There are three books on my anarchy page. Malatesta. Kropotkin. Goldman. Two men and one woman, and I picked them myself.
So this essay starts with a hunch that my own reading list argues against. The hunch is that anarchism has more prominent women in it than either the left or the right does — that if you lined up the faces people actually recognize, the black flag would look different from the red one and the red-white-and-blue one. I have believed this for a while without checking it. That is exactly the kind of belief worth taking apart.
Making the comparison fair
Anarchism is small. It has no party, no caucus, no donor class, no primaries. If you count heads, every other political tradition wins before the argument starts.
So the question is not how many. It is what share of the front row, and how early they got there. Measured against the left and the right standing next to it — not against politics in general, and not against the whole population.
And the answer has to survive a stress test: if it is only true on the left wing of anarchism, it is a fact about the left, not about anarchy. The schools atlas on my anarchy page runs from anarcho-communism to agorism. The claim has to hold across that whole span or it is not a claim about anarchism at all.
The left wing of the black flag
Emma Goldman is the strongest single data point in the whole investigation. Ask a random American to name an anarchist. They will not say Bakunin. They might say Goldman. The most recognized name in the tradition, in the country with the loudest political culture on earth, is a woman — one who was jailed repeatedly and deported in 1919.
She is not alone, and this is the part that surprised me.
Louise Michel fought in the Paris Commune and was deported to New Caledonia for it. Lucy Parsons organized in Chicago for forty years under constant police surveillance; the line attributed to the Chicago police was that she was more dangerous than a thousand rioters.
He-Yin Zhen founded the journal Natural Justice in Tokyo in 1907 and published "On the Question of Women's Liberation" the same year — cutting feminism loose from nationalism at a moment when essentially all Chinese feminism was nationalist. That is not a woman participating in a movement. That is a woman founding a line of thought.
Then Spain, where it stops being about individuals. Mujeres Libres was founded in 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercedes Comaposada, and Amparo Poch y Gascón. By July 1937 it had roughly 20,000 members; by the summer of 1938, around 30,000. It refused to be an auxiliary of the CNT. Its position was that women's liberation and the social revolution were the same size — not one nested inside the other, waiting its turn.
And in November 1936, Federica Montseny became the first woman cabinet minister in Spanish history, and one of the first in Western Europe. She was an anarchist. Sit with the sequence: the first woman to hold a ministry in Spain came out of the movement that does not believe in ministries. She took heat for it inside the movement, and she should have. But the fact stands, and it lands decades ahead of the mainstream parties that actually believed in cabinets.
Without adjectives
One figure sits between the two wings, and the comparison I am making does not work without her.
Voltairine de Cleyre started as an individualist anarchist, drifted toward communist anarchism, and then refused to land. "Anarchism without adjectives" was not her coinage — Ricardo Mella and Fernando Tarrida del Mármol worked it out in Spain, and Tarrida published it in 1890 — but she is the one who carried it into American argument, at a moment when individualists and communists were busy excommunicating each other. Her position was that the adjective was the problem. Free people would sort out the economics once the rulers were gone.
That idea is the only reason the left-to-right span of my schools atlas holds together. Without it, "left anarchism" and "right anarchism" are two movements that happen to share a word.
Her other work was harder-edged. "Sex Slavery" was a lecture she gave in Philadelphia in 1890, defending Moses Harman, who had been jailed under the Comstock laws for publishing criticism of marital rape. De Cleyre pushed past Harman: the problem was not a bad marriage law, it was marriage — a coercive institution that the state and the church licensed, over a thing she would not concede was anyone's to license. She argued that thirty years before American women could vote.
Then in December 1902, a former student shot her three times in a Philadelphia hall. She refused to name him to the police, argued publicly that he was ill rather than criminal, and helped raise money for his legal defense. He was convicted anyway. It is the most complete refusal of the carceral reflex I know of, performed by the one person with unquestionable standing to demand the opposite.
Goldman, who fought with her for years, called her the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.
She organized in Philadelphia, which is also where I first walked into a room run by volunteers and started taking the word seriously. That is geography, not lineage. But it was enough to make me go check whether the room had one.
The right wing of the same flag
Here is where I expected my hunch to fall apart, because the anti-state right reads as a men's club.
In 1943, three books lit the fuse on modern American libertarianism: The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson, The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. All three authors were women, publishing in the same year. Paterson's biographer called them the Libertarians of '43.
I have to be precise here, because it would be easy to overclaim: none of the three were anarchists. Rand attacked anarchism by name. Lane came closest to the line. But the founding texts of the American anti-state right were written by women, and the men who built the institutions afterward were reading them.
