Goldman, Emma (1869–1940)

Arriving in the United States from Russia in 1885, in the first major wave of immigration of Eastern European Jews, Emma Goldman soon found the anarchist movement and rose to prominence there. By the turn of the century, she had become the best-known anarchist in the country. With her lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman, Goldman spoke, wrote, and organized on behalf of workers, women, political prisoners, children, immigrants, the unemployed, homosexuals, and “the people.” She served three prison terms: The first time she was convicted of inciting a riot for urging unemployed workers to take bread, and served a 1-year sentence; the second time she was in jail a few weeks for speaking in public about birth control; the third time, with Berkman, she served a grueling 2-year sentence for opposing conscription prior to World War I.

After completing their prison terms for anti-war activism, Goldman and Berkman were deported in 1919. They went first to the nascent Soviet Union; soon concluding that the Bolsheviks had strangled the revolution and installed themselves as the new ruling class, they fled the USSR and eventually settled in the south of France. Goldman continued her political activism, working with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and conducting lecture tours in England, Wales, and Canada, where she died following a stroke.

Goldman was part of a vibrant radical subculture connecting recent immigrants with native-born, Jews with gentiles, middle-class reformers with working-class labor activists, workers with artists, and radicals in the United States with those around the world. She supported herself as a garment worker, nurse, and midwife, supplemented by meager earnings from her writings. While based in New York City, Goldman conducted extensive cross-country lecture tours throughout the United States, with the exception of the South. She was a spellbinding orator, often drawing thousands of people to her lectures, which she initially delivered in German, Russian, and Yiddish before switching to English to reach a larger audience. Authorities frequently prohibited her lectures; she was arrested so many times that she always took a book with her to her own lectures so she would have something to read in jail.

Goldman's entry into political radicalism was initiated during the worldwide protests over the Haymarket incident in 1886. Under circumstances that remain unclear, a bomb exploded during a demonstration and the police opened fire on the crowd, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries. Eight Chicago anarchists were [Page 626]tried and convicted of murder in a legal proceeding widely recognized as fraudulent. Four were executed, one committed suicide before execution, and the others received long prison sentences; the survivors were pardoned 6 years later by Illinois Governor John Altgeld. The agitation surrounding the Haymarket executions radicalized many young people, including Goldman. She moved from sleepy upstate New York to Manhattan, where anarchism, socialism, and other radical perspectives were thriving, largely within immigrant communities.

The major intellectual influence on Goldman was a blend of European revolutionary ideology with American romantic individualism and her unique radical feminism. From Bakunin and Kropotkin she developed her ideas about popular struggles against capitalism, religion, and the state; from Stirner and Nietzsche she cultivated ideas about the cultural transvaluation of values; from Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman she articulated her joyous erotic embrace of life's possibilities. To this rich stew she brought an enduring commitment to sexual and gender equality, a keen eye for hypocrisy, and a fierce opposition to any form of injustice. Scorning suffrage as a weak and misleading reform, she insisted that women cultivate both internal (psychological) liberation from puritanical social values and external (social/economic) liberation from their dependence on men. While the anarchist movement had many successful women orators and writers, Goldman was the best known, becoming a radical celebrity as well as a very visible target for government surveillance.

...