Emma as Reformer

It's conventional to remark on Emma as an espouser of reformist causes -- her institution for outcast women being the most conspicuous -- but it's pretty clear that Emma was no radical. Not only was she unable to carve out a space in the landscape of her thought for "free love", but she was equally unable to envision any solution to the stand-off brewing in the 1860s and 1870s between capital and labor that involved taking a hard position on one side or another of the exploitation/economic efficiency argument at the heart of that conflict. I have yet to dig into her lectures on the origins of the races, but I'm a bit scared about what I might find there, and as Leslie Price has pointed out to me, the fact that Ann Sophia came from a family that made their money in the West Indies trade virtually guarantees that Emma carried some residual guilt about her more-or-less direct participation in the slave trade.

Emma's 1878 extemporaneous lecture on The Chinese Labor Question is indicative of her discomfort with political questions, but more indicative, if sketchy, is the canned lecture on capital and labor she was giving in Australia and New Zealand later in 1878 and in 1879.

That she was billed as a Freethought lecturer in New Zealand is somewhat humourous, in the political sense, as her thought is hardly free from the completely ineffectual small-c christian small-s socialist mentality emphasizing 'voluntary cooperation for mutual betterment' between the employer and the employed (the nineteenth century equivalent, in many ways, of "why can't we all just get along?", poignant and relevant but ultimately unworkable), but it's interesting to speculate, in light of her relatively under-developed opinions on this issue circa 1879, how much she had developed her ideas a decade or so on, when she found herself, in the offices of The Two Worlds amidst truly left-wing socialists with, in some cases, a to-the-barricades mentality.