Max Stirner and the Grisette


1845-1945, Historical Work, Max Stirner / Wednesday, December 28th, 2022

Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) was an anarchist of the collective variety, but she knew her individualist anarchists too. In Victims of Morality and The Failure of Christianity (1913) Goldman gets personal about Max Stirner and his darling in Goldman’s denunciation of morality…

Meanwhile the respectable young man, excited through the daily association and contact with his sweetheart, seeks an outlet for his nature in return for money. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he will be infected, and when he is materially able to marry, he will infect his wife and possible offspring. And the young flower, with every fiber aglow with the fire of life, with all her being crying out for love and passion? She has no outlet. She develops headaches, insomnia, hysteria; grows embittered, quarrelsome, and soon becomes a faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and everyone else. No wonder Stirner preferred the grisette to the maiden grown gray with virtue.

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