Mother Earth was a monthly anarchist magazine founded by Goldman, Max Baginski, and others in 1906.
Goldman criticizes the role played by Christian churches in historically encouraging and maintaining prostitution.
[5] American radical feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman strongly endorsed the essay, reading the entirety of it into the record of a legislative hearing on prostitution in New York.
[6] She argues that Goldman's sympathy for prostitutes was due to identifying with them, "because of their class and because they defied the sexual hypocrisy of Puritanism".
While Rubin follows Goldman in arguing that prostitution is part of the same spectrum as marriage, she also builds off of the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud, to describe a "sex/gender system" through which such transactions can occur.