It’s possible that Emma Goldman, the American revolutionary, would never have been able to have her effect on history without the financial and emotional support of another dangerous woman, Aline Barnsdall.
If you know little or nothing about Emma Goldman whose work in the 1920’s was crucially important to our situation today, the PBS special I’m attaching will give you at least a taste of her extraordinary story. Watch it!
The story of another dangerous woman of that time, Aline Barnsdall, is hidden; only one biography, selling for more than sixty dollars, gives a dry account.
Aline’s story is not dry. Born in Pennsylvania to an early oil magnate, she used her substantial inheritance to support radical progressive causes such as Emma Goldman’s crusade against war and the capitalism that fuels it, women’s rights and the potentially explosive role of the arts in this society, a role gentrified almost out of existence by the overwrought, overpriced museums and galleries of today, an example being the Broad Museum here in Los Angeles, a monument to size and male hubris (are the two connected?).
When I visited Hollyhock House, Aline’s creation with Frank Lloyd Wright, perched on a hilltop above the city, I was moved by its extraordinary beauty: a Mayan temple, furnished with exquisite Modernist furniture designed by the architect, a difficult man who decreed that Aline’s bedroom had no room for a bed and told her to sleep on a mat on the balcony, perhaps the reason that in her wide-ranging life she never spent much time there. She gave it to the city shortly after completion; left almost in ruin for a decade, Los Angeles has now come forward with a remarkable renovation project.
Now one of eight UNESCO World Heritage sites, included in a group of eight Wright’s houses outside Los Angeles, Hollyhock House inspires me with curiosity about its owner’s unconventional life.
She wanted a daughter but disdained marriage as “archaic” and managed—the guide, going discreet, didn’t exactly explain—to have a daughter in the early 1920s with no husband or live-in lover. “Out of Wedlock,” the guide called it, which caused the expected scandal, but “intentional” seems more apt to me.
As a friend of Emma Goldman’s, she financed Goldman’s eventual success in freeing a political prisoner after he spent 21 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. And this was only a small part of Barnsdall’s unquestioning support of Goldman’s radical causes until she was exiled to Russia by the federal government.
Barnsdall based her life on travel, buying houses in many different parts of the world, including Santa Fe. What was she doing during these difficult and distant travels? And who inspired her political radicalism?
All to be discovered. Her story is important for many reasons, not least because, like Doris Duke, heroine of my The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, she freed herself from loyalty to the father who made her fortune and the values he embodied.
How many other women inheritors—usually seen as eccentric, spoiled, or irrelevant—did, in fact, use their money to chisel at the foundations of capitalism?
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