Emma Goldman Speaks on 'The Birth Strike'

On December 21, 1914, anarchist and sex radical Emma Goldman addressed a capacity crowd of radicals and reformers, delivering a lecture titled "The Birth Strike" at the Labor Lyceum in her "adopted hometown" of Rochester, New York.

The presentation combined two of Goldman's dominant themes (aside from anarchist theory): sex radicalism and her passionate distaste for war. Like the more purely antiwar speech she had delivered the evening before at the Victoria Theater, "The Birth Strike" condemned America's entry into World War I, which had occurred some four months previously. But it also wove in sex radical themes, urging women to engage in sexual abstinence and, to the degree they could, birth control as a form of protest. She envisioned women throttling back the supply of babies until such time as the U.S. involvement in the war might end.