The Child and Its Enemies

Goldman questions adult power in family and education, asking whether feminist care can protect children without controlling their thought.

The Child and Its Enemies treats children as people with their own development, rather than the future property of family, state or movement. Published in Mother Earth in April 1906, Goldman’s essay places apparently benevolent education within relations of power.

Its target includes radical parents, not only religious schools or conservatives. Goldman describes children trained to recognize thinkers, recite revolutionary verse or name the author of Capital. Liberating content does not make mechanical obedience free. Parents displaying their politics through a child can still turn that child into an exhibit.

A feminist reading asks why care and domination are allowed to cancel each other out. The labor of upbringing does not grant ownership over a child’s thinking, and mothers are not naturally immune to authoritarianism. Questions, curiosity and refusal test whether a relationship permits another subject to exist, beyond whether adults profess progressive beliefs.

Goldman’s appeal to freely developing innate powers risks romanticizing childhood. Rejecting coercion cannot mean withdrawing protection, specialist support or clear safety boundaries. The sharper practical question is whether adults can secure the conditions of learning while permitting judgments that disappoint their own expectations.

Dena Simmons’s talk locates the demand to edit oneself for acceptance within racialized schooling. Research on children’s intellectual stereotypes examines how social labels shape early interests. Together they connect an ideal of free development to observable educational conditions.