Emma Goldman (1869 - 1940) was a Russian-born American anarchist, political writer and lecturer who played a central role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe. [1] She founded and edited the journal Mother Earth, campaigned for free speech, birth control, labour rights and women's emancipation, and was deported from the United States in 1919. [2] Her autobiography Living My Life is a principal record of the era's radical movements.
Early life
Emma Goldman was born on 27 June 1869 in Kaunas, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family, and spent part of her youth in Königsberg and St Petersburg. [1] Exposure to Russian radical literature and to the repressive conditions of imperial Russia shaped her early politics. In 1885 she emigrated to the United States, settling first in Rochester, New York, and working in garment factories.
Turn to anarchism
The execution of four anarchists after the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago was decisive in Goldman's political formation, and she moved to New York City in 1889, where she joined the anarchist circle around Johann Most and met her lifelong associate Alexander Berkman. [2] She soon became a sought-after public speaker, addressing audiences across the United States on anarchism, labour organisation, atheism, literature and drama.
Goldman was imprisoned several times, first in 1893 for a speech in which she was accused of inciting a riot during an economic depression. Her association with Berkman's 1892 attempt on the life of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, and later the false claim of a connection to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, made her a recurring target of state authorities and the press. [1]
Mother Earth and public campaigns
In 1906 Goldman founded Mother Earth, an anarchist monthly that published political essays, literary criticism and work by radical writers, and which she edited until it was suppressed in 1917. [1] She lectured widely in defence of free expression, helped found the Free Speech League, and campaigned for access to contraception, for which she was jailed in 1916.
Deportation and later years
Goldman and Berkman were imprisoned for two years for organising against conscription after the United States entered the First World War. In December 1919, during the postwar Red Scare, they were deported to Soviet Russia. [2] Goldman initially welcomed the revolution but was quickly disillusioned by Bolshevik repression, and left in 1921, setting out her criticism in My Disillusionment in Russia.
She spent the rest of her life in exile in Europe and Canada, writing, lecturing and briefly supporting the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War. She published her autobiography Living My Life in 1931. Goldman died in Toronto on 14 May 1940 and was buried in Chicago near the Haymarket martyrs. [1]
Legacy
Goldman is regarded as a major figure in the history of anarchism and of American civil liberties, and her writings on free speech, militarism, marriage and women's independence were rediscovered by later feminist and libertarian-left movements. [1] Her collected papers and correspondence are preserved as a significant archive of transatlantic radical politics. [2]
