Emma Goldman
(Writer)
Emma Goldman was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
Born in Kovno, Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania) to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892 and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth.
In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with hundreds of others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution which brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman reversed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion and denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. In 1923, she published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status by a revival of interest in her life in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest.
Top 10 Emma Goldman Quotes
Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another.
Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian.
The motto should not be: Forgive one another; rather understand one another.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
In the true sense one's native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.
Let us not overlook vital things, because of the bulk of trifles confronting us.
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
No one has realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.
To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.
Books
Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910.
The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. Boston: Gorham Press, 1914.
My Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1923.
My Further Disillusionment in Russia. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1924.
Living My Life. New York: Knopf, 1931.
Voltairine de Cleyre. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: Oriole Press, 1932.
Emma Goldman's Orthodox Jewish family lived in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas (called Kovno at the time, part of the Russian Empire). Goldman's mother Taube Bienowitch had been married before, to a man with whom she had two daughters—Helena in 1860 and Lena in 1862. When her first husband died of tuberculosis, Taube was devastated. Goldman later wrote: "Whatever love she had had died with the young man to whom she had been married at the age of fifteen."
Taube's second marriage was arranged by her family and, as Goldman puts it, "mismated from the first". Her second husband, Abraham Goldman, invested Taube's inheritance in a business that quickly failed. The ensuing hardship combined with the emotional distance of husband and wife to make the household a tense place for the children. When Taube became pregnant, Abraham hoped desperately for a son; a daughter, he believed, would serve as one more sign of failure. They eventually had three sons, but their first child was Emma.
Emma Goldman was born on June 27, 1869. Her father used violence to punish his children, beating them when they disobeyed him. He used a whip on Emma, the most rebellious of them. Her mother provided scarce comfort, rarely calling on Abraham to tone down his beatings. Goldman later speculated that her father's furious temper was at least partly a result of sexual frustration.
Goldman's relationships with her elder half-sisters, Helena and Lena, were a study in contrasts. Helena, the oldest, provided the comfort they lacked from their mother; she filled Goldman's childhood with "whatever joy it had". Lena, however, was distant and uncharitable. The three sisters were joined by brothers Louis (who died at the age of six), Herman (born in 1872), and Moishe (born in 1879)
When Emma was a young girl, the Goldman family moved to the village of Papile, where her father ran an inn. While her sisters worked, she became friends with a servant named Petrushka, who excited her "first erotic sensations". Later in Papile she witnessed a peasant being whipped with a knout in the street. This event traumatized her and contributed to her lifelong distaste for violent authority.
At the age of seven, Goldman moved with her family to the Prussian city of Königsberg (then part of the German Empire), and she enrolled in a Realschule. One teacher punished disobedient students—targeting Goldman in particular—by beating their hands with a ruler. Another teacher tried to molest his female students and was fired when Goldman fought back. She found a sympathetic mentor in her German-language teacher, who loaned her books and took her to an opera. A passionate student, Goldman passed the exam for admission into a gymnasium, but her religion teacher refused to provide a certificate of good behavior and she was unable to attend
The family moved to the Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, where her father opened one unsuccessful store after another. Their poverty forced the children to work, and Goldman took an assortment of jobs, including one in a corset shop.As a teenager Goldman begged her father to allow her to return to school, but instead he threw her French book into the fire and shouted: "Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefilte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.
Goldman pursued an independent education on her own, however, and soon began to study the political turmoil around her, particularly the Nihilists responsible for assassinating Alexander II of Russia. The ensuing turmoil intrigued Goldman, although she did not fully understand it at the time. When she read Chernyshevsky's novel, What Is to Be Done? (1863), she found a role model in the protagonist Vera, who adopts a Nihilist philosophy and escapes her repressive family to live freely and organize a sewing cooperative. The book enthralled Goldman and remained a source of inspiration throughout her life
Her father, meanwhile, continued to insist on a domestic future for her, and he tried to arrange for her to be married at the age of fifteen. They fought about the issue constantly; he complained that she was becoming a "loose" woman, and she insisted that she would marry for love alone.At the corset shop, she was forced to fend off unwelcome advances from Russian officers and other men. One persistent suitor took her into a hotel room and committed what Goldman called "violent contact" two biographers call it rape She was stunned by the experience, overcome by "shock at the discovery that the contact between man and woman could be so brutal and painful.
Goldman felt that the encounter forever soured her interactions with men
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