keeper so faithful that naught can escape him. The most tragic part, however, is that the home no longer frees her from wage slavery; it only increases her task.”
,,The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.”
,,Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”
toto!
,,The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life's struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.”
,,Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”
toto!
February 16, 2024
So I was out of town for work this week, stopped into an anarchist book shop to get some reading for the hotel.
So many good choices, but I had to pick this up and read it right away because, I mean, it was Valentine's Day. How can you not read Emma Goldman's "Marriage and Love" in a hotel on Valentine's Day?
I love this, and I'm pretty sure I've read it before in a collection of her writing, but that was at least 25 years ago.
This was written in 1907 or 1910 or something like that.
I am a very happily married person and I feel like pretty much none of what she says applies to my marriage at all. Or very little. (I took my wife's last name, we both have careers that we care about, we are both independent but collaborate on making a good life for ourselves and the kids, etc).
Sadly, there are a lot of marriages in parts of the world-- including in many communities in the US-- where her criticisms are still very, very relevant, where women are considered less than their husbands, where there is no equality, little potential for meaningful love, etc.
It's a good tract, and it reminded me how much I appreciate my wife.
Happy Valentine's Day.
So many good choices, but I had to pick this up and read it right away because, I mean, it was Valentine's Day. How can you not read Emma Goldman's "Marriage and Love" in a hotel on Valentine's Day?
I love this, and I'm pretty sure I've read it before in a collection of her writing, but that was at least 25 years ago.
This was written in 1907 or 1910 or something like that.
I am a very happily married person and I feel like pretty much none of what she says applies to my marriage at all. Or very little. (I took my wife's last name, we both have careers that we care about, we are both independent but collaborate on making a good life for ourselves and the kids, etc).
Sadly, there are a lot of marriages in parts of the world-- including in many communities in the US-- where her criticisms are still very, very relevant, where women are considered less than their husbands, where there is no equality, little potential for meaningful love, etc.
It's a good tract, and it reminded me how much I appreciate my wife.
Happy Valentine's Day.
May 3, 2025
Goldman delivers a concise and scathing critique of the institution of marriage without holding any punches. Goldman's critique lands squarely on modern man, woman, church, and state, as she holds all equally accountable for what she deems an oppressive, reductive, repugnant, destructive, immoral institution that strips participants of their humanity and undermines social progress and liberation. In contrast, Goldman holds love in high praise as a spiritually transcendent experience that rescues humanity breathing freedom and magic into life and supplying the pathway for peace, progress, and nature. In that sense, she hopes that our species will find salvation in knowing true love and use it's power to free ourselves from the destructive forces of unjust power and their many institutional tools of oppression. Her writing is powerful. Her vision, clarity, analysis, and resolve are thought provoking, considered, and sound. She writes with presence and measured, intellectual anger and sharpness. In this short effort, Emma Goldman is profound, unwavering, and convincing.
February 14, 2024
“Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?”
April 6, 2021
Brilliant and challenging. Lays bare the way that marriage was created to protect the economic and state system, rather than to inspire love for each other or care for the child. According to Goldman, Marriage is an unnecessary institution and she makes a great case for this argument.
Read
April 19, 2022"Solo quando le miserie umane sono trasformate in un giocattolo dai colori abbaglianti i bambini se ne interessano, almeno per un po'. Il popolo è un bambino estremamente volubile."
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"Ove invece esso (l'amore) alberga, il più misero tugurio è raggiante di calore, di vita e di gioia."
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"Ove invece esso (l'amore) alberga, il più misero tugurio è raggiante di calore, di vita e di gioia."
November 15, 2019
Marriage and Love
Marriage and Love, by Emma Goldman,is way too.short. She doesn't have much use for marriage, and thinks that it is all a sham.
Marriage and Love, by Emma Goldman,is way too.short. She doesn't have much use for marriage, and thinks that it is all a sham.
May 21, 2020
"love needs no protection, it is its own protection"
September 4, 2020
A voice like a bell.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews