From the first time that Doctorow presents us with the character Evelyn Nesbit, we know her as someone strikingly beautiful whose both profited from her good looks as well as been badly hurt because of the frightening lust she stirs in powerful men. When Emma Goldman encounters Evelyn Nesbit, she sees Evelyn as the embodiment of what she believes to be the corrupt system that is capitalism. "You are a creature of capitalism, the ethics of which are so totally corrupt and hypocritical that your beauty is no more than the beauty of gold, which is to say false and cold and useless," Goldman tells Nesbit. Goldman sees Nesbit's beauty that is so prized for what it really is: something to be hoarded by wealthy men like gold or money.
Doctorow defines the “myth of individualism” in America as the idea that Americans are “entrepreneurs of themselves, tending to define themselves by anything that points up their distinction from the larger community.” Nesbit fits well into the myth of individualism, profiting off the singular distinction from the larger society that is her beauty in order to succeed in a male-dominated capitalist world. Just as Goldman argues, Nesbit epitomizes the corruption of capitalism, being robbed of the dignity she might have had in a more egalitarian society in exchange for the luxury that capitalism promises, the same kind of luxury that Tateh succumbs to in exchange for his socialist ideals, and that Ford gravitates toward in exchanges for the laborers' craftsmanship. A little luxury is gained for the few who find their way to the top, but it comes at a huge cost for the masses who must work long hours in dangerous conditions for a pittance in order for such excesses of wealth to be amassed by capitalist superstars like J. P. Morgan.
While Nesbit lives as an entrepreneur of herself and her body, she stands for the degradation that extreme capitalism can impose upon people. The fact that there are men so powerful and rich as to be able to essentially buy any woman they want for themselves shows the extent to which capitalism has enabled the maldistribution of wealth and power. In a society which Emma Goldman envisions where the masses are well supported and the wealthy is evenly distributed, someone like Evelyn Nesbit would probably not exist.
This is a very important angle from which Goldman's putatively radical or revolutionary "free love" ideal in fact doesn't represent an abandonment of moral values so much as a *reclaiming* of self-respect and self-determination, from a woman's point of view. Goldman breaks down how the traditional marriage has a lot in common with prostitution, and in this view, the proponent of "free love" is in fact working to maintain or restore the dignity and self-reliance of women. (And, Doctorow strongly suggest, this is precisely why she's seen as so "dangerous" to the entrenched interests.)
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