Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman, c. 1910

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869–May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarchist known for her anarchist writings and speeches. Adopted by Second-wave feminists, she has been lionized as an iconic "rebel woman" feminist. However Goldman played a pivitol role in the development of anarchism in the US and Europe throughout the first half of the twentieth century. She immigrated to the United States at sixteen and was later deported to Russia, where she witnessed events of the Russian Revolution. She spent a number of years in the South of France where she wrote her autobiography and other works, before taking part in the Spanish Civil War in 1936 as the English language representatives.

Birth and early years

Goldman was born to a Jewish family in Kaunas, Lithuania, where her family ran a small inn. In the period of political repression after the assassination of Alexander II, she moved with her family to St Petersburg at the age of thirteen. There, due to economic hardship, she was forced to leave school and work in a factory. It was in that workplace that Goldman was introduced to revolutionary ideas; she obtained a copy of Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done, which sowed the seeds for her anarchist ideas and her independent attitude.

Emigration to America

She fled to America with a half-sister after she refused to allow her father to marry her off at fifteen. The hanging of four anarchists after the Haymarket Riot drew the young Emma Goldman to the anarchist movement, and at twenty she decided to become a revolutionary. By this time she had been married for ten months to a Russian immigrant. The marriage didn't work out, so she left him and moved to New York. They remained legally married, allowing her to retain her American citizenship.

File:Goldmanberkman.jpe

Goldman and Alexander Berkman

New York City

In New York City she met and lived with Alexander Berkman, along with whom she was a major leader of the anarchist movement in the United States at the time. Her defense of Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick made her highly unpopular with the authorities. Berkman (or Sasha as she fondly referred to him) was jailed for eleven years.

Prison

She was imprisoned in 1893 at Blackwell's Island penitentiary for publicly urging unemployed workers that they should "Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread." (The statement is a summary of the principle of expropriation advocated by anarchist communists like Peter Kropotkin.) Voltairine de Cleyre gave the lecture In Defense of Emma Goldman as a response to this imprisonment. While serving the one year sentence, she developed a keen interest in nursing.

Conspiracy to assassinate the President

She was arrested, with nine others, on September 10, 1901, on charges of conspiracy to assassinate President McKinley. Leon Czolgosz, a native-born workers and anarchist, had shot the President several days before. Goldman had met Czolgosz only once, briefly, several weeks before, where he had asked Goldman's advice on a course of study in anarchist ideas. Despite strong feelings against her among the public, she and the others were later released and all charges against them were dropped. Leon Czolgosz was found guilt of murder and executed.

Birth control

On February 11, 1916, she was arrested and imprisoned again for her distribution of birth control literature. She, like many other early feminists, saw abortion in a negative light, as a tragic consequence of present social conditions. In 1911, Goldman wrote in Mother Earth:

"The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief...So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies."

World War I

Her third imprisonment was in 1917, this time for conspiring to obstruct the draft: Berkman and Goldman were both involved in setting up No Conscription leagues and organising rallies against World War I.(illustration, left) She was imprisoned for two years, after which she was deported to Russia. At her deportation hearing, J. Edgar Hoover, directing the hearing, called her "one of the most dangerous anarchists in America."

Deportation

This deportation meant that Goldman, with Berkman, was able to witness the Russian Revolution first hand. On her arrival in Russia, she was prepared to support the Bolsheviks despite the split between anarchists and statist communists at the First International. But seeing the political repression, bureaucracy and forced labour in Russia led Goldman to write My Disillusionment in Russia and My Further Disillusionment in Russia. She was also devastated by the massive destruction and death resulting from the Russian Civil War. Goldman was friends with Communists and New Yorkers John Reed and Louise Bryant, both of whom were also in Russia at this time (during a period when it was impossible to leave the country); they may even have shared an apartment (see also the film Reds).

Rejection of violence

Her experiences in Russia helped change her ideas on the use of violence: after the Red Army was used against strikers, Goldman began rejecting violence except in self-defense.

Spanish Civil War

In 1936, Goldman went to Spain to support the Spanish Revolution and the fight against Franco's fascism that was the Spanish Civil War. During this time she wrote the obituary of the prominent Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti in a piece of vibrant prose entitled Durruti is Dead, Yet Living, which echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley's Adonais.

Death and burial

Emma Goldman died of a stroke in Toronto on May 14, 1940. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed her body to be brought back to the United States, and she was buried in Waldhim Cemetery in Chicago, close to where the Haymarket Riot martyrs are interred.

Emma Goldman in fiction

Emma Goldman appears as a fictional character in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (novel), where she plays an important part in allowing the characters of Evelyn Nesbit and her lover, Younger Brother, to examine their own lives in a new way. The book combined fictional elements with historical elements.

References

Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 1 - Made for America, 1890-1901. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. ISBN 0520086708
Falk, Candace, et al. Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 2 - Making Speech Free, 1902-1909. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. ISBN 0520225694
Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1925. ISBN 048643270X
Goldman, Emma. Living My Life. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1931. ISBN 0486225437
Moritz, Theresa. The World's Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman. Vancouver: Subway Books, 2001. ISBN 0968716318

External links

See also: list of anarchists