Hear From the Residents

I’m sitting in a small house that smells of warm pine, writing about my subject, the feminist, abolitionist, anarchist Emma Goldman. The house is the Pope-Leighey House—the only Frank Lloyd Wright home in Virginia open to the public. It was built for a family in the 1940s, a model of affordable, modern living. The house was commissioned by the Washington, D.C. journalist and writer Loren Pope in 1941. Its original cost: $7,000 (about $124,000 today). 

I marvel at its simplicity and feel a strange connection to the place, to the carved modern shapes in the wood, the small windows inset with thin panes of glass.

And yet, as I write about Emma Goldman—her beliefs, her rage, her theory of feminist freedom—the irony is not lost on me that I’m surrounded by a structure meant to enshrine the stereotypical, heteronormative nuclear family.

The house opens into a narrow hallway, so tight it gives you anxiety, so constricting it forces you into other spaces: the children’s bedroom, the husband’s office, the wide family room framed with broad windows. Every inch has been accounted for, leaving no space unassigned. The wife, like the architecture, is expected to fit neatly into her function. The children have their bedroom, and the husband has his neat little office. The wife’s only private domain, if one can call it private, is the galley kitchen, no bigger than a walk-in closet. 

In Emma’s 1897 essay based on her lecture “Marriage,” she writes, “I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases.”

I walk from room to room, brushing against carved wooden slats. There is beauty here, yes, but it is a tightly corseted beauty, a vision of harmony contingent on compliance. I am writing about a woman who refused to comply, a woman who spoke of love without possession, of sex without shame, of homes without masters. A woman who revolted against the institution of marriage. She would have hated this house; it’s beautiful, wooden bondage.

“Marriage is often an economic arrangement purely, furnishing the woman with a lifelong life‑insurance policy … while it furnishes the man the right of a chattel mortgage over a human life.” (Source)

I keep bumping into corners in this house, and in this writing. Emma won’t stay still on the page. She spills over into the margins, into questions I’m not entirely sure how to answer. 

​​Goldman warned that property turns people into possessions. In her eyes, ownership was never neutral; it was a form of domination, a way to bind people to places, to roles they hadn’t freely chosen. A house could be a home, but it was also a boundary.

I like this house. I like the clean lines, the cozy wood, the way the light hits the floor in the family room, the wide windows that refuse to allow nature to hide. There’s something soothing about it all. And still, a part of me hates that I like it, hates how much I appreciate its snug architecture. 

While I sit at this desk, days in a row, birds twittering outside reminding me that this is truly their home, I write more about Emma Goldman than I have written in months, maybe more than I’ve written in any single week since my project’s inception, nearly six months ago. What does it mean to need structure to write about a woman who gave her life trying to dismantle it?