it. Goldman would not, and she told him as much. Moreover, she would from now on judge herself superior as a woman activist to her roommate Helene Minkin who accepted, to some extent, a domestic role with Most. As Goldman wrote in her memoir with a hint of disdain: “A home, children, the care and attention ordinary women can give, who have no other interest in life but the man they love and the children they bear him—that was what he needed and felt he had found in Helen.”20 But in a 1904 letter to Berkman, her tone is much harsher. “Helena M. is a common ordinary Woman, has not developed in the least,” she wrote. “I am sorry to say, that all those of my sex we have known together [the Minkin sisters] have become ordinary Haustiere [pets] und Flatpflanzen [potted plants].”21
Most’s past going back to his adolescent years provides clues to his disposition toward women. Two childhood traumas defined much of his later life: the death of his beloved mother when he was nine, and a life-saving operation on his jaw, which left his face horribly deformed. One year after the loss of his mother, Most’s father married Maria Lederle who strictly enforced her will on the children. Instead of play, Most was put to work in the house and was forced to attend mass. He later described his tyrannical stepmother as a “shifty arch-Catholic” and a “crafty bitch.”22 Not only did Most develop a hatred of all forms of oppression, but also a mistrust of women.
The surgical operation that Most underwent when he was thirteen seems to have been even more traumatic. Successful though it was, the procedure disfigured him for life, and until he could grow a beard, Most could muster little confidence in the outside world. It was the “deepest tragedy of my life,” he once told Goldman in later years. She was convinced that it produced in him “what would now be called an inferiority complex.”23 When other young women and men enjoyed flirting and dating, Most convinced himself that he had to forgo such pleasures, and at times blamed women for shunning him. He recalls an episode from 1868 when he was twenty-two and a member of a workers’ educational society in Switzerland. It was not unusual, he tells us, for male members to have relations with the female cooks despite some strict house rules. “For my part,” Most writes, “I understood very little of those things at the time, because I convinced myself that my shifted face did not get me that eternal Feminine, and that as a result the tables turned and my ‘woman-hater’ comes out, which in later years did not of course protect me from the (totally unwarranted) accusation of being a ‘Don Juan’.”24
As soon as Most found a home in the emerging socialist movement in Germany, he overcame much of the pain and humiliation of his earlier years. Work in the movement—whether as speaker, editor, or writer—consumed him. Then, at age twenty-five, he met Clara Hänsch, the daughter of a policeman, and, according to Most, considered one of the “prettiest girls in town.”25 They married in January 1874, only weeks after Most’s first election victory to the German Parliament (Reichstag). The endless persecutions by authorities, including stints in jail, inevitably strained the relationship. They had two children but both died before reaching their first birthdays, which Most thought was probably for the best. It was Most’s rise in the movement and his increasingly hectic schedule that left no time for family and doomed the marriage. In one brutally honest passage, Most distills it this way: “In time, everything came down to the following question: “Party or Family? […] I sacrificed my family.”26 The marriage lingered for years as a kind of “dog and cat existence,” as Most phrased it, until 1880 when they divorced in London.27 There is evidence that there Most had a brief relationship with Marie Roth, a teacher of German descent. Even years after Most’s departure to New York, Roth contemplated joining him in 1885. She eventually married the Irishman John Lincoln Mahon, secretary of the Socialist League and later cofounder of the Socialist Union, a precursor of the Labour Party.28
Throughout Most’s life, the topic of women and feminism remained awkward. Women’s rights, while a worthy cause, could not take precedence over the urgent fight for political and economic liberation, he felt. He could not see that gender equality was intrinsically linked to economic freedom. Sexual politics and the issue of free love, which became a central issue for many anarchists, appeared to Most as frivolous distractions. In December 1899, when fifty-three-year-old Most was on lecture tour in California, Sarah Comstock, a young, Stanford-educated reporter for the San Francisco Call, managed to track him down for an interview. After hearing about his childhood and his political beliefs, Comstock asked, “What do you think about women?” “As I tell you, I had troubles,” he said. “I do not like to get into the woman question.” About his wives, he complained that they “made my life a misery. They fought, fought, fought me all the time.” Then he resumed with a typical analysis that reserved feminism for a future date:
The woman of the future will have a different life from the woman of the present, and so she will be a different creature. She will no longer be a mere housewife, but she will enter all fields which are open to man, and she will be his companion in art and science and labor. She will not need to marry that she may be supported. There will in the happy future be no unfortunate marriages.29
If the 1870s chronicle Johann Most’s rise in the socialist movement, then the 1880s recount his rise in the anarchist movement, a turbulent decade in which Most does not seem to have had any long-term relationships. And so an interesting evolution emerges regarding his balancing family and the activist life: whereas during the 1870s Most was obsessed with work and perhaps fame, by 1890 he seems to have expressed—if we can believe Goldman—a desire to settle down, to have a home other than the editorial office, and to have children again.
Contrary to Goldman’s comment, however, Helene Minkin did have other interests in life, and there were times she too resented housework. She was certainly more than a domestic sidekick of the famed Johann Most. She was a committed anarchist in her own right and believed deeply in the cause for freedom and workers’ rights. She did not share the uncompromising vision of a Berkman who modeled himself after the unswerving Russian revolutionaries. She did not have the talent for forceful public speaking like Most or Goldman. She did have a talent for writing, management, and editing. After she and Most moved in together, Minkin became active in the running of Freiheit, Most’s paper that made its way to readers since 1879. And so perhaps their relationship offered, for both, a workable balance between family and work. Especially during the late 1890s when the paper nearly died, Minkin was crucial in keeping it afloat while many of the (mostly male) comrades failed to step up. At one point, Most was ready to quit and burn all the books.30 “Of the few who stood faithfully beside him [Most] during these tough months,” wrote biographer Rudolf Rocker, “his brave life partner Helene Most deserves special mention because time and again she helped him to keep up his work, and she took care of almost the entire expedition of the paper.”31
After Most’s death in 1906, Helene Minkin was briefly in charge of Freiheit, but decided to withdraw from the movement.32 She insisted that Freiheit fold for good now that its creator had passed away, but a handful of German anarchists decided to continue publication by setting up the Freiheit Publishing Association. Minkin also insisted that she and her children did not need financial support from the comrades. She and Most had talked about the obligation that many supporters would surely feel if the moment of death would arrive. “I told him that I will never agree to that,” Minkin wrote in a letter published in Freiheit