It continues. Tonie Nathan ran for vice president on the 1972 Libertarian ticket and became the first woman in American history to receive an electoral vote — thirty-six years before a major party put a woman on a general election ticket that won one. Sharon Presley founded the Association of Libertarian Feminists and wrote seriously about autonomy as an anarchist principle. Wendy McElroy carried individualist anarcha-feminism into the voluntaryist present.
So the hunch survives the stress test. Both wings, same pattern.
Now the part that argues against me
The canon is men. Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Tucker, Rothbard, Bookchin, Chomsky, Graeber. That is the syllabus, and it is almost entirely male. My own three-book shelf is two-thirds male. Anarcha-feminism is filed as one school on my atlas among twenty-one, which is exactly how a tradition quarantines a critique it has absorbed but not metabolized.
And the population skews harder than the electorate does. Across Reason-Rupe and Cato surveys, 63 percent of self-identified libertarians are men and 37 percent women — 68/32 among millennials. Pew found men about twice as likely as women to say the label fits them. Whatever is happening in this space, it is not that women are overrepresented in the rank and file. They are underrepresented, and by more than in ordinary politics.
Both things are true at once. That contradiction is the actual finding.
What is actually going on
The hunch was right about the front row and wrong about the reason. It is not that anarchism attracts more women. It attracts fewer. It is that once a woman is in it, nothing stands between her and the front.
Think about what prominence requires in electoral politics. Ballot access. A party committee's blessing. A primary. A donor network. Seniority. Committee assignments. Incumbency. Every single one of those is a hierarchy, and hierarchies are filters, and the filters were built by people who were not thinking about women when they built them.
Anarchism has none of that apparatus. There is no nomination to be denied. The routes to prominence are writing, speaking, organizing, and getting arrested — and none of the four require anyone's permission. Goldman did not need a party to clear her. Michel did not need a seat. He-Yin Zhen founded a journal. Mujeres Libres declined to ask.
Put the timelines next to each other. Spain's first woman minister was an anarchist in 1936. The first woman to receive a U.S. electoral vote was a Libertarian in 1972. Meanwhile in the 119th Congress, women are 29.3 percent of the House and 25 percent of the Senate — and Republican women are 7.5 percent of the House. That is the record of institutions that have been trying, with money and machinery and a century of runway.
A movement with no machinery beat them to it. That is the finding, and it is not a flattering one for anyone with machinery.
The cost, which is real
No gatekeepers means no gate. It also means no walls.
A party that can promote you can also protect you. Anarchism can do neither. Goldman was deported. Michel was shipped to a penal colony. Parsons was watched for four decades. Itō Noe was beaten to death by military police in 1923, along with Ōsugi Sakae and Ōsugi's six-year-old nephew, during the chaos after the Kantō earthquake. She was twenty-eight. The officer who did it served two years.
Mujeres Libres — thirty thousand women — was erased when Franco won, and then largely written out of the histories of the war by the men who survived it. The absence of hierarchy got these women to the front. It also left them standing there alone.
Why this matters to me
The principle I landed on is that the only legitimate arrangements are the ones people freely choose and can freely leave, and that coercion corrupts the relationship no matter who is doing it. That is an easy thing to assert and a hard thing to test.
This is a test. If hierarchy is genuinely the corrupting mechanism — not just an inefficiency, but the thing that distorts who gets heard — then you would predict that a movement without hierarchy produces a visibly different front row. Not a better one. Not a fairer world. Just a different set of faces at the front, arriving earlier than the institutions managed.
That is what the record shows, across both wings, for a century and a half.
It is evidence, not proof. The sample is small and the cost was paid in bodies. But I went looking to confirm a hunch and found something better than a confirmation: a mechanism. Hierarchies filter. Remove the filter and different people end up in front. The anarchists ran that experiment before anyone else, on both sides of the map, and the results have been sitting there the whole time.
I am fixing my reading list.
Sources: Mujeres Libres · Federica Montseny · He-Yin Zhen, "On the Question of Women's Liberation" · Keith Rosenthal on Lucy Parsons · Sex Slavery (1890) · Anarchism without adjectives · FEE on Paterson, Lane, and Rand · Cato on Tonie Nathan · Reason on libertarian demographics · CAWP on women in the 119th Congress · Amakasu Incident · Sharon Presley, "No Authority But Oneself"
The full essay on where I landed, the schools from left to right, and the reading list I am about to fix: xsp.dev/anarchy.