Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 - May 14, 1940) was a Lithuanian-born anarchist
known for her radical libertarian and feminist writing and speeches. She
emigrated to the United States at sixteen, and was later deported to Russia,
where she witnessed some events of the Russian Revolution. She also spent a
number of years in Britain, where she wrote her autobiography and other works.
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 Cherychevsky's What is to be done which sowed the
seeds for her anarchist ideas and her independent attitude.
She was sent 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 divorced him
and moved to New York.
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 defence of Berkman's attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick made her
highly unpopular with the authorities.
She was imprisoned in 1893 at Blackwells 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.
On February 11, 1916 she was arrested and imprisoned again for her distribution
of birth control literature.
For several years, she expected to be arrested whenever she gave a speech, and
therefore always carried a book when she got up on stage.
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. 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 women
in America."
This deportation meant that Goldman, with Berkmann, 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. Goldman was friends with
fellow 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).
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.
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
was to write 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.
Emma Goldman died in Toronto and was buried in Chicago.
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